Health: A Game of Cause and Effect
Do we affect our health by making wrong choices in our lives
You have to focus on how you can keep yourself healthy throughout your life. This thought will help you learn new things on how to improve your health. Wishing to live healthily and be willing to do what it takes to be healthy are two different things.
Most of us do not think about this marvelous body and mind of ours until something goes wrong, and the circumstances force us to learn more. There is a lot of information that can help you take better care of yourself.
The questions are: Can you do something to get control over your health? Can more knowledge — about how your body and mind work — help you in some way?
New medical research keeps growing every day. You can’t read all the data and all the results if you wanted to. Even doctors have to struggle to keep themselves updated in their particular specialized fields.
But there is a general idea that is controlling everything that happens around us, and it is cause and effect.
The health of body
Our body has several systems working side by side in a precisely coordinated way, with an astonishing level of internal communication through hormones and neurotransmitters.
We breathe in oxygen from the air. We unknowingly consume .84 kg — according to NASA — of oxygen every day. This oxygen is like food — something that we need to live — that goes into our lungs and helps in cleaning our blood by removing carbon dioxide — a waste product that we don’t need.
If the air we breathe is clean, we can save ourselves from most of the lungs related diseases. If you go for a morning walk and breathe in fresh oxygen, you are going to cause yourself to be healthy. If you smoke, you are going to give yourself a disease — like lung cancer — as the effect.
Then we eat food — and we love to eat. The food we eat, in our homes, must provide us proteins, fats, carbohydrates, dietary fiber, vitamins, and minerals in a balanced diet.
If you eat unhealthy junk food, monosodium glutamate MSG, and canned food, you are creating a cause for a future disease. The effects of eating the wrong types of food can be short term or long term depending upon the food you are consuming — from indigestion to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
It is our choice to drink water. Our bodies are 60% water. We can prevent most of the diseases for which we visit doctors if we chose to drink a decent amount — usually six to eight cups — of water daily.
The health of mind
If your health is a game of cause and effect, then it is a matter of making smart choices. Where do we make those choices?
We make our choices in our minds, and we base our decisions on our cultural habits and personal knowledge. I believe that our culture provides us enough information to remain healthy if we pay attention.
What you read, watch, listen, or learn becomes an input that becomes the cause of changes in your mind.
Every sensation that you feed into your brain is going to do something to the rest of your system — body and mind. Your brain is trying to make sense of what you are doing at every moment. It assumes that if you are doing something, it must be necessary for you.
If you make poor choices and think unhealthy thoughts, your mind facilitates you in making similar choices and rationalizing negative behavior. It’ll convince you that you are right and nobody cares about you.
Miley Cyrus celebrated four months of sobriety in October 2019. “It is no secret that I was into partying in my teens and early 20’s. I have not only smoked, but advocated for weed, I’ve experimented with drugs, my biggest song to date is about dancing on molly and snorting lines in the bathroom,” she tweeted after rumors that she had cheated on Liam Hemsworth.
Sir Elton John felt a lot of regret, after the death of his friend due to AIDS, that he had spent a decade using alcohol and cocaine. He asked for treatment in 1990 and then established the Elton John AIDS Foundation in 1992.
A healthy mind helps you to make smart choices. Your brain needs a lot of sleep, a routine, and something to feel enthusiastic. You have to watch the stress of work and emotional anxiety. Doing what you want to do, not only engages your mind but ends the boredom and gives you a sense of purpose — that is essential for a healthy mind.
What your mind decides — after knowing everything about your unique situation — becomes the effect.
It is your mind where you decide to smoke, to eat junk food or to drink water. It is your choice to learn more about your health.
Conclusion
We live in a universe where cause and effect shape everything.
At this time in human history, most of us know basic concepts related to health, and disease is not as rampant as it was in the nineteenth century. For example, we all know we have to wash our hands with soap to stop the spread of many diseases but until 1846, even doctors didn’t know this.
Even accidents are not purely random but depend on the choices of the people involved. Drunk drivers, lack of sleep, drowsiness due to some medicine, or some other emotional, psychological, weather-related issues cause most of the vehicular accidents.
We are always the cause. Our health should be our priority — it comes even before work. Accepting responsibility is the first step. The disease is an effect.
We waste our sacred healths — most of us were born healthy — designed for a life of 122 years like Jeanne Calment. We start the chain of events that leads us to disease in most of the cases. If we made smart choices, we would still get sick; disease would not end, but these unfortunate events would become rare.
