How many people do you know that go to the gym every day? They think they must go to the gym to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Unfortunately, there is so much more to being healthy and living a healthy lifestyle than just going to the gym.

Yes, going to the gym is an important part of being healthy

...but what you do at the gym also plays a giant part. If you are just trying to live a healthy lifestyle and be healthier it is vital that you train all aspects of your body especially your heart. The most efficient way is to do some form of cardiovascular training, such as running. This is important because you will increase your maximum heart rate and which will let allow your heart to work more efficiently as you become elderly.

It is important to train all aspects of your body though through lifting and doing variations of exercises like squats or bicep curls. This allows your body to generate new muscles. If you only train one part of your body, your body will not equally be able to do all its internal processes efficiently.

While going to the gym is important it is also incredibly important to have a healthy “diet”

The biggest problem that people face is the amount of food being consumed. A lot of the time, people are consuming significantly more food than necessary for their body. Your portions should be small enough so that your body does not have a drastic spike in blood glucose levels. It is better to eat six smaller meals throughout the day than two or three giant meals.

These are the two most common thoughts that go through the heads of people who are trying to be healthy. However, they aren’t entirely correct. These are definitely the biggest components of being healthy but there are smaller components besides physical health such as social health, cognitive health, and emotional health.

Emotional health is probably one of the most important parts of being healthy.

There is more to emotional health besides being happy all the time. Maintaining stable emotional health is being able to talk about how you feel, to others, and appropriately handle a stressful situation. This can be done by managing stress properly and not allowing yourself to get overly stressed out.

Social health is defined by one’s ability to successfully form social relationships and adapt to social situations.

In college, this is incredibly important because your friends become your family and can help manage your emotional health. This can be maintained multiple different ways, such as knowing yourself and keeping commitments.

By knowing yourself you will know your preferences and everything you need from your friendships. This will allow you to maintain friendships with people who are able to help you de-stress and make you smile. It is important to “not be a flake” and keep commitments because it shows people that you are reliable. You will know yourself better, and make sure that you do not spread yourself too thin.

Lastly cognitive health, cognitive health is one’s ability to maintain independence and some factors that fall under category are the ability to learn, intuition, and planning.

Being able to learn allows someone to make better-informed decisions. Increasing one’s intuition allows for enhanced creativity and better judgment calls in stressful situations. Lastly having better planning and organization allows for more success in college and the workplace.

Whether it be physical, emotional, social or cognitive health they are all important to someone’s overall health. They also all relate to each other in the sense that maintaining good cognitive health will make it easier to maintain social and emotional health. All four aspects of health are heavily influenced by ones confidence because if you are confident all levels of health increase.