There are many things that affect our health and maintaining an healthy lifestyle can sometimes be difficult. An healthy lifestyle affects both physical and mental health and there are some things to focus on that could significantly improve our lifestyle and therefore, consequently, our health.
It is no secret that many people struggle to maintain healthy habits in their busy lives. With so many people working desk jobs, grabbing fast food because there's no time to cook, or foregoing social and sometimes it can be difficult to prioritize the things that really make us well.
Sleep
One of the most important things to pay attention to for a healthy lifestyle is the quality and duration of spleep.
Believe it or not, sleep is probably one of the most important activities of the day.
Those who sleep less than seven hours a night are more likely to have weight issues and other health. The National Sleep Association recommends adults get 7-9 hours of sleep per night.
During the day your body gets broken down by environmental conditions and the tasks that you perform. As you sleep, it gets built back up.
Your bedroom or the place where you sleep should be conducive for sleeping and free from any form of disturbance.
When we get inadequate or poor quality sleep, we tend to lose the ability to concentrate as well as lose our self-control. This can negatively impact your mood, social life, dietary choices, and exercise quality.
As previously mentioned, there are various points to be reached in order to achieve a healthy lifestyle and one of these is nutrition.
Balanced diet
A balanced diet is the one which has the right amount of fat, proteins, minerals, and vitamins. In fact, according to nutritionists and physicians, your nutrition accounts for 80% of your overall body health. It can cause us to stay healthy and also cause unwanted conditions.
The best types of food are organic and not processed.
Diet and exercise, while not quite as influential as sleep, are also of great importance. Poor eating and drinking habits can cause obesity, mood swings, and poor athletic performance. Inadequate exercise can cause pain and stiffness, insomnia, and depression. Healthy dietary patterns support healthy exercise and vice versa.
“Mens sana in corpore sano” “healty mind in healty body” the Latins said, many factors must be considered in addition to these, such as:
Stress management
Stress management is defined as the tools, strategies, or techniques that reduce stress and reduce the negative impacts stress has on your mental or physical well-being. A variety of techniques can be used to manage stress, these include mental, emotional, and behavioral strategies. When stress management is used regularly and in response to stressful life events, we can optimize our lifestyle.
Stress can be acute (e.g., in respons of danger) or chronic (e.g., in response to a stressful job we've had for years or in our case exams session).
These stressful events initiate activation of the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal axis (HPA), the greater the stress we have, the greater the activation of the HPA axis. When we get stressed, we may at first feel energized because cortisol gives us the energy we need to escape the danger or fight disease and inflammation if the stress is due an health condition but when the stress is too much, we can start to feel overwhelmed and we begin to feel exhausted because the cortisol peak is just temporary.
Given how bad stress is for the body, managing stress is essential. There are lots of ways to do it.
Some of the most important activities for stress management include optimizing sleep, eating, and exercise but also change the way we see the situations that cause our stress in order to find a solution to them. When we are stressed, we can view the situation as a challenge that we can handle or a threat that we are afraid of, the research suggests that viewing a situation as a challenge (and not a threat) reduces our stress.
Another way to reduce stress is to do some exercises to relax such as meditation, visualization and gratitude list.
Meditation: This is a method that can give you a sense of calm peace and balance and benefit both your emotional well-being and overall health.
Happiness visualization: This exercise helps you visualize what happiness feels like for you. The full-body experience of this exercise can really help you take a step back from momentary stress.
Gratitude list: By making a list of all the things you're grateful for, you can shift your mind to focusing more on the positive and less on the things that are stressing you out.
Social health
Psychologists talk about social health in terms of child development. It is a child’s ability to form secure relationships with others and develop trust so that they can feel safe to explore and learn. This ability is closely connected to their emotional regulation skills.
For adults, social health also includes the networks and social support structures we have around us. Social health boils down to two main factors:
• Your ability to build healthy relationships. This includes platonic friends, romantic partners, family members, and professional relationships.
• The quality of those relationships, as measured by their duration and your ability to connect meaningfully with other people.
Our social relationships contribute to our overall health and quality of life. Having strong interpersonal relationships and a strong support system indicate good social health. Good social health supports better mental and physical health, at the same time ongoing loneliness and chronic stress of poor social health is linked to many physical health problems.
Strong social connections are linked to longer life, reduced stress, and improved heart health,
in fact, cultivating human connections is just as important as eating healthy food or physical activity.
The risks of poor social skills are social isolation, low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, and other mental health disorders.
Physical exercise
Exercise is the miracle cure we’ve ever had, but for too long we’ve neglected to take our recommended dose. Our health is now suffering as a consequences. Whatever your age, there’s strong scientific evidence that being physically active can help you lead an healthier and happier life. People who exercise regularly have a lower risk of developing many long term condition, also known as chronic condition, such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke and some cancers. Research shows that physical activity can also boost self esteem, mood sleep quality and energy, and reducing your risk of stress, clinical depression, dementia and anzheimer disease. Be physically active is essential if you want to live an healthy and fulfilling life into old age, it’s medically proved that people who do regular physical activity have lower risk of: heart disease, diabetes, bowel cancer, early death, depression. To stay health many universities studies, has demonstrate that the adults should try to stay active every day and aim to do at least 150 minutes of physical activity over a week, through a varieties of activity. For most people the easiest way to do physical activity every day is to make activity who takes part in every day’s life, like walking or cycling instead of using the car.
People are less active nowadays partly because technology has made our lives easier. We drive car or take public transport, machine wash our clothes. We entertain ourselves in front of a tv or a computer screen. Fewer people are doing manual work, and most of us have jobs that involve little physical effort. Work, household chores, shopping and other necessary activities are far less demanding than for previous generations. Many adults spend more than 7 hours a day sitting down, at work, on transport or in their leisure time. People aged over 65 spend 10 hours or more each day sitting or lying down, making them the most sedentary age group.
Inactivity is described as a silent killer. Common examples of sedentary behaviour include watching TV, using a computer, using the car for short journeys and sitting down to read, talk or listen to music. This type of behaviour is thought to increase your risk of developing many chronic diseases, such as heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes, as well as weight gain and obesity. Crucially, you can hit your weekly activity target but still be at risk of ill health if you spend the rest of the time sitting or lying down.
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