The fact that the rule “in a healthy body – a healthy mind”, works in the opposite direction, modern specialists in the field of medicine and psychology began to think about relatively recently. In recent decades, a lot of research has been done to identify the impact of a person’s mental and emotional state on his physical health. Based on the results of these studies, physicians established a direct relationship between psychological and physiological health. Specialists even identified a whole category of psychosomatic diseases – diseases that arise from mental and emotional disorders.
And in order to establish laws, rules and limits of the relationship between physical and mental health, to determine behavior that promotes physiological health, and to find effective methods for preventing unhealthy behavior, the psychology of health and a healthy lifestyle has been singled out as a separate branch of science. And despite the fact that the term “psychology of health” itself began to be used in scientific circles only in the late 1990s, for less than 20 years psychologists, psychotherapists and physicians did a great job and defined the basic rules of healthy behavior, found a stable relationship between certain traits and diseases, and also managed to find psychological methods of preventing a variety of diseases.
How strong is the link between mental and physical health?
Many people are skeptical about the connection between the emotional and mental state of a person and his physical health. It is from such skeptics that one can hear that “genes are to blame for everything”, “bad ecology is to blame for all diseases” and “the main reason for people’s poor health is that our medical system is imperfect”. And meanwhile, scientists confidently refute all these statements, because, according to the results of many studies, the following factors influence the state of human health:
- The quality of medical care is 10%
- Hereditary factors (genetic predisposition to diseases) – 20%
- Ecological environment – 20%
- The way of life of a person is 50%.
The lifestyle of a person affects his health more than all the factors taken together that do not depend on the person himself. Therefore, it is obvious that each of us can significantly reduce the likelihood of the occurrence of certain diseases and feel good, even having a bad heredity and living in an environmentally unfavorable environment. And for this you need to adjust your lifestyle in such a way as to exclude from it bad habits, unjustified risk, stressful situations and negative thoughts.
