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Home | About Us | Contact Us | House Calls Newsletter - Minding Your Mind's Own Business | Five Prescriptions for Happiness | A Picture is Really Worth a Thousand Words | Exercising Your Mind | Nutrition for Your Mental Health |
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Lifestyle for Longevity Minding Your Mind’s Own Business We have spent a great deal of time discussing what I often refer to as the three greatest factors of longevity—nutrition, activity, and your healthcare. But truly, there is one other factor that is likely to be just as important—your mental health. Cultures that push the life expectancy charts have more in common than just their nutritional and exercise habits. They also have some form of human intervention that allows them to preserve mental integrity. In Italy, meals bind people and they find comfort surrounded by large numbers of extended family. The Japanese find peace as they center themselves with meditation. And in the longest living group of Americans which is found in a cluster of Seventh Day Adventists in a small town in California, serenity appears to be found in their religious core. Similarities of these kind appear to exists in each of the 24 countries which live longer than the male population of the United States. In some intangible ways, these cultures support their mental health by providing opportunities to let go of the day to day frustrations that can eat away at our souls (and apparently our bodies). For years, in this country, we have viewed depression and other mental health disorders as strategic losses and weakness. Yet today, supported by an overwhelming body of scientific evidence, we know that these disorders’ pathologies resemble other disorders, such as diabetes. We now acknowledge that depression is simply a symptom of serotonin dysfunction. Other more serious symptoms include platelets clotting more aggressively. This serious effect can result in premature death due to heart attack. We have all seen an elderly loved one slip away earlier than expected after the loss of a spouse. We seem to understand this as a sense of giving up—or our bodies shutting down due to the sadness and stress of the situation. However, physicians now feel this may happen due to the increased platelet clotting that is present with serotonin dysfunction. Their depressed mood was just another symptom. It is difficult to separate mood as a symptom because it has no location. We can’t point to it and say, “it hurts here.” But the reality is that our mood is a reflection of a physical process. A process that may be more important to longevity than we expected. We need to start thinking of our mood—our mental health—as something which is just as important as our hearts. We acknowledge that cardiovascular exercise will reduce our risks of premature death and I am suggesting that you should also devote attention to your mental health. Our society has lost a great deal of virtues that have acted in the past as buffers to mental stress. Divorce, decreased family size and separation from family members by occupational relocation have caused a disruption to the family unit and that has been shown to be linked directly to an increase in mental health disorders. Certainly, it appears the disintegration of these mental health buffers will continue. So we need to establish alternate ways to keep our minds healthy. Sound familiar? You have all heard me say that we have engineered the labor out of our lives and the nutrition out of our foods. So I advise each of you to exercise 180 minutes per week and to go back to eating whole, organic foods. Now I am adding that we have engineered the “comfort resources” out of our lives and we need to find alternate ways to boost our mental health and in essence— Start Minding our mind’s own business. |
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HOUSE CALLs |
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Page One |
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February 2008 |
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The Newsletter of Jeffrey J. Viscomi, M.D. |
