More Than We Think Health Is: Body, Mind, Soul as One! Most of us think of health merely as "the…
In other words, if we don't have a cough, if our head doesn't hurt, then we're healthy, right? But it turns out the World Health Organization (WHO) offers a much deeper definition on this subject. They say:
"Health is not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, but a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being." This definition forms the foundation of my entire medical philosophy. In other words, we are truly healthy when our body, mind and social relationships are in harmony with one another.
So how is it that we humans are able to live healthily? Actually, this is one of the fundamental dynamics of life. We humans—indeed all living beings—want to live. Protecting our lives, keeping them in balance, and improving them is our most basic desire. To do this, we regulate our own life processes and are able to achieve the results we want. In other words, living healthily means arranging our lives with our own hands in a way that achieves the results we desire. Health is, in fact, a person's ability to self-regulate.
Psychological Health: The Foundation of Feeling Good
Here I would like to touch on an important subject: Psychological health. This is just as important as physical health. The World Health Organization defines psychological health as follows:
"Psychological health is a state of well-being in which a person can use their abilities, cope with the normal stresses of life, work productively, and contribute to their community." In other words, it is not enough for our body alone to be well; our mind must also be healthy.
When we think of psychological health, the following should come to mind:
- Wellness: Feeling good as a whole, being in harmony with one's environment.
- Life Skills: Being able to manage one's own life in a conscious, meaningful and productive way.
- Coping/Resilience: Understanding and being able to cope with life's uncertainties, difficulties, illnesses and painful experiences.
As you can see, health is a multilayered concept. It encompasses not just the body, but the mind and soul as well. This holistic perspective is the foundation of the approach I call Regulation Medicine.
Feeling Good: Not Just a Feeling, But an Art of Living!
We all want to feel good. We want to be in harmony with our body, our mind, our soul, our loved ones, and even nature. This state of "feeling good," what we call the "state of well-being," can actually be experienced at different levels:
Feeling Good Without Noticing: Most of the time, we live in a balanced way during many moments of our lives without really noticing it. It feels as if it were normal. Perhaps the hours we spend feeling good far outnumber the moments we spend feeling bad, but we tend to hold onto those bad moments more in our minds.
Semi-Conscious Feeling Good: Sometimes we feel a pleasant sense of balance momentarily, but we don't consciously register it, and then we forget it.
Conscious Feeling Good: This is the most important one! Consciously noticing the moments when we feel good, savoring that moment, reflecting on it, and storing it in our memory. This way, we develop our capacity to feel good and live more consciously healthy lives.
Being in Harmony with Ourselves:
Feeling good has many dimensions:
- Physical Harmony: When we consciously feel our breath, hear our heartbeat, and move in a relaxed and rhythmic way (such as walking, yoga, dance), we feel physically good. This even includes feeling more energetic after a light physical effort.
- Mental Harmony: We feel psychologically good when we experience joy, pleasure, and positive energy.
- Spiritual Harmony: We feel spiritually good when we value ourselves, think of contentment, trust ourselves, and say "yes" to our life.
Being in Harmony with Society:
Being in harmony not just with ourselves, but with the people around us—our family, our friends, our colleagues—also makes us feel good. Acting together, striving for common goals, and sharing our feelings and thoughts makes us happy.
Our Connection with Nature and the Universe: A Deep State of Well-Being
The state of well-being is not limited to our body and social environment alone; the bond we form with nature and the universe is also very important.
Feeling Good in Nature:
- We feel good through activities such as walking, running, cycling or swimming in nature.
- Consciously noticing and valuing the plants, animals and landscapes in nature helps us form a bond with nature.
- In this way, we form a bond with the life of nature and "Mother Earth."
- Consciously feeling the light and warmth of the sun, the effect of the air and wind, the feel of rain, and the light of the moon and starry sky also does us good.
Spiritual Connection: Harmony with the Universe
For many people, spiritual or religious beliefs are a way of forming a deep bond with the universe and trusting in a "divine origin." This can mean experiencing deep religious-spiritual experiences such as feeling the unity of the universe and feeling dissolved within that unity. Such experiences give a person a great sense of peace and well-being.
Health and Illness: Two Natural Sides of Life
Dear friends, life has two sides: good and bad, happy and unhappy, healthy and ill. Just like breathing in and breathing out. We humans live through various rhythmic and cyclical processes. Within these processes, we feel not only good but sometimes bad as well.
Why Do We Sometimes Feel Bad?
- Unfulfilled Wishes: We experience disappointment because our wishes go unfulfilled or because of the shortcomings of others' actions.
- Energy Fluctuations: Sometimes we feel very energetic, and sometimes we may feel tired and weary.
- Mood Fluctuations: We experience transitions from high moods to low moods.
- Discord in Relationships: We experience harmony and discord within communities, because people come together with both shared and differing wishes.
- Anxiety About the Future: We may harbor thoughts of hope or fear regarding the future.
These bad feelings, weaknesses, low moods or discord belong to the natural cyclical processes of life. In addition, uncertainties, obstacles, difficulties and dangers are also part of life and can cause us to feel bad. Because "we are not living in paradise."
These situations show us that it is not possible to feel good all the time. Life does not offer a paradise-like, constant state of feeling good.
Living in Harmony with Life's Rhythms: Balance and Imbalance
In the various rhythmic and cyclical processes of our lives, we sometimes live in balance and sometimes in imbalance.
- Living in Balance: A Healthy Life: When we allow rhythmic flows within life's cycles of movement (whether unconsciously or consciously), we live in balance and feel an inner sense of equilibrium. People can consciously perceive, experience and accept the rhythmic cycles within their life processes. In this way, they achieve inner balance and health.
- Example: When we feel the cyclical rhythm of breathing in and out, we generally feel good and balanced. When we consciously feel our breath during many daily activities, we generally perform these actions in a calm, balanced and healthy way, without excessive tension. When we consciously feel our breath, we experience the rhythmic cyclical oscillation of a central life process particularly clearly, and we promote inner balance.
- Living in Imbalance: An Unhealthy Life: We humans are always imperfect; we never live in complete balance. In certain processes, we tend to overemphasize one side while neglecting the other. In doing so, we slow down rhythmic cyclical processes and reduce balance. In this situation, we may feel bad, uncomfortable, and live unhealthily.
Healthy and Ill: A Continuous Cycle
People constantly live with both "healthy" and "ill" inner processes: always somewhat "healthy," never completely "healthy"; also feeling somewhat "ill," never completely "ill." People live cyclically between the poles of "very healthy" and "very ill"—until their final heartbeat. The "health and illness" dimension is one of many cyclical dimensions of rhythmic life processes.
Conscious Health Management: Steps Toward a Healthier Life
So how can we protect our health within these complex life cycles? Here are some practical recommendations:
1. Turn Complaints into Opportunities: Sometimes when we feel unwell, we realize that health is not a "given" state. That's when many people begin to value their health more, want to live more healthily, and consciously do more for their health. Complaints are, in fact, stimuli that push us to take better care of our health.
2. Consciously Experience and Encourage Feeling Good:
- Awareness: When we feel good, let's consciously notice it often and say "I feel good right now."
- Live the Moment: When we are in places we enjoy, with people we enjoy, let's consciously feel that we're feeling good for two minutes. This way, we better embed our state of feeling good into our memory and improve our quality of life.
- Remember: Unfortunately, people very rarely consciously notice the minutes and hours in which they feel good and don't record them sufficiently in their memory. Many people perceive a few minutes of discomfort or disharmony more strongly, and give it more weight, than several hours of feeling good.
- Conscious Steps Toward Well-Being: People have often felt good in their life experiences. They can consciously recall in which situations they felt good. From this, they can deduce what they can consciously do to feel good. We can aim to consciously do something every day for our physical, spiritual well-being and for feeling good while with others.
3. Consciously Do Good: Doing good in our lives benefits both ourselves and others:
- Good for Ourselves: Doing good things for our own well-being and health, with self-love.
- Good for Others: Doing good things for the well-being and health of the people close to us and of the community.
- Professional Good: Doing good and providing service through our professional activities—thereby also earning a living.
- Consciously doing something for ourselves and others every day is an important path to healthy living.
Supporting Balance: Becoming the Architect of Our Own Health
As I mentioned earlier (Page 4), people sometimes live through imbalanced processes of movement: they overemphasize one side and neglect the other, which can cause them to feel bad and uncomfortable.
Overcoming Imbalances:
- People who want to live more healthily can pay more attention to the sides they have neglected so far in their imbalanced processes of movement.
- They can give more prominent consideration to the aspects they have neglected so far, and act on them going forward.
- To do this, they can try, practice and train themselves in new health-related activities.
- In this way, they can expand their lives and broaden the cycles between two poles or sides. This gives them a good chance of promoting balance and health.
- By contrast, continuing to focus on and trying to "eliminate" the overemphasized, "painful" side is generally less successful and also narrows the cycles of life.
Health Sciences and a Holistic Perspective
Today, "health" has become the focus of many scientific disciplines, such as biology, chemistry, medicine, ecology, nutritional science, sports science, psychology, sociology, political science, philosophy and religious studies. Health sciences, which have developed since the 1980s, present themselves as an interdisciplinary, organizationally independent field of study based on the equal collaboration of the fundamental sciences related to "health." By integrating the natural, social and human science disciplines on an equal footing, they work toward the promotion, protection and improvement of health.
Health scientists have developed many different definitions of health that include the following important aspects:
- Individual and Environmental Interaction: Health is attributed to individuals living within ecological and social environments. These environments can affect a person's health positively or negatively.
- Positive Goals and Well-Being: Health is characterized by targeted positive goals that can be defined through subjective experiential criteria, such as "well-being," as well as objective criteria. A targeted state of health is generally described as "holistic," for example as "a state of complete well-being," because people in a positive state of health generally feel themselves to be a whole, or in harmony with themselves and with their ecological and social environment.
- Skills and Resources: Health is associated with conscious capacities for experience and action—that is, with "competencies," "potentials" and "resources."
- A Dynamic Process: Health occurs as a process that continuously involves many changing states over time. A positive process flow can be characterized, for example, as "dynamic equilibrium." Health is determined by various sub-processes and emerges as an overall balance from the interaction of these different processes.
Remember, dear friends, we ourselves are the architects of our own health. Listening to the signals our body sends us, living in harmony with it, and making conscious choices are the keys to a healthy and happy life. As I have always advocated, while Regulation Medicine offers us scientific guidance on this path, listening to our own inner voice and paying attention to our life's rhythms is also our greatest ally.
I wish you healthy and balanced days, and I am always ready to be by your side.