Promoting Positive Health and Well-being

Promoting Positive Health and Well-being

Stress Resistant Personality

• Kobasa have shown that people with high levels of stress but low levels of illness share 3 characteristics, which are referred to as the personality traits of ‘hardiness’
• Hardiness is a set of belief about oneself, the world and how they interact.
• It consists of ‘3 C’s’:

1. Commitment - A sense of personal commitment to what you are doing. For instance, commitment to work, family, hobbies, social life.
2. Control - A sense of control over your life.
3. Challenge - A feeling of challenge i.e., they see changes in life as normal and positive rather than as a threat.

Life Skills

• Life skills are abilities for adaptive and positive behavior that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life.
• Our ability to cope depends on how well we are prepared to deal with and counterbalance everyday demands, and keep equilibrium in our lives.
• Can be learned as well as improved upon.
• Some of the like skills are:

a) Assertiveness

• A behavior or skill that helps to communicate, clearly and confidently, our feelings, needs, wants, and thoughts.
• Ability:
• to say ‘no’ to a request.
• to state an opinion without being self-conscious.
• to express emotions (love, anger, etc.) openly.
• An assertive person:
• feels confident
• has high self-esteem
• has a solid sense of own identity

b)Time Management

• The way we spend our time determines the quality of our life.
• Learning how to plan time and delegate can help to relieve the pressure.
• Major way to reduce time stress is to change one’s perception of time.
• Central principle of time management is to spend your time doing the things that you value or that help you to achieve your goals.
• It depends on being realistic about what you know and that you must do it within a certain time period, knowing what you want to do, and organizing your life to achieve a balance between the two.

c) Rational Thinking

• Many stress-related problems occur as a result of distorted thinking.
• The way we think and the way we feel are closely connected.
• When we are stressed, we have an inbuilt selective bias to attend to negative thoughts and images from the past, which affects our perception of the present and the future.
• Principles of rational thinking are:
• Challenging your distorted thinking and irrational beliefs.
• Driving out potentially intrusive negative anxiety-provoking thoughts.
• Making positive statements.

d) Improving Relationships

• Key to a sound lasting relationship is communication.
• This consists of 3 essential skills:
• Listening to what the other person is saying.
• Expressing how you feel and what you think.
• Accepting the other person’s opinions and feelings, even if they are different from your own.
• Also requires us to avoid misplaced jealousy and sulking behavior.

e) Self-care

• If we keep ourselves healthy, fit and relaxed, we are better prepared physically and emotionally to tackle the stresses of everyday life.
• Our breathing patterns reflects our state of mind and emotions.
• When we are stressed or anxious, we tend towards rapid and shallow breathing from high in the chest, with frequent sighs.
• When we are relaxed, breathing is slow, stomach-centered breathing from the diaphragm i.e. a dome like muscle between the chest and the abdominal cavity.
• Environmental stresses can all exert an influence on our mood.
• These have a noticeable effect on our ability to cope with stress and well-being.

f) Overcoming Unhelpful Habits

Such as perfectionism, avoidance, procrastination, etc. are strategies that help to cope in the short-term but make one more vulnerable to stress.

• Perfectionists are persons who have to get everything just right.
• They have difficult in varying standards according to factors such as time available, consequences of not being able to stop work, and the effort needed.
• More likely to feel tense
• Find it difficult to relax
• Critical of self and others
• May become inclined to avoid challenges
• Avoidance is to put the issue under the carpet and refuse to accept or face it.
• Procrastination means putting off what we know we need to do.
• People who procrastinate are deliberately avoiding confronting their fears of failure or rejection.

Positive Health

Health is a state of complete physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

Positive health comprises the following:

• A healthy body
• High quality of personal relationships
• A sense of purpose in life
• Self-regard
• Mastery of life’s tasks
• Resilience to stress, trauma and change

Following act as stress buffers and facilitate positive health:

a) Diet

• A balanced diet can:
• Lift one’s mood
• Give more energy
• Feed muscles
• Improve circulation
• Prevent illness
• Strengthen the immune system
• Make one feel better to cope with stresses of life
• The key to healthy living is to eat three main meals a day and eat a varied well-balanced diet.
• One’s activity level, genetic makeup, climate and health history determines the amount of nutrition one needs.
• What people eat, and how much do they weigh involve behavioral processes.
• Some people are able to maintain a healthy diet and weight while others become obese.
• When we are stressed, we seek ‘comfort foods’ (high in fats, salts and sugars).

b) Exercise

• Positive relationship between physical fitness and health.
• Lifestyle change with the widest popular approval.
• Regular exercise plays an important role in managing weight and stress
• Has a positive effect on reducing tension, anxiety and depression.
• Physical exercise that are essential for good health are stretching exercises such as yogic asanas and aerobic exercises such as jogging, cycling, swimming etc.
• Stretching exercises have a calming effect.
• Aerobic exercises increase the arousal level of the body.
• Health benefits of exercise work as a stress buffer.
• Fitness permits individuals to maintain general mental and physical well-being even in the face of the negative life events.

c) Positive Attitude

• Positive health and well-being can be realized by having a positive attitude.
• Factors leading to a positive attitude are:
• Having a fairly accurate perception of reality.
• A sense of purpose in life and responsibility.
• Acceptance and tolerance for different viewpoint of others
• Taking credit for success and accepting blame for failure.
• Being open to new ideas
• Having a sense of humor with the ability to laugh at oneself.
• These factors help us to remain centered, and see things in a proper perspective.

d) Positive Thinking

• Helps significantly in reducing and coping with stress.
• Optimism i.e. the inclination to expect favorable life outcomes, has been linked to psychological and physical well-being.
• Optimists tend to:
• assume that adversity can be handled successfully.
• use more problem-focused coping strategies whereas,
• Pessimists tend to:
• anticipate disasters
• ignore the problem or the source of stress
• use strategies such as giving up the goal with which stress is interfering or denying that stress exists.

e) Social Support

• The existence and availability of people on whom we can rely upon, people who let us know that they care about, value, and love us.
• Someone who believes that she/he belongs to a social network of communication and mutual obligation experiences social support.
• Perceived support i.e., the quality of social support, is positively related to health and wellbeing.
• Social network i.e., the quantity of social support, is unrelated to well-being, as it is very time-consuming and demanding to maintain a large social network.
• Social support can help to provide protection against stress.
• During times of stress, one may experience sadness, anxiety and loss of self-esteem.
• People with high levels of social support from family and friends may experience less stress when they confront a stressful experience, and they may cope with it more successfully.
• Social support may be in the form of:
• Tangible support or assistance involving material aid such as money, goods, services etc.
• Family and friends also provide informational support about stressful events.
• Supportive friends and family provide emotional support by reassuring the individual that she/he is loved, valued and cared for.
• Social support effectively reduces psychological distress such as depression, anxiety during times of stress.
• Social support is positively related to psychological well-being.
• Social support leads to mental health benefits for both the giver and the receiver.