Physical Activities and its Effect on Students' Mental Health:A Comparative Study between Athlete and Non-athlete Students

A physical activity is any bodily activity that enhances or maintains physical fitness and overall health and wellbeing. Physical activities not only affect on the body health but also affect on the mental health. It can increase the ability of adaption with the society. And it can also improve the mental illness, increase the ability of remembrance and accepted as a tool for maintaining and increasing psychological health. Physical activities play an important role in peoples vitality. Today, students play an important role in the future of each country and are considered as one of the most important groups in the society, about increasing the mental health problems in the students, this study aims to determine the physical activities and its effect on students mental health, systematically comparing athletes (regular practitioners of exercise) to non-athlete students (students who do not practice any organized athletic activity). The study sample consisted of 250 female and male athlete and non-athlete students were chosen who were aged 21-26 years. In this study, a standardized questionnaire, general health questionnaire designed by Goldberg and Hillier was used; it consisted of 28 questions to measure four subscales (physical symptoms, anxiety and sleep disturbance, social dysfunction, depression). The reliability (reliability coefficient) of the questionnaire was obtained as 0.85 through Cronbach's alpha coefficient. Data were analyzed using the independent t-test. By analyzing the proposed hypotheses at the P≤0.05 demonstrated a significant difference in mental health score between athlete and non-athlete students.