Health-ease vs Busy-ness.... time to turn things right side up

The promotion of healthy lifestyles has gained a lot of ground in recent decades but medicine (even preventative medicine) is overwhelmingly concerned with disease.

What if we were to consider “health-ease”?  It is the antithesis of disease.  A basic premise of the Relative Model of Health (Downie et al 2000) is that health and well-being are not solely based on the absence of disease or illness.

Downie advanced the process of being empowered to have a good life by having the autonomy to satisfy one’s social, material and aspirational needs and the strength, stamina, suppleness and skills to achieve “positive” health.

The Wellness Wheel illustrates this concept and a number of universities including Princeton and Clarion have adopted this as a model for student life.

In other words psychological, social and spiritual health are vitally important and contribute to medically good health.  As a holistic practitioner, this aligns with my beliefs.  

Yet psychological health is suffering and I see it in my consulting room.  My clients have presented with burnout, stress, anxiety, depression and mental agitation. 
Is chronic “busy-ness” the problem?  Well, partly.  You can’t sustain a state of hyper-arousal.

A few years ago the comedian Ruby Wax parodied our societal obsession with being busy.  When asked if we’re busy, she admonished us to retort, "Am I busy, are you kidding? I'm so busy I've had three heart attacks and I'm on life support."

The fact of the matter is that as a nation, we are busier than ever but according to the Office for National Statistics (2019) productivity has been steadily declining for a decade. 

We are also more stressed-out here in the North East of England than the rest of the country (Chronicle, 2018).  The Mental Health Foundation conducted a survey that revealed 77% have been “overwhelmed or unable to cope”.

The Telegraph (2019) reported that the internet is physically changing our brains leading to shorter attention spans and worse memory.  High internet use and multi-tasking have caused us to hold what researchers call a ‘divided attention’, making concentration more difficult.

Social media is impacting on embodied face time as well.  We are yearning for human and natural contact but “technoference”  (Psychology Today 2015) or smartphone use in the company of others is responsible for creating conflict, dissatisfaction and depression according to a Brigham Young University study.

Ofcom found that the average British adult spends 50 full days a year online.

In a prescient piece of writing from 1941 Carl Jung (Sabini 2016) wrote:

All time-saving devices, amongst which we must count easier means of communication and other conveniences, do not, paradoxically enough, save us time but merely cram our time so full that we have no time for anything.  Hence the breathless haste, superficiality, and nervous exhaustion with all the concomitant symptoms – craving for stimulation, impatience, irritability, vacillation, etc.  Such a state may lead to all sorts of other things, but never to any increased culture of the mind and heart.

The health-giving benefits of the more-than-human world are in stark contrast to the harmful effects of the manmade world.

The challenge for us is how to manage our usage of IT and not succumb to the tyranny of instant communication and the ubiquity of the internet.

The difficulty is that we live in the digital age, work in the gig economy and belong to a consumer society.  Just how life-affirming is it?


References

1. Downie, R.S., Tannahill, C. and Tannahill, A. (2000) Health Promotion Models and Values, 2nd en. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2. Office of National Statistics accessed online May 2019.

3.  "New figures show North East is suffering more stress than the UK average," Chronicle, 14 May 2018.

4. "Internet is giving us shorter attention spans and worse memories, major study suggests," Daily Telegraph, 6 June 2019.

5. "Is Technoference Wrecking Your Love Life?" Psychology Today, 4 July 2015, accessed 15 May 2019.

6. Sabini, M. (2016) "C.G. Jung - The Earth Has A Soul", North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, Calif.