The Health Climate Survey is a
simple tool for measuring your health, fitness and wellbeing
Here's what's happening to millions of people
world-wide who are in bad physical and mental condition.
They come to work and put on a brave face,
but underneath the surface they
•
experience frequent headaches
•
are tired because they
don't get a good night's sleep
•
lack energy and
vitality
•
have a host of painful
musculo-skeletal complaints
•
are not aerobically
fit
•
have low
libidos
•
have trousers and
skirts that are uncomfortably tight
•
have all manner of
digestive complaints
•
drink too much alcohol
and caffeine
•
are anxious,
apprehensive and depressed
•
feel they're under
appreciated at work and at home.
It's not a pretty picture and it's common in just about all the
organisations we've surveyed. It's a shocker.
If you don't measure it you can't do anything about it.
THE PROBLEM
Based on our experience administering the Health, Fitness and Wellbeing
Profile to
thousands of people, there are a number of causes of the body system
dysfunctions that are manifested in the workplace, among them
Low levels of physical fitness
Particularly in the sit down professions,
the effect of cooping people up in cages leads to all manner of
hypo-kinetically induced mind and body system dysfunctions. It's
difficult - in fact well nigh impossible - to stay healthy in a
sedentary occupation without a regular and systematic aerobic fitness,
strength and flexibility training program.
We've reached the point in time where
organisations who don't provide staff with the greatest
encouragement and incentive
to maintain reasonable levels of fitness, are at great risk of
reduced levels of productivity due to absenteeism, presenteeism and
worker's compensation.
In some organisations it's reached the
point where the cost of giving some people some time off during the week
to improve their strength and flexibility is dramatically less the cost
of rehabilitation programs and worker's compensation.
An
inappropriate diet
Too much junk food and too little good
food
An inability to manage the stress of life and work
'Your difficulty is not contained,
primarily, in the situation which gave rise to it, but in the mental
state with which you regard that situation and which you bring to bear
upon it.' James Allen
Wrong job
Not being in the job that suits one's
personality, intelligence strengths, training, passions and interests.
A significant proportion of people report that they are in the wrong
job. Many don't know what they really want to do.
Poor workplace design
Relating particularly to repetitive work,
whether it be on an assembly line or sitting in an office.
In our experience, call centres are the satanic mills of the 20th
Century.
Inattentive and dismissive management
Particularly by an employee's immediate
supervisor.
The number of people who feel under-appreciated at work is legion.
Lack of a satisfying
home life
A
life that's lacking meaning and purpose.
THE BODY AS AN ECOSYSTEM
The body is made up of trillions of cells,
grouped in organ systems.
It's an ecosystem where all of the
organ systems are connected, where the
function of one part of the system is intimately connected with the function
of another; so that if one of them becomes
dysfunctional there is a good chance it affects the smooth operation of
others. That’s why we all need to keep focused on the Lifestyle Prescription
as a means of keeping ourselves fit and
healthy.
No
more is this connection more strongly felt than in reference to the
connection between the way the mind and the other body systems function.
However, it’s not just the mind and the other body systems that are connected, it’s all the body systems that are connected.
As I’ve said, dysfunction in one can lead to dysfunction in others.
It is conventional
wisdom of the medical/pharmaceutical industry which has us believe that the
connection between organs and systems is not a particularly close one.
That’s why when you go to most physicians with a particular complaint, you’re
likely to come away with a prescription for a tablet, which masks the symptom (ie pain in a
particular organ)
Of course it is unlikely that the tablet will treat the cause of the complaint
- as in tablets for high blood pressure, diabetes, reflux, or headaches.
That's because the cause of the dysfunction is probably not at the site where the dysfunction is manifest.
Plus it's highly likely that there is more than one cause
In any case, there is unlikely to be a
detailed search for the cause of the pain, the elimination of pain being
seen to be the outcome of the visit to the doctor which has the highest
priority. Both doctor and client collude to ensure the pain disappears in
the shortest possible time, with the least amount effort on
either part.
What's more the client, likely as not wants to get out of the
surgery without paying anything for the doctor's trouble. Increasingly the
hands of the dysfunctional are dipping into the pockets of the fit and
healthy to pay for ineffective illhealth treatment. It's
junk medicine at its best.
It’s
increasingly unlikely that you’ll come away with a Lifestyle Prescription, a prescription
which seeks to stimulate the body’s own recuperative power through things
like exercise, a good diet, the ability to manage the stress of one's life and
one's work and meditation.
One of the great tragedies of modern,
pharmaceutical medicine is that we’ve stopped treating metabolically induced
body system problems with metabolic solutions. For
instance, if you have high blood pressure you could come away with a diuretic
which will drain fluid out of your body, rather than a lifestyle prescription
which will have you cool down an over-stimulated sympathetic nervous system,
reduce your body weight, stimulate the elimination of toxic waste, unclog the
pipes and flush out your liver.
Of
if you have the flu, you’ll come away with a tablet
to dry up the stream of mucus flowing from your nose, ignoring the fact that
the mucous stream is an integral aspect of the body’s way of dealing with the
viral infection.
Of
if you’re feeling anxious, sad, grief-stricken, tired, angry, moody,
despairing or vacuous; if you break into tears, feel blue or just plain
dreadful, you can walk into a doctor’s surgery and in seven minutes come away
with a prescription for a bottle of Diazepam.
Because
of the inter-relatedness of all the key body systems we need to think further
than just the relationship between the mind and other body systems, and start
talking about a host of body system inter-relationships
•
the
mind - muscle
•
the
heart – liver
•
the
lung – stomach
•
the endocrine – skin ….
Once
we’ve got that concept firmly embedded in our psyche, maybe we’d be
better able to look at the human being as a total, unified system instead of
a group of parts stuck together. Traditional Chinese and other traditional
medical cultures have a much better handle on these inter-relationships than
Western medicine.
Instead,
using the reductionist model we treat the body like a machine, made up of
quite separate and distinct parts, each having little or no connection with
the other parts. This
is another of the great tragedies of modern medicine. If the pump plays up,
we treat the pump and only the pump. In fact we’ve got to the point in
medical plumbing history where we can replace the pump altogether and not
give two hoots about the causes of the dysfunction in the first place.
If the exhaust system gets faulty we just stick
a bit of muffler putty up it and
keep going. Using the reductionist model, the question of why
various body systems and organs become dysfunctional doesn’t have to be
addressed.
Perceptual motor
mechanics, plumbers, fitters and electricians, masquerading as physicians,
and their indifferent patients masquerading as machines, conspire with each
other to mask the symptoms of the dysfunctional parts in the quickest possible time,
using the most
expedient means, regardless of the cause of the dysfunction or it’s relationship to dysfunctions in other body systems
which may, or may not yet have appeared. This is usually done with a
symptom-masking pill.
Just
treating the symptoms with pills is a very tawdry, lazy, and primitive form
of treatment which only leads to more complicated and expensive medical
treatments in the future. The other parts of the body which are dysfunctional
and have a causal relationship with the problem that has promoted the visit
to the doctor in the first place are not treated.
Intelligence
Whilst the mind is just another body system,
it is not the only one involved in intelligence and communication.
Intelligence is spread throughout the body.
All of the cells of the body and all the key body systems and major organs
have their own intelligent means of
communicating between cells of like character and
cells in other organs, memory …
Having
said all that, the concept of viewing the brain/mind as one key body system group
(psyche) and treating all the other body systems as another group (soma) has
been with us since time immemorial and is useful for the purposes of
illustration.
As
well as being an organ in it’s own right, one which
has to manage it’s own function, the brain is also the central processing centre for
all the other systems. If something goes wrong with the brain, there is a high
likelihood that it will affect other systems.
Psycho-somatic effect
For
instance, when people get anxious their blood pressure can go up, they could
get an irritable bowel, rashes, headaches and chronic fatigue. This is known
as the psycho-somatic effect.
Somato-psychic effect
On
the other hand, what is less well known is that when something happens to
other body systems there is a high likelihood that there will be an effect
experienced in the mind. This is the somato-psychic effect.
For instance if the body doesn’t get enough physical activity, essential
fats and B group vitamins a person can end up feeling depressed.
The
corollary of this is that if someone is feeling sad, anxious and miserable
there is a high likelihood that a
lifestyle prescription involving
•
regular
vigorous exercise
•
a
refined cereal and sugar free diet
•
food supplemented with vitamins, minerals, essential fats, and
'octane boosting' nutraceuticals
•
meditation to
stimulate an under-stimulated sympathetic nervous system
•
inner
mental training to
positively stimulate the sub-conscious
•
counseling to encourage the person to complete the past
•
and life coaching to encourage the person to live the present and create
a powerful future
... will lead to a dramatic improvement in how the person
feels.
