Mental Vs Physical Health; Two Partners, Not Competitors

There is never going to be a time when one aspect of health will be more important than the other! This is because when one suffers, the other suffers as well. It's just that bad. At all times, all if them should be taken care of adequately.

Need me not remind you of the definition of Health according to World Health Organisation, but for the benefit of doubt,

Health is defined as the complete or total social , psychological, physical, mental and economic well being of an individual and not merely in the absence of diseases or infirmities.

This is an encompassing definition because in reality, whenever any aspect of the human life is affected, everything else suffers as sequelae to that.

As someone who has firsthand experience with the management of people's health, I always tell people that health is not divided into compartments, let's say "mental health" or "physical health" because none of them exists in isolation. The relationship between the mind and the body is so powerful.

Let's drive it home with this analogy:

Source

A man suffering from a chronic illness such as Diabetes or hypertension, who has by the nature of his weakened physical health has been subjected to taking drugs every single day of his life can easily go into depression because of the constant thoughts running through his mind, invariably affecting the mental health.
Here, his weakened physical health indirectly erodes his mental strength.

Similarly, someone who is paranoid or living with anxiety at all times my develop poor sleep or even heart diseases at worst.

But how do you practically make sure you're always threading on balanced practice?

• Therapeutic Exercise:

This is indeed a good way to go at it. Exercise isn't meant to just strengthen the body muscles alone, exercises can be therapeutic and advantageous to the minds too in many ways.
At those moments when you do those exercises you enjoy so much with your very good friends and you see yourself laughing so hard even at the slightest joke, exercise becomes not just a thing of the muscles but therapy to the mind

• Quality sleep:

This is like an intersection between the physical body and the mental body. After the day's stressful activity, lying down to get a quality sleep of at least 6hours will help reinvigorate the mind while renewing the body's strength for the day ahead.

• Medical check-ups:

It's always hard preaching the relevance of medical check-ups to citizens of my country, Nigeria and this Is because of the poor economy of the state. An average man would rather use the little money he has to buy foodstuffs and eat rather than use it to visit the hospital for medical check-ups and it's not their fault, it's just the world we live in.
However, balancing healths involves coming for check-ups routinely as it affords you opportunities to discover something going wrong at a very early stage.

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In summary, it will be very wonderful if we understand the fact that there's no ranking as to between physical health and mental health, which is bigger rather, they are partners and co-exist for the greater good.

Thanks for reading and have a nice day ahead 👍