I think that most many people want to be healthy. I also think that it is hard to know how to be healthy. If you do any sort of research on what it means or takes to be healthy, you will find a lot of advice. You can spend a boat load of money to get healthy and to have your personal healthy regime developed for you. What you might also notice, if you have ever researched being healthy, is that the experts, doctors, scientists, nutritionists, philosophers, therapists and coaches, cannot agree. They can’t agree on what “healthy” means, and they certainly cannot agree what people should do in order to be healthy.
Considering only matters of physical health and removing the concept of mental health, you would think experts could at least agree on that, but alas, they can’t. One will say don’t eat carbs. Others say you need carbs and to avoid fats. One says, balanced diet of different colors. Another says only eat white food. Everyone has their own ideas. Some of the ideas have been studied on humans, and many more of them on animals. Still, the experts cannot find ONE way that ALL people should live and be that will cause them to be an agreed upon definition of healthy.
Historically, what you eat and how you move have been the entire focus on health and well-being for the health care field. Over the past several years there has started to be a shift. The experts are starting to move from a focus on what makes us physically well to what makes us mentally well. The reason for this is that people who eat all the right things and exercise the recommended amounts are still dying from things like heart attacks and cancer, and they still develop high blood pressure and diabetes. It is true that people who do not eat a balanced diet of nutrient rich foods and who do not move around much and are over weight end up with those health conditions more often, but what they are seeing is that eating healthy and moving around does not actually prevent those diseases either. Yes, it accelerates them to eat junk food and not get off the couch, but not doing that does not necessarily prevent disease.
So, what do supposedly healthy people who are of a proper weight, who eat and move well, and get diseases, have in common with people who are not and do not and also get diseases? It is their thinking. This might surprise you, but the more recent studies about chronic illness and debilitating diseases are showing that the way a person thinks is as large if not a larger factor in health than what you eat and how you move. It started with studying cancer patients who did and did not recover. The ones with positive outlooks and supportive networks tended to recover in greater numbers than people who were negative and didn’t have the support around them to keep up the mental battle with cancer.
And of course, what is the prevailing mental factor? That is right, stress! Stress is a lot of things though, particularly when you are talking about mental stress. We each create our own form of stressful thinking and so, each person’s stress is unique. That makes it hard to study and find correlations among people. It is much easier to locate and identify the physical manifestations of stress, cancer, high blood pressure, obesity, addiction, etc., than it is to locate the causes of stress.
The studies are also showing that the environmental stressors, like poverty, abuse, violence, war, hunger, etc. are not the commonalities among stressed people. A person with more money than they can spend, a person who has enough to live comfortably, and a person who is living in poverty can all show the same levels of stress around money. AND that stress level can be both high stress around money and low stress around money for all three groups. The amount of money does not dictate how much stress they feel about money. How they think about money is what dictates how much stress they experience around money. That is just one example of a stressor. They have studied multiple groups experiencing what people might think are stressors and what people might think are low or average stressors, and the levels of stress around the potential environmental stressors is all over the place and does not correlate to the level of the environment. It correlates to how the individuals see the environment. This is critical. Stress is not in the environment. It is in our perceptions of the environment.
For example, a group of people who have healthy relationships with money, a common stressor. If they understand money, its purpose in life, and have a belief that there will be enough for their basic needs and sometimes more, and that they will have to work for that money and sometimes not have what they want, and sometimes have more etc. No matter how much they actually have, if they have a balanced idea of money, and it does not scare them, and they do not fear not having enough, they will not experience much stress around money. And on the other side, if they fear money, always worry if there will be enough, are constantly trying to get more or spending too much to always have more things, etc. Those people will experience high stress around money no matter how much or how little they have.
What does stress have to do with being healthy physically though? Well the studies are showing that people with high levels of reported stress, regardless of their environment, are the same people developing disease. The commonalities are not their weight, eating habits, exercise habits etc. It is their stress levels. Again, remember, stress levels are all based on perceptions. Stress doesn’t exist unless we create it. Even people in what many would consider highly stressful environments have reported low stress levels, and other people who appear to most to be in low stress environments report high levels of stress. It is not external factors that create the stress. It is our perceptions that create it.
How to be well with this latest trend toward stress causes disease model? Simple/Not Simple answer: manage your perceptions of stress. Simple because it is one area to focus on not many. Not simple because it requires controlling your thoughts and emotions, which many humans have had little to no training to do. By controlling, I do not mean suppressing and hiding from or denying the existence of any emotion or thought. I actually mean the opposite. I mean meet every thought and emotion head on with vulnerability and openness to experience it, AND then learn to let it go. That last part is the hard part.
Letting go is one of the hardest things for humans to do. We are a species of attachment and ownership. This is MINE!!! It starts around 1 and a half years old. We start gathering things around us and claiming them as Mine! By the time we reach adolescence, the world is ours and we are entitled to it. As adults we will fight a war over what is “Mine!” No judgment there. I am simply stating all of the attachment and possessiveness over what is ours is what is causing us stress. Like that money we worry about, the house, the job, the relationship. Like any of that is ours to own. It isn’t. Everything in life is temporary and can end instantly. Life itself is short comparatively to the life of everything. Your money will live longer than you. You don’t own it. Now, will you let it own you?
Whatever we are stressing out about is always temporary and will eventually change into something else. Humans are usually horrible at accepting change, even when it is to something better. That is the thing that causes us all the stress, change! We worry about things changing. Will it change? I don’t want it to change. I wish it would change. What if it changes? What if it doesn’t? Do any of the things you feel stress over sound like that? I call that fighting reality. While I stole that line from Byron Katie, I don’t think she copywrote it. 🙂
Bottom line here, when we fight reality, wish for things to stay the same or wish them different, and reality does not match that or we worry that it won’t match what we want, we experience stress. That stress is what is slowly and sometimes quickly killing us. It is what causes us to eat like crap, move less than we should, and even if we eat right and move well, it is what causes us to still get sick. We are killing ourselves by seeing the world as a stressful place that does not meet our large and small expectations constantly, and then being mad about that.
How do we fix it? RELAX! Stop fighting. Be present. Stop worrying. Don’t attach to things. Breathe!!!! The key to health is to just be and know that long term health is more dependent on your mental well-being than your physical body. When you die, which we all do, this body you live in now will not go with you. However, your soul will. Which do you plan to take time to nourish and cultivate wellness within. I also guarantee you, that if you focus on mental well-being and lowering your perceptions of stress, those things you don’t do now to be physically healthy, will not seem as hard to do. When we feel well mentally and are not stressed out, we eat better and move better. Some people move more when stressed and don’t eat at all. They are, of course, not any more physically healthy than their counter parts, who eat too much and move too little when stressed. They are simply thinner. Both are not well.
Take care of your mind and soul because they stay with you forever. Your body will be what your body will be. With a well mind, you are way more likely to be successful at making body changes that might also feel good physically. With a well mind, your body has more energy and resources to heal itself and stay well regardless of what other changes you make. It is difficult to have a well body without a well mind. A well mind is more likely to inspire a well body than simply trying to make that body well without managing the mind. It seems more possible to change a body than a mind, I get that. Like all things in life, it takes practice. What else have you got to do though? I mean, I know you are busy, but if you are not cultivating a well mind, what are you doing?
-Namaste