It has been a few weeks since the new semester begins. Students must have returned to their busy lifestyle. With the coming of quizzes, mid-term tests, presentations, society duties and part-time jobs, you may have already felt stressed. Apart from handling your academic work and jobs, you should also constantly strengthen your body and heart in a bid to enjoy university life and boost your learning efficiency.

Adequate sleep is important to our health and well-being. While it is not uncommon for people to suffer from occasional sleep disturbances, insomnia or chronic sleep problems can have adverse effects on our learning, memory, thinking, attention, and emotions. It can affect our school and job performance and lead to errors and accidents in our daily lives.

Do you notice that whenever you encounter health problems and are not doing well, your emotion will be affected too? This is accredited to the reduction of a secretion called “neurochemicals of happiness” from our cerebellum. The amount of that secretion is directly related to our feeling of happiness. If our body is healthier, the amount of the secretion will increase and people will become healthier.

All of us experience stress on a regular basis as we respond physically and psychologically to ongoing issues and events that emanate from our environment. While ‘eustress’ is a positive and motivating form of stress, ‘distress’ is undesirable and can have negative and debilitating effects on our health.