Health, Is It The Most Important Thing?
When we think about health, we usually tend to believe that it is the most important thing to have a full and happy life and that if we ever lost it, we would inevitably be doomed to have a meaningless and miserable existence.
This belief, so widespread in society, is really an irrational and false idea, which can cause a lot of suffering to those who take communion with it. In the first place, because it can create in us an obsession with health, beyond the normal concern – or rather, occupation – that we should have about it.
We can see it in the psychological disorder of hypochondria, which is born precisely by embracing this idea. Hypochondriacs think that health is more than important and are so worried about losing it or having lost it, even when there is no evidence or data to support it, that they become anxious to the point that they take one test after another to find out if they are sick, or they constantly seek information about symptoms, disorders or illnesses, falling into a spiral with no way out and increasing their discomfort.
Why is health not the most important thing to be happy?
From psychology, we say that external circumstances are not responsible for our happiness or unhappiness, but that happiness is born from within the person: the ultimate responsible for your happiness is yourself.
External events help to make life more satisfying and joyful or more painful and miserable, but they do not determine anything. There is no linear relationship between situations and emotions. It is everyone, with their way of facing life, who chooses their emotional state.
Health, as an external circumstance, therefore does not determine our happiness, although it is true that it can be a great adversity, but nobody told us that the world was going to be perfect.
The test to verify that health does not determine whether we are more or less happy, we have it in the different reactions of people to the concept of health : there are people who are overflowing with physical health and are extremely unhappy and there are others, like Irene Villa or Stephen Hawking, who with a significant loss of health, have declared themselves to be very happy people, with great vital goals and concerns.
Another reason why it is not reasonable to worry excessively about health is that it is something that we are all inevitably going to lose, sooner or later, to a lesser or greater degree. So why worry or give so much importance to something that we are sure to lose? Personally, I think that it is great to take care of body and mind and wish to be healthy, but without making a world on this subject because as we have said before, we will have two problems instead of one.
If in the end, we are all going to die and we do not know when or under what circumstances. Today I can be perfectly healthy, but tomorrow I’ll be dead and you will be sick, but live longer than me. This is reality, there are no certainties. Stop worrying!
On the other hand, we have to be aware that complaining about our health is a great waste of time that can also work against us. People always magnify our pain when we focus on it all the time, complaining over and over again without reaching any solution. Enough of complaining!
Therefore, the most reasonable and intelligent thing for your emotional – and physical – health is to stop complaining about what you have lost and focus on what you still have or can do and realize that there are millions of possibilities out there, still being sick go out and look for them!
The most important thing is that now you are alive and you are here, in the world, better or worse, but here you are and you have a universe to discover and enjoy. Even without health, you have things to do for yourself and for the people around you, take advantage of it!
