Is it a lack of awareness, or is it the avoidance of complexity and hassle?
With recent events happening in my family, I'm starting to realize a pattern. After being diagnosed with an illness that requires long-term medication or treatment, we start to ‘reflect’ and guilt-trip ourselves about our past habits.
“I should've eaten less salt..”, “I should have exercised more…”,"I should have…", “I shouldn't have…”….
All the things we should have or shouldn't have done, more or less. It's always the same reflection.
But we always knew before that that too much or too little of anything is bad for our health. Be it salt, processed food, exercise, even going for yearly medical checkups, the list goes on.
Even tough we knew that, we still did whatever we want anyway, because we couldn't see its repercussions in front of our eyes.
And when it finally hits us, that's when we start to regret. But why are humans like this?
Why do we wait for something so majorly bad, painful and irreversible to happen to us before we actually take action to make changes in our lives, to take care of our health?
My mum, in her late-50s, often told me - that her generation is this way because they were never informed of the repercussions of not taking care of their health by controlling their daily microhabits.
I do agree to a certain extent, but even if they did know, would they have been willing to go through possibly tons of complexity and hassle to change their lifestyle in the pursuit of better health?
I also don't think so - and that's just human behavior. Millions of years of evolution, somehow we survived even with this behavior. Guess evolution's on our side?
Even if we do commit to making changes to our lifestyles, we do it for maybe a couple of weeks, and then when our health improves even a slight bit, we go back to our old ways. We essentially never learn.
Once again, behavior shaped by millions of years of evolution.
All jokes aside, please don't wait until its too late to change your lifestyle and take care of our health. If you know you need to change, do it now.
‘Later’ is NOT guaranteed.
C Chai (crystal.chaijeecheng@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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