A Mindful Nation by Tim Ryan

Author:Tim Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Hay House, Inc.
Published: 2012-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

Like Alex, many of us wait for a traumatic event before we look closely at our overall health. This on-going lapse in attention is costly for us, and for our loved ones—and it’s costly for the nation. Sometimes, worn-out old sayings contain hard truths: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And with health-care costs hitting our own pocketbooks hard and threatening to pass on crippling debt to future generations, we need to look at every way we can make ourselves healthier at low cost—and the simpler, the better.

We all realize that we have some level of control over our own health. We know smoking is bad for us. We know too much sugar or salt can have a negative effect on our health. We feel guilty about that bowl of ice cream at the end of the night. I know I do. But one of the things we sometimes fail to see is the direct effect that stress, especially chronic stress, has on our health and well-being. If we truly want to prevent unnecessary illness, we need to recognize stress as a major contributor to poor health and well-being—and ultimately to catastrophic illness.

The health-care reform we enacted in 2008, imperfect though it may have been, helped us make some important strides in the direction of prevention. We eliminated co-payments for preventive disease screening for Medicare recipients, and in 2014 insurers will no longer be able to charge co-payments for any customer getting preventive screening. It’s good we could make a step forward in encouraging people to do something to help catch diseases at their early stages.

But a growing number of distinguished health-care practitioners, like Dr. Christiane Northrup—winner of the 2010 Integrative Health-Care Visionary Award—think the current health-care system is far too focused on disease care, to the exclusion of preventive medicine. Even screening for diseases, while good, falls far short of promoting health, in her view. The screening, as important as it is, still may be a step too late.

Finding out that your cholesterol and blood pressure are off the charts when you’re 55 is better than never finding out. Medication may help you at that point. That’s treating a downstream condition, however. It’s not really creating health for ourselves. We need to start upstream, earlier in the process.

Northrup and others say that teaching ourselves how to handle stress more effectively is as important as screening for disease conditions. Reducing the negative impact of stress can prevent some of the diseases that would be caught at a screening. We can’t have full control over all of the stress in our lives, of course, but we can reduce our conditioned, largely reactive habits and the patterns we revert to when we’re confronted by perceived and real threats and challenges. We can reduce our reactivity and thereby limit the effect that stress has on our overall health.

So, how do we foster real health for ourselves by limiting our stress reactions? How do we make ourselves more resilient and

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