Health may be our most important asset, but it’s often something that we don’t give much thought to until it’s gone. The good news, though, is that this is a regret that is imminently avoidable. It’s possible to begin taking action today that will protect your health and preserve your strength well into the future. The key is to pursue a proactive and comprehensive approach to ensure long-term wellness.
Creating a Protective Living Environment
We spend the vast majority of our lives in our homes, and that means that your living environment is far and away one of the most important factors in your overall health.
A particularly important aspect of ensuring the healthfulness of your home comes in monitoring your indoor air quality and installing filtration systems to remove contaminants from the air. In addition to purification and filtration, though, it’s also imperative to monitor for potentially lethal gasses, such as carbon monoxide and radon.
While the threat posed by carbon monoxide is more urgent, as toxic exposure can result in death within minutes or hours, prolonged exposure to radon gas can be just as lethal, resulting in the development of life-threatening conditions, such as certain forms of cancers. Fortunately, highly sensitive and accurate carbon monoxide detectors can be installed at low cost to help safeguard homeowners against this silent and invisible killer.
Similarly, radon testing is a relatively simple and low-cost process. It can generally be completed in a matter of hours and may only need to be performed once unless radon gases are detected. If that’s the case, radon mitigation can be performed to seal your home and protect your family from exposure.
In addition to monitoring air quality, creating a healthy home environment also means being alert to other potential dangers in the home. For example, if you live in an older home, you may face the possibility of hazardous materials still present in your home’s construction, from asbestos in the insulation to lead in the home’s plumbing and paint. A home inspector can help you identify these potential harms and devise a remediation plan that meets your needs and your budget.
Developing the Wellness Mindset
If you are looking to enjoy good health and vitality for decades to come, you also need to cultivate not just your physical health but also your mental health. This must include strategies for accommodating the inevitable stresses, uncertainties, and fears that arise in life.
A key component of this is learning to accommodate change. Let’s face it, no one likes change. The human mind and spirit crave stability and predictability. But stability and predictability simply are not reality. And the more time you spend worrying, fretting, or resisting, the less time you have for cultivating wellness.
While you cannot control the inevitability of change, you can control your response to it. The key is to find the techniques that work best for you, such as meditation, yoga, journaling, or simple mindfulness. Whatever strategy you choose, though, the fundamental goal is the same: to learn to productively manage stress, anxiety, and fear. The more centered, serene, and empowered you feel, the less likely you are to develop stress-related conditions, such as high blood pressure and diabetes. With this greater sense of wellbeing and peace will also come less risk of engaging in unhealthy behaviors, such as overeating or eating poorly, drinking to excess, or sleeping too much or too little.
This mindset will also help you beat the anxiety from which you can suffer when it comes to your physical health. Lots of people have beaten their fear of blood and needles because they’ve realized how beneficial it can be to get a blood test, not to mention how much blood donation can help people who need it. It’s important for anyone who doesn’t like needles to realize that this often life-preserving measure is more than worth their fear.
Cultivating a Healthy Lifestyle
Maintaining a healthy environment in your home is just the first step in planning ahead for a future of wellness. It’s also important to build a lifestyle that supports long-term health.
Not surprisingly, this often begins with feeding and hydrating your body well. Eating a nutritious diet and supplementing with essential vitamins and minerals will ensure that your cells are getting the nourishment they need to function optimally.
Cultivating a healthy lifestyle also means being proactive about your medical care. Preventative medicine has gained prominence in recent decades as clinicians and patients alike increasingly recognize that the best way to battle disease is to stop it before it can take root in the first place.
Fortunately, preventative screenings are easily accessible in most communities, often at low or no costs. Your local urgent care center, for instance, is often well-equipped to offer not only urgent care but also preventative health services, from cancer screenings to blood panels, cash for diabetic supplies, to radiological imaging to immunizations.
The Takeaway
Good health is perhaps our greatest gift, but it is not something that is beyond our control. In fact, there are many important steps you can take to ensure your long-term wellbeing. This includes cultivating an environment, a lifestyle, and a mindset that ensures health and vitality for years and decades to come. From eating a nutritious diet to monitoring the healthfulness of your home to managing stress and anxiety, your future health is truly in your hands.