06 Sep Health Is the Secret to Happiness
For too long, too many have thought of “physical” health and “mental” or “psychological” health as being separate.
But the reality is, they’re intimately and integrally connected.
It’s hard to be happy if you’re sick and tired all the time; but if you’re healthy, you’re much more likely to feel good!
Check out this Psychology Today article by Thomas Rutledge about health being the secret to happiness …
KEY POINTS
- Despite centuries of wisdom about happiness, happiness remains elusive in modernity.
- Although many factors influence our happiness, arguably the most robust and persistent influence is our own physical health.
- Physical health regulates how we feel, controls what we can do, and relies on identical biology responsible for our mental health.
In the long history of humanity, no goal has been more consistently imagined, discussed, and pursued than happiness. In fact, our persistent focus as a species on happiness—across centuries, continents, and circumstances—is possibly matched only by the diversity of means through which we’ve sought to obtain it. From Greek philosophers such as Aristotle, religious texts such as the Quran and the Bible, to modern happiness science and self-help books, happiness is a goal we never stop chasing and a feeling we never stop craving.
Although we have traditionally pursued happiness through relationships and religion, status and substance use, money and material goods, arguably the most enduring and powerful contributor to our happiness is the quality of our physical health. The profound influence of health on our capacity for happiness is readily demonstrated in two ways: First, our state of health strongly affects how we feel. Energy, vitality, motivation, and resilience are just some of the many dimensions we characteristically describe as emotions that are often instead a manifestation of our physical health. While few would dispute that it is possible to experience happiness despite the malaise of medical illness, none can deny that it is more difficult.
Second, the quality of our physical health determines the boundaries of what we can do. Even under the best of circumstances, the feeling of happiness can be as capricious as the weather or stock market. Constrain our already fickle capacity for happiness even further with disease and disability that rob our ability to move in and modify the world around us, engage with and experience the people and preoccupations we care about, and happiness becomes as ephemeral as a rainbow…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE