As a human in this crazy and beautiful world, staying mentally, emotionally and physically healthy is a struggle. Your boss calling you while you’re at the club, demanding those performance reports stat or the metro card you just refilled with $50 falling on the train tracks and being carried away by a furry, swift-pawed Manhattan local, makes it difficult to keep your head up. These daily stresses can wreak havoc on your emotional and physical health. In order to stay alert, aware and emotionally balanced, maintaining a clear head and healthy body is essential!

HAPPIER PSYCHOLOGY FOR HEALTHIER PHYSIOLOGY

Today’s giant pharmaceutical and consumer goods industries make it hard to stay balanced in a natural way. They are married to the ceaseless stream of modern advertising, ensuring that everything sold, from Pringles to Prozac is partly influenced by the doctors, scientists, advertisers, tycoons and politicians who profit in some measure from the dollars you’re spending to stay alive. Raw foods and natural medicines are only making a marginal comeback today, a sad reminder of how humans have become the only species that has so wholly and willingly removed itself from its normal course of biological progression.

It’s not surprising that our species’ parasitic relationship with nature, like a tapeworm in your colon, has come full circle. With the amount of pollution humans generate, finding peace with nature-where it still exists, is becoming as scarce as finding a tusked elephant in the wild. Especially in western culture, pharmaceutical giants influence our medicines while the foods we consume come boxed and compartmentalized, and bear no resemblance to anything found in nature. People are bombarded hourly by advertisements impacting their daily buying decisions, which are based off psychological studies solely conducted to examine and capitalize off consumer buyer behavior.

Food, medicine, insurance, clothes and thousands of other things are all packaged and marketed to people who are blithely unaware of how much time and money has been spent by companies to ensure they purchase the adult diapers they wanted rather than the adult diapers they were actually subtly influenced to purchase.

To avoid the constant advertising, while remaining clear headed, stress free, and physically happy is a process that comes from the inside out. Stress is scientifically proven to increase free radicals, some of which your body produces naturally, but when there is an imbalance of free radical presence to anti-oxidants in your body, it begins to inhibit your normal, healthy bodily functions and becomes a source of chronic disease.

Below are a few tips on how maintaining your emotional well being influences your bodily health.

1. Get Your Mind Over Your Body

Note what is causing unhappiness and imbalance in your life and try to monitor it. When you become aware of the source of the problem, you’re able to start resolving it. Kindly asking your boss to back off, trying that new bikram yoga studio so you can sweat out your frustration or reading your favorite Captain Underpants book are all methods that can help you keep your mind clear and happy.

2. Choose Flight Over Fight

Like Michael Jackson would say “Showin’ how funky strong is your fight, it doesn’t matter who’s wrong or right.” Sometimes saying, “just beat it” is the wisest thing to do when in conflict. Don’t give in to pounding your chest and confronting your boss on just who she thinks she is to ask you to stay late, again! Allowing yourself a few deep breaths and counting to 10 can help you avoid a fiery dismissal and you having to tell your mom you’re unemployed again. Take a walk during your lunch hour and head to the park and actually smell the flowers, and not just think about what a trite quote that is. Meditate! The Buddhists do it and they are the greatest proponents for symbiosis between humans, their environment and themselves.

3. Guilty By Association

Ever hear people say “you’re guilty by association?” This isn’t just referring to your pot-selling neighbor whose Wi-Fi password you stole while borrowing that blender you never returned, but to the positive and negative relationships you establish with people and the effect they have on you. People who are stressed themselves will unleash their misery on you, whether you like it or not. Stay close to the people who calm you, listen to you and are aware of your stressors. Talking to them and getting their insight about a stressful situation like your beef with that certain Manhattan rat that scurried away with your $50 metro card can help you re-think your unwise decision to go down to it’s hole and confront it, homo sapien versus rattus.

April 23th 2015, written by Maria Schumann for bodono.

Maria Schumann is a writer living in NYC.
About Maria Schumann: “I love writing poetry, breaking a sweat at bikram yoga, and reading serial killer books while cooking. I love watching documentaries and I am always game for a crazy night of poker. Understanding the importance of a healthy relationship with my body and mind inspires me to help others come to a symbiotic relationship with their bodies and minds as well. Through writing I am able to reach people with my words and hopefully inspire positivity and change.”