The Art of Healthy Living
27 Jul 2022
In the simplest term, 'art-of-living' refers to proficiencies for leading a good life. There may be diverse views and understandings on what a good life is and thereby there could also be different perspectives in the potentials called for.
The Art of Living offers several, highly effective educational and self-development ideas and tools that facilitate the elimination of stress. These tools also foster deep and profound inner peace, happiness, and well-being for all individuals.
It’s a platitude that most of us want to live long, happy, successful and healthy lives. Unfortunately, during our chase for success in life, as if there is no tomorrow, we are prone to taking shortcuts with our health and end-up suffering from various ailments and disabilities that we could have easily avoided in the first place.
It doesn’t have to be that way at all. Though many of us live stressful and demanding lives, yet with just a little tweaking here and there we can develop habits that will help us live healthier and more productive lives.
In this age of information spreading, there is no shortage of material available on suggested tips for living a healthy lifestyle. There are lengthy discourses on the subject but we don’t want to get that exhaustive.
We have pinpointed below the most prevalent seven healthy habits that anyone should be able to include in their daily lives:
1. Sleep and health - A lack of sleep at night can make you irritable the next day and over a period of time, frugal sleep can mess up more than just your morning mood. Studies show that getting quality sleep on a regular basis with best home air can help improve all sorts of issues, from your blood sugar to your workouts. While you sleep, your blood pressure goes down, giving your heart and blood vessels a bit of rest. The less sleep you get, the longer your blood pressure stays up during a 24-hour cycle. High blood pressure can lead to heart disease, including stroke.
Short-term downtime can have long-term payoffs.
2. Exercise for physical and mental health - Physical activities and exercises are major contributors to a healthy lifestyle. Bodies are meant to be used physically, and its disuse leads to unhealthy living. Unhealthy living may manifest itself into obesity, weakness, lack of endurance and overall poor health that may foster disease development. Most individuals can begin moderate exercises, such as brisk walking even without a medical examination. Healthy living involves more than physical health, it also includes emotional or mental health.
Mental health is more important now than ever before; it influences every area of our lives. The importance of good mental health ripples into everything we do, think, or say. Nurturing mental health doesn’t just improve our daily functioning, but it can also help us control — or at least combat — some of the physical health problems directly linked to mental health conditions. For example, heart disease and stress are related, so managing stress might have a positive outcome on heart disease.
3. Healthy eating (diet and nutrition) - A healthy, balanced diet is essential for our overall wellbeing, both physically and mentally. Our gut microbiome is heavily influenced by the food we eat and a poor diet will lead to an imbalance in our gut’s ecosystem. This will have a knock-on effect on our physical as well as mental wellbeing.
Therefore, eating the right foods before and after exercise helps to provide our body with the energy it needs to perform and recovery post exercise, enabling us not only to perform at our best but also avoid illness and recovery from injuries that we may get while exercising.
Understanding whether our body is getting the right nutrients from our diet is a great place to start. A dietician or a general physician can prescribe a simple blood test for vitamins etc. that will check all the key nutrients important for one’s health and also show deficiencies, if any. A right advice thereafter, will give us an insight into how well our food is fuelling our body and will help us make the right changes to improve our overall welfare.
4. Avoid Tobacco & excessive alcohol consumption - Cigarette smoking has been causally linked to diseases of nearly all organs of the body, including an increased risk of heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes mellitus and lung cancer. Lung cancer caused by smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer deaths. It also causes complications in pregnancy, harms the foetus and leads to diminished overall health status. People who smoke are estimated to lose more than 10 years of their life expectancy. However, the risk of all-cause mortality for smokers dramatically decreases, the sooner they quit. Smoking also is a potent weapon against passive smokers who are exposed to such smokers especially children at home. In this case one should use air purification system to avoid passive smoking indoors.