People nowadays spend a whole lot of time in the gym, running or doing other exercises to enhance their physical wellbeing and get a fantastic figure. Although maintaining your physical health is all good and well, lots of individuals tend to overlook the advantages and importance of mental health and even how both coexist.
Sure, the distinction between physical and mental wellbeing is relatively clear and simple, however their similarities and how are they connected may be a bit more elusive.
Emotional health and a sound state-of-mind, in actuality, are equally important to your overall health as exercising, proper diet and performing “cardio” and really influences how well all of those matters maintain your physical health. Speaking generally, in 2009 a research team in the United Kingdom concluded that psychological fatigue results in the body getting fatigued faster (Emotional and Physical Health). Why? The Solution is simple but multifaceted:
Primarily, mental exhaustion inhibits the mind’s capacity to inspire itself and also to push through a physically draining activity. That being true, if you’re in a sound mental condition, and you go running, your brain will be ample ready to push your body harder and further, past the first signs of fatigue. On the flip side of the coin, if you’re emotionally tired, frustrated or distracted, your mind, chemically (because of the decreased levels of dopa-mine), won’t have the ability to get the motivation to push your body, resulting in a shorter, less productive exercise.
Secondly, we can observe a similar feature of the problem from the perspective of apathy, which frequently arises when someone isn’t in sound mental wellbeing. Take the example of a mentally distressed person, being asked about something not especially important to them. Their response to questions such as: “What do you think about it?” Or “What should we do in this circumstance?” Will probably be: “I do not care” or “It does not matter”. Similarly to our first point above, the indifference due to the individual’s mental condition, which I am certain that we’ve all felt, directly influences their physical condition once the questions become internalized: “If I work out today?” , “If I cook myself something healthy?” Or “That portion looks a little too large for me.”
That being said, it’s not hard to understand how, while bodily and psychological health aren’t identical, they are, without a doubt, deeply intertwined and rely heavily on each other. While physical health could be regarded as a chemical or biological condition of the human body, it assesses how well your body moves, reacts to stimuli and how well you focus on things. Thus, with poor physical health, your mental health will suffer. Similarly, mental health might appear unrelated and much less important, as it’s subjective and harder to control, but mental health has a direct influence on the body’s ability to overcome difficult physical activities (the center of doing any physical exercise) and heavily affecting the ability to motivate themselves to do anything.
Overall, so as to be a “healthy” human being, an individual must not look at diet and exercise, but also at how they’re feeling and the state of their mental health.