Greetings From Goizueta: How To Make Health Your Competitive Advantage In Business School

Nobody tells you before business school starts that the biggest threat to your success isn’t the coursework or the competition. Instead, it’s the slow erosion of your health. The first casualty is usually sleep. Then exercise falls by the wayside. Then the only thing you’ll eat is your school’s greasy pizza. Before you know it, you’re operating on five hours of sleep, surviving on coffee and Celsius, and struggling to find joy in classes or get motivated for recruiting prep.

I watched it happen to classmates during the first semester. I watched intelligent, capable people gradually stop functioning at their best because they’d convinced themselves they didn’t have time for basic health maintenance. People went from bright-eyed, highly-engaged classmates to fighting off sleep before they could make it to our mid-afternoon classes. The irony is that neglecting your health doesn’t buy you more productivity. It just makes you slower and less effective with the time you have.

MY STRUCTURE

I’m a routine-oriented person, so it isn’t hard for me to fit healthy actions into my day. But! I am still a lover of a sweet treat or three. The actions I take that are great for my body and my mind are balanced with those that are great for the soul. In a normal school day, this is how I make health happen.

I wake up between 6:30 and 7:15 AM and immediately read or listen to a book. Every weekday, this happens, so I can start my day with a joy that feeds the mind. Between the time I wake up and when I’m out the door by 8:00, I brush my teeth, put together my outfit, and ready my food for the day. I am at school from roughly 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM, depending on the day of the week. Regardless of the day, I eat lunch and do homework between 11:15 AM and before my 1:00 PM class. I do this throughout the week so I can get to Friday with as little work as possible. Sometimes, that means I eat lunch by myself in the library or I cut a lunch with friends short so I can have flexibility later in the week. For the most part, the weekends are for me, my fiancé, and my friends. Sorry school. Not a lot of work gets done then.

By finishing my work on campus, I can head home at 4:00 PM to get in my physical activity. Three of the weekdays will have an in-gym workout while I do a multi-mile walk on the other two. This helps me get stronger, more flexible, and disconnect from whatever school stressors may come during the day or week.

I wrap up the day with dinner and as many hours as I can get in front of the TV chill time. These few hours from 6:00 or 7:00 PM until bedtime at 10:00 are some of my favorite hours of the day. I have an opportunity to be creative in the kitchen with the meals I whip up before I learn more about my favorite topics on YouTube, or turn my brain off and become a fan with TV or sports. This may sound counterintuitive, but it isn’t. What you do to relax may be different than what I do. I have a YouTube algorithm that focuses on cooking, travel, and sports history. This offers me a passive way to learn and be entertained after a day of very active learning. I’m enjoying myself without succumbing to the brain rot of other platforms. These hours are important for my winding down from activity during the day, so I’m ready to sleep soundly when my head eventually hits the pillow.

My days and weeks are structured to keep myself holistically healthy. It isn’t only about diet or exercise. It’s also about my emotional and mental health. Without all of me being at top condition, then I won’t be able to be my best for my responsibilities and the people who matter to me.  My “best”, a “best” I have been able to achieve because of this routine I started for business school, looks like this:

• Never missing class
• Going on recruiting trips to different states and landing a job
• Reading daily
• Becoming better at my hobbies like cooking, baking, and writing
• Being present for my friends on and off campus
• Maintaining a close relationship with my fiancé

Your best, like your routine, will be different. Whatever your best is the only way you will achieve it is by building a foundation that enables you to get there.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON’T

In short: you burn out. You crash, finding yourself staring into the middle distance, wondering what happened and how you got here. Your motivation falls away, and you don’t maximize the opportunity you have to learn and grow in an environment with talented people.

I have classmates who are involved in multiple clubs on campus. They are in leadership in organizations that help our program go. They are rock stars! But they don’t do a good job of taking care of themselves. Their diet is unbalanced, and they get inconsistent exercise, whether that be in the gym, at a Pilates studio, or taking stairs from class-to-class. Motivation fluctuates, and energy can be inconsistent, making it hard to get the most out of what is great about school. I rarely see them off campus because so much time is needed on the weekends to recover from what happened during the week. The candle can only burn from both ends for so long before it all melts away. Time has to be made to take complete care of yourself.

Before business school, I had a routine. It wasn’t impressive, but it I worked out multiple days a week with a weekly trip to my favorite bakery and coffee shop. Life was good…not perfect, but good. What I did not know at the time was the life I was living, a flexible life that saw me working from home, was so far from the life I was going to live at school. By going back to school, I was going to be in the same city as my girlfriend again, requiring me to have time and energy saved for her. I was going to be around friends far more often because of the forced proximity of school. I’d have to actually leave my house to do “work”. My routine of going out for a walk in between meetings, meal prepping if I finished my to-do list early, or spending all day at a coffee shop was incompatible with school.

So the start of the semester was rough. The routine I planned failed almost immediately when school started. I faced free meals, weekend study sessions, and long assignments I didn’t understand. I thought things were going well, even though it wasn’t easy, but I was wrong. I was challenged to change during a conversation with my girlfriend in her kitchen. I was so caught up in school and the fun there that I was neglecting the most important person in my life – a person integral to my success. This also helped me realize that I wasn’t doing as well as I thought. My sleep was poor. I had gained weight thanks to all the free pizza and Chick-fil-A. I forgot what my “best” really looked like. That conversation in the kitchen had pushed me to change how I operated. Now we’re engaged.

I guess a good routine can do a lot for you.

The hard truth is that business school doesn’t slow down. If you wait for a good time to prioritize your health, you’ll be waiting for a while. Maybe you’ll get time during break, but that’s only a week. Maybe two. Then you’re back at it. Then you graduate and are back to work. The workload isn’t going to lighten. The commitments won’t decrease. We have to decide that taking care of ourselves is non-negotiable, so we can have the best experience during our two years at school.

THE COMPOUND EFFECT

The benefits of maintaining your health compound over two years, just like the interest we learn about in finance classes. Being well-rested doesn’t just help you today. It helps you retain information better, which means you spend less time studying later. Having energy means you can say yes to opportunities. Opportunities like coffee chats, club leadership, and networking events that tired people have to skip or perform poorly in if they don’t. By staying on top of my routine, I was able to go to a recruiting conference with my only focus being on recruiting. School work was done. Quality time with my significant other was had. Research and practice to prepare me for the trip had been completed. I was ready to go because I put myself in a position to be ready. And from that conference, I got the job I had been looking for. What sets us up for success can be small, but, as my dad tells me, the small things become the big things.

The students who finish business school strongest aren’t the ones who had their noses to the grindstone. They’re the ones who had balance. They combined hard work with smart work while maintaining themselves well enough to sustain their effort over time.

You can’t control how difficult the program will be. You can’t control recruiting timelines or group project deadlines, let alone how much your professors assign. You can’t control how reliable and accountable classmates will be. But you can control whether you sleep, move your body, and stay connected to what brings joy to your life. You can control your reactions. That is self-regulation, sure. That is very important. The actions you take after you regulate that moment, like stress eating or misplaced anger, are also forms of reaction. These things sound basic because they are. Too often, the basics are the first things you forget – and the hardest to return to following.

BUILD YOUR SYSTEM NOW

If you’re about to start business school, don’t wait until you’re drowning to figure this out. Decide right now what your non-negotiables are. What does health look like for you? What do you need to function at your best? Then build your routine around those things.

For me, it started with recognizing that what I was doing wasn’t working and then caring enough to change. After that, it was trial-and-error. I tried to do work and eat lunch by myself every day at school, but then I missed bonding time with classmates. Next, I tried blocking off a day on the weekend to do work. That took too much time from my girlfriend and friends outside of school. Eventually, I landed on something where I could spread my work, time, and energy across the week in a way that kept me sane, on top of responsibilities, and present for the people that matter. I don’t go to all of the events or participate in all of the same activities I did when I started school. And that’s good. I found my priorities, focused on them, and aligned my life match those priorities as well as I could.

It won’t be perfect. You’ll have weeks where you go to bed after midnight and you can’t make it to the gym and you’re only getting takeout. But that’s what the strong foundation you created is for. You can always return to that so you can recover faster.

Business school is designed to push you. The question is whether you’ll have the foundation to handle that pressure without breaking. Your health isn’t separate from your success. It’s the platform everything else is built on.

---

Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Martin Gravely graduated from Seton Hall University with a B.S. in Marketing and Economics. After undergrad, he worked in digital marketing and social media analytics in health media before moving to into the agency world with SSCG Media Group as an analyst and brand supervisor.

DON’T MISS: GREETINGS FROM GOIZUETA: FIND YOUR FIT – HOW I CHOSE THE RIGHT MBA PROGRAM

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.