A first heart attack. Prostate cancer. A 50th anniversary. At some point, every man receives a shocking reminder that he will not be young and healthy forever.
This achievement brings the big question: how long do I have? For a good guess, you can submit to a battery of medical tests, get some pieces probed and fill inquiry volumes. But for the most accurate forecast, you should ask the even bigger question: How healthy I feel?
Think carefully. No matter what all these tests say, your future has invaded largely your response.
Healthy Fat Loss - Think Healthy, Be Healthy?
A number of recent studies have discovered an amazing fact: a man's opinion on his health is one of the most important keys to his longevity.
It is certainly that the researchers at Duke University have found when they asked for almost 3,000 cardiac patients to evaluate his health as poor, fair, good or very good. As reported in December 1999, the issue of medical care, those who chose "poor" were about three times more likely than those who chose "very good" to die in the next three and a half years. Even a "good" response instead of "very good" increased the risk of death by 70%.
At the beginning, these numbers may not seem particularly shocking. After all, a man who thinks he is disabled is usually right. The surprising is that in this study and many others, the researchers did the best to control by age, smoking, activity levels, socioeconomic class, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, current diseases and practically everything that could affect a person's survival .
Even with all these factors removed from the equation, the perspectives of a man in his health still stands out as a strong predictor of his survival. (The trend, although found in men and women, is for significantly stronger unknown reasons in men.) Take a room of 55-year-old men with the same lifestyles and results identical from your last checkups, and a single question can say What are more likely to see 60.
In one of these studies, published in the February 25 issue of February 1998 of the magazine of the American Medical Association, a classification of "poor" in relation to someone's health proved to be abandoned than congestive heart failure or smoking 50 or more cigarette packages per year.
"No one knows why health self-control are so important for mortality," says Ellen Idler, Ph.D., professor of Rutgers University and co-author of research on aging research. Idler speculates that a fatalist attitude can encourage a person sliding into an unhealthy lifestyle. She says it is also possible that people are deeply tuned to their bodies and may experience imminent problems.
"People with depressive personality traits, neuroticism or anxiety seem to be at greater risk [for heart problems and other diseases]," says Gunnar Engestrom MD, Ph.D., Professor at Lund University in Sweden, who has extensively studied self-classification of health. "A positive attitude could be protective."
You do not even need to be particularly healthy to see the positive side. Idler once interviewed a man connected to the wheelchair that claimed to be in excellent health. "His only complaint from him was that he recently touched his shoulder in a karate class," she says. "He never mentioned the wheelchair."
Not everyone can combine the indestructible optimism of this man. But we can all take some control over attitudes that can help guide our destiny. As Idler puts, "people should occasionally move their attention from risks to their health and focus on resources they need to stay healthy."
and if someone asks how to feel, try to find something good to say. And say that.
