Mental
health is the key to physical well being. The role of mental health is not just
limited to the impact of stress on physical well being. The core cause
associated with any illness, be it life style based diseases such as diabetic,
hypertension, cardio vascular (heart) diseases or various infectious diseases,
can be traced to poor of lack of mental health. Here the role of poor mental health
can be identified by the gulf between the knowledge and use of knowledge.
Many
of us know what is healthy life style and eating habits. We know that we need
to take a healthy diet, which has enough of each essential nutrient, contains
many foods from all of the basic food groups, provides the right amount of
calories to maintain a healthy weight, and does not have too much fat, sugar,
salt, or alcohol. But we fail to do it and even if we start doing it, it is
just restricted to the time period when the symptoms have restricted our
functional ability.
We know
importance to exercise on health and well being. We know that being physically
active can help us to continue doing things we enjoy and help us to stay
independent at any age and regular physical activity over long periods of time
can produce long-term health benefits. But we just refrain from doing it finding
some excuse or other. When we are ill we claim that we cannot involve in
physical exercise due to the impact of illness and when we are better we feel that
“now we are healthy, why waste time on it while there are more important tasks
to be completed”.
The other
important factor associated with physical wellness about which there is lesser
awareness is sleep. Good sleep not just give you rest, but also helps in
healing. A simple review of our sleeping time may only show that in most
occasions, we are wasting our time for sleep on unimportant activities such as
goalless browsing or purposeless chats. Even though we experience various
troubles in our day time functioning due to lack of sleep, we never try to
adopt healthy sleeping patterns. Most of the days we force ourselves to be
awake till we are pushed into sleep.
We also
know the role of hygiene in preventing illnesses. But we never take initiative
to maintain a clean environment around us, but gain solace in making complaints
about the civic administration for not taking adequate measures.
Even
in people who don’t have adequate knowledge or claim so, which result in them becoming
victims of these illness, when the professional provide adequate informations
after the onset, they find it difficult to adapt to the necessary changes, for
maintaining health and preventing escalation.
The flabbergast
fact is that, all the above said facts are not just restricted to lay people,
but present in most of the professionals who are promoters physical or mental
health. They preach but rarely follow.
Inspite
of all the information and understanding of the importance of the above said
facts, we have never tried to probe and find out what has been preventing us
from adopting these healthy habits. It’s not just limited to prevention; even
the people who have becoming prey of life style diseases do not want to adopt
the healthy life style to prevent the escalation of these diseases. Even if a
few adopt it, they do not maintain consistency and in few other cases, where people
who follow healthy habits are easily persuaded to leave it by the ones who do
not follow them. The surprising fact is, a good percentage of them fear the
consequences, and do not want to suffer from escalations, but limit their
non-adherence by expressing helplessness.
We can
term the cause as negative attitude, lack of motivation, habituation, laziness,
learned helplessness, false belief systems such as exercising unnecessary excessive
control etc. But aren’t all these indicators of poor mental health.
There
are robust awareness programs are being done through media and various others programs
by medical professionals and organizations; to advocate the adoption of
preventive measures, to avert various life style based diseases. Awareness programs
about importance of maintaining hygiene, as a preventive measure to avoid
contact of diseases due to bacterial or viral infections and are being done in
an exuberant way. But the vital factor, the mental health factor associated
with all these illnesses are not being addressed. If the role of mental health with
the focus on changing the attitudes, increasing the motivation and changing the
false belief systems to ensure that people adopt healthy habits and life styles,
is not addressed then all these program will only become futile exercises
resulting in wastage of money and resources
Apt mental
health, improves the quality of our lives in ways including better physical
health; faster recovery from illness; fewer limitations in daily life; higher achievement
and better relationships.
