Health related issues nowadays becoming trends, as people gradually realizing the importance of healthy living. Especially in big cities where pollution is every day consumption. In the city where I live in, the dangerously beautiful Jakarta, we have many kinds of pollution to offer, water, noise, air, food, sight you name it. You don’t have to look anywhere else to learn kinds of pollution. Sometimes on the street, I get so confused seeing a nice vehicle modified into some kind of “monster from hell” with noises screaming out of the exhaust system as if they trying to scare you.
Luckily, all of these depleting health, physical and mental. But regardless all of those scary things, there is still hopes remain for those who want to be healthy. One of these has something to do with how you operate your “head”, being optimist. But it is very important to notice, this is not some kind of new-agey or wishful thinking. In fact it’s scientifically proven.
The latest study comes from Wageningen University in the Netherlands. For 999 elderly Dutch men and women, agreement with statements such as “I still have many goals to strive for” were highly predictive for longevity. When subjects were traced nine years after being surveyed, death rates of optimistic men were 63 percent lower than those of their pouty peers; for women, optimism reduced the rate by 35 percent.
Now you might ask maybe be it has something to do with their diet. Nope, you have to guess again. Because by controlling for dietary factors, smoking habits, obesity physical activity and alcohol dependence in participants, researchers can isolate optimism’s protective influence. Some of that influence drives healthy behavior. “Optimists will try to avoid and escape bad events,” explains Martin E. P. Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania not linked to the Dutch team. For example, they are more likely to follow prescribed medical routines.
This finding can be brought also to homes and schools. If you’re a mom/dad or a teacher, you should inform your kids or your students about the following. In a study by Seligman, pessimistic college students randomly assigned to optimism workshops subsequently had fewer visits to their school’s health services department and had lower rates of depression and anxiety than classmates who had no happiness classes. Positive self-talk can help, too. For example, says Robert C. Colligan, professor emeritus of psychology at the mayo clinic, “a student with a bad grade should replace `I’ll probably fail all of my other courses too’ with `it’ll go better next semesters.’”
