Submitted By: Kurt Mattsson
Your health depends upon several factors as your own behavior, your lifestyle, your eating habits, physical work, training and exercise, your social habits, your age, the environment, your senses, and your social situation. These are interdependent, several of them interacting. You can easily influence upon some of them, while you might be stuck in others and have severe difficulties to come around them.
1. Behavior
To be born in a peaceful community and to be brought up properly lays a ground for good health. Then it is up to you whether you choose or have the characteristics to make you avoid bad influence and habits.
Drugs, criminality, violence does not promote health. Just as bad is of course to become a victim of crime, living with an alcoholic or violent person can be ruining for your life. There is no easy way out if you are in such trouble .
2. Lifestyle
The modern society with double-working parents, children with numerous leisure time activities causes stress and split up days for the whole family. There is too little time for rest and recovery for too many of us. We end up having a whole range of diseases originating from this lifestyle. If we do not manage to handle the situation can this on the other hand lead to loss of the employment, economic problems, house foreclosure etc. The problem is complex and needs careful analysis before action is taken.
3. Social habits
The possibility to live in a peaceful and friendly surrounding has a strong influence on our health, the contrary leads to the opposite. Mobbing is a growing problem in schools. Some working places suffer from archaic structures and others have a too strongly competitive spirit leaving no room for human feelings and recovery after fulfilled efforts. Again matters not so easy to tackle!
4. Eating habits
The fall of the food pyramid and the diet circle has created a multiple choice of food gurus with different ideas of how our eating habits should be to give best possible odds for healthy life.
It is also certain that we totally have lost control of what we eat. The situation reminds me of the sausage dealer, who on his death bed whispered the best and most important advice he could give to his very best friend: “Eat never sausage!” Most people interpret this story: The dying old man alone knew what ingredients the sausage consisted of and advised strongly against eating it. That is exactly our relation to the food we eat. We believe that we know what we eat but some components in the food should horrify us, were we aware of them. Not all such ingredients are subject to any control but the manufacturers.
This is something that can be dealt with. You can after all find a common nominators from most food gurus and the rest can be solved by common sense.
5. Physical work, exercise and training
A physical work is training in itself, but can if too one- sided wear you down.
Exercise and training help us to cope with an intensive life, which is positive but can also enhance the stress itself. Different modes of exercise are favorable to address or prevent various problems. Some leisure sports as golf are quite time consuming, which formerly led to that golfers used to be fairly old. It is best for a traditional family if both wife and husband play, but there are still quite a lot of golf widows around, at least here in Sweden.
Simply do not sit down too much, move and try to have fun while doing it!
6. Age
We expect our health to grow worse while we become older. The experience teaches us this as a fact and what we have learnt in school does not contradict the expectation. Would it still be possible to stop the aging or at least slow it down? Many experts leave such options open. We will therefore scrutinize their claims to find out what appears to be probable, possible or less likely. A former Swedish Cross Country Champion used to say - and still says - “Nothing is impossible”.
7. Environment
Our expected life length depends very much of where we live. People in poor areas have in average shorter life time then people in richer areas. The death reason in the poor areas is mainly related to the poverty itself, on the contrary wealthy people die of wellbeing related diseases. Allergy is common in wealthy areas in the same town where it does not occur at all in the same proportions in poor areas. There is a lot to be learnt from extreme differences in living environment, we will drill into what in coming articles.
8. Senses
It is of course a very big handicap to be blind, deaf or dumb. It is remarkable though how nature can compensate for such defiances. Even less severe problems with senses have a thorough impact upon our health. Reduced hearing is something you pay dearly in your social life. Reduced sights exclude you from driving a car. You are not likely to be a successful professional marketer, if your speech is poor. Such limitations can on the other hand be overcome, there are good examples thereof.
9. Social situation
New types of home life are created as heterosexual pairs are mixed with homosexual ones and the number of singles increase. The latter especially is sometimes a lonely alternative, which may or may not be self chosen. Modern society is on its way reorganize itself to meet this challenge.
