College life can be overwhelming for students, especially for first-year students, and mental health issues are becoming increasingly common. It is also a big step in a young person’s life, especially if you’re far away from home. This can increase anxiety levels, stress, and even depression. However, there are ways to overcome these mental health challenges and help first year-students strive academically and emotionally. Let’s talk about what can first-year students do if they find themselves struggling with their mental health.

What is mental health?

Let’s first talk about what is mental health exactly. Mental health is regarding a person’s overall well-being. This affects first-year students a lot. This is because it’s their first time having real freedom, being away from home, having more responsibility, and being able to take ownership of their actions. Usually, this would lead to stress, anxiety, and depression because this is something brand new to them and most first years are not that experienced with anything like this.

What are the most common mental health disorders?

Mental health does a lot to a person’s overall well-being. But let’s look at what are the main mental health disorders that pop up with first-year students. These mental health disorders are depression, anxiety, and stress. Depression is the feeling of sadness or getting in a low mood. Anxiety is an alert in your body that causes you to have second thoughts, feel worried, or even full-on panic attacks which could even lead to stress. Stress is the feeling of mental strain or tension from adverse or demanding circumstances. Those three mental health disorders are the main reason why first-year students tend to struggle throughout the whole year, especially in the fall semester. Which can lead to students dropping out, failing, leading to academic probation, or even experiencing suicidal thoughts.

In what ways can college students improve their mental health?

In the previous paragraph, I gave examples of what might cause first-year students to go through mental health disorders, but let’s talk about what students can do to fix their mental health issues.

Breathing

The first step is to breathe. Students at any level of education can have a million things wrapped around their minds when dealing with school or situations in life in general. But the one thing that students fail to realize is that breathing helps the body calm down and go into reset mode. This can help first-year college students prepare for a big presentation, or test, or organize themselves and get things done one thing at a time.

Speaking up

The second thing they can do is to talk to someone about it. This is one of the hardest things for me to do, but one of the things first-year students should do is talk to someone about how they feel. It can be a family member, friend, counselor, professor, teacher, success coach, etc. Doing this can relieve a lot of stress once they talk to someone, especially if that person is advising them on what to do when they are stuck.

Journal/Write down thoughts.

Journaling is another option that first-year students can use to write down their thoughts and read them. First-year students sometimes might feel insecure about their thoughts, as they go through a stage of adulthood for the first time. Sometimes students might not even have anyone to talk to about it, which makes journaling another great resource for being able to understand your health and thoughts.