Wala’s Clear Goal to Establish a Physical & Mental Health Gym
Every lift, every squat, and every push-up shoves your anxiety further into the deep realms of your mind. When you are running, you aren’t thinking about your upcoming exams. When you are lifting weights, you aren’t worried about your grades and graduation. Your fitness is much more than merely a way to stay in a toned shape. In fact, it is your outlet for raising awareness regarding mental health issues. It is what a junior student, Alison Walla, at University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) has understood and brought it into her practice.
Her strong will to being physically active is not a new thing. As during her high school days, she had participated in several sports. She finds mornings as the best time to better her fitness. Therefore always arrived at the gym with her dad at 5 AM, so they could peacefully work out and lift weights together with synergized results. However, her father ended his life with suicide. According to Wala he had remained conscious about his diet and always ate healthy. Upon his death, she decided she must do something to help many others battling with anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses. She incorporated pre-sports psychology as a major this year with the clear goal of creating an excellent gym to help people with varying mental disorders.
At her gym, participants could have issues ranging from different levels of depression since he or she can’t lose weight, to stress and everything in between. Her career focuses on to being a “therapist for athletes.” Instead of prescribing to them pills, she would be adding different exercises and healthy diets into their daily lives. Though pills have their scientific results, sometimes these are not enough. Physical and mental exercises do help a lot a person to recover from ill health.
While she
talked about her vision to establish a gym she will have to wait until upon receives a Master’s degree in Sports Psychology, she still desired to make an incredible different while being at UNL. Therefore, she came up with the innovative idea of selling T-shirts to raise money and create awareness about increasing mental health problems, specifically suicide prevention. College time could be an especially stressful period in someone’s life due to fear of getting failed in exams, receiving low grades, and not achieving the required skills to peruse the desired career. She hopes that teachers would reach out to their students they see struggling to prevent any chances of further tragedy.
Reaching your barbell can help you alleviate your stress and daily practicing healthy habits can give you a new better and beautiful life loaded with happiness and pleasant feelings with mental stability. Wala realized the fact and brought it into her daily practice with the aim of establishing a gym helping participants in physical and mental fitness. Let’s be part of her idea, raise awareness regarding mental health issues, and listen to each other’s concerns.
http://www.dailynebraskan.com/news/student-raises-mental-health-awareness-hope/article_07cef300-90fe-11e6-bf1d-634470c799db.html
