Guidelines to Good Health, Survival, & Longevity-- III

Welcome to our health & self help blog.

In it we post health commentary & reviews of books, eBooks, & other things that improve or protect your health or which enable you to live longer, to be more prosperous, & to be more effective.

Today's post: Monday, 8-21-2006

Guidelines to Good Health, Survival, & Longevity-part III

Following these guidelines helps you to have a good quality of life mostly unhampered by getting sick or disabled or spending a lot on drugs, doctors & hospitals.

And, it means you’ll have that quality of life for many years longer than many of the people who don’t follow these guidelines will live. (Your quality of life may be good into your nineties or beyond while people who follow none of these guidelines often die before age 80 – & many even earlier.)

In addition, as you get older, you’ll gradually find you look years younger than other people your age.

For the previous guidelines in this series, see the posts for Thursday, 8-17-2006
& Friday, 8-18-2006.

5. Follow these good health generating & health protecting guidelines.:

g) Escape or physically relieve Excessive Stress:

In much the same way that exercising regularly improves your health & protects it in literally dozens of ways, excessive stress is that harmful.

A short & partial list of things that excessive stress tends to cause includes:

making it much harder to eat health enhancing food & easier to choose sugary or fatty comfort foods that can sabotage your health & keep you fat;
it can cause you to make mistakes by being distracted or making it hard to think well when you need to do so;
it can help cause heart attacks & often causes high blood pressure;
it can make it more likely you’ll get sick by suppressing your immune system;
it can damage your brain’s centers for emotions & memory;
it can cause excessive drinking of alcohol & can result in car accidents from doing so;
it can make you irritable or depressed & hard to be around for other people;
& it can depress or even shut down your sex drive.

The good news is that you can combat each of these effects of excessive stress without changing your level of stress & protect yourself that way.

However, if you can overcome or escape the cause of your excessive stress or relieve it physically, all or most of these effects vanish or dramatically improve.

Literally everything you can do to become more effective & take control of the situations that produce excessive stress can help.:
Making an extra focused, effort when it counts most to remove the cause of an excessive stress or escape it successfully;
Getting more money to use as a resource;
Getting significant help by knowing how to ask for it well & having or knowing how to find the right people to ask.
Learning enough more about the causes or cures of a bad situation to know what to try next.

However, some stressful things cannot be changed – or, even if they can, it may take quite a while, so it’s important to know ways that work that physically relieve it.

By far the most accessible of the ways to do that --&, the one that tends to work well for most people is regular aerobic or cardio exercise.

Yoga; tai chi; & meditation work for some people. They can be a bit slow & hard to learn & are often not a good fit for busy people as they tend to require classes & even more time than exercise. And, only some of the people who do them get enough of a stress relieving effect.

There is a new way to relax physically that solves those problems & which we will cover in future posts.

Until then, make a special effort to get regular aerobic exercise; do what you can to remove the causes of any excessive stress you are under; & do what you can to avoid or prevent the effects we listed in other ways

h) avoid or escape from tobacco smoke & use:

This one is as powerful as eating right; exercising; & avoiding or relieving excessive stress in protecting your health.

It’s still surprisingly little known by people who are not doctors; but occasional second hand smoke & even smoking a little bit each week harm your health substantially. And the health & longevity of average smokers & heavy smokers are really hit hard.

Most people know that smoking tends to cause lung cancer. But many, if not most smokers never get it.

And, since most people & most people who smoke still don’t know more than that, people still smoke & allow themselves to be exposed to second hand smoke.

The real health risks of smoking are MUCH worse; & EVERYONE who smokes is damaged by those risks, starting with their first cigarette.

Even the health of smokers who never get lung cancer & is hit & hit hard.

Most smokers who smoking kills or harms are done in or damaged by something OTHER than lung cancer.

Here’s why:

Every single exposure to tobacco smoke tends to increase your homocysteine levels; reduce your HDL levels & make the HDL you do have less protective to your heart & blood vessels; & it tends to use up your body’s supply of vitamin C.

Here’s a partial list of what THAT causes:

sharply increased rate of aging; highly wrinkled skin on the face;
heart disease & heart attacks;
& massively reduced blood flow –resulting in:
kidney disease, foot amputations; strokes; age onset dementia; & impotence;
& according to one Oncologist (doctor specializing in treating cancers) I spoke to in a cancer ward once, over half of ALL cancers are caused by smoking—not just lung cancer.

And, here’s important news, if you smoke or are exposed to second hand smoke, you no longer have to GUESS if it’s doing this to you --

Because, by having your HDL level & your homocysteine level tested, you’ll find these measures are NOT in the desirable range &, very likely you’ll find they ARE in the dangerous range.

So, avoiding or escaping from cigarette smoke is worth an enormous extra effort to protect your health.

And, one of the reasons to get good at escaping or physically relieving stress in other ways is to make it less likely you’ll rely on cigarettes to do so.

We’ll post more of these health guidelines in our next post.)