Help from a Nurse Practitioner

If there are no exercise routines to examine, no well-being. Everyone, regardless of age, benefits from exercise. Whether it's organized exercise, free weights or just a personal routine, exercise is a great wellness tool. It keeps our body conditioned, our mental sharpness working at the top speed, and thanks to the physical aspect, we get a boost to our cardio health, burning extra calories, and more oxygen to these cells! Being able to cope and manage the daily stress of life keeps us well. Make sure we take the time to meet our stress relief needs, such as downtime, therapy time, massage time, or just take the time for a good hot bath. The body tends to retain stress in the shoulder muscle and back. Take the time to relax, do relaxation exercises, and combine this with physical exercise for the whole body, and you should have no trouble maintaining a state of well-being. If you can't, do some research to find out who can. Perhaps there are many organizations in their neighborhood that offer care to the elderly, be it a phone call every morning to check on their welfare, a home visit to clean and prepare meals, or a shuttle service to take them to the senior center, the library, and the market. One friend pays a taxi company by the month to drive her grandmother around her small town. She says she's become the most popular old lady in town because she'll pick up her friends and get them out of the house, too. Your instinctual duty is to make your aging parents' lives easier so that they can live independently as long as they can, because for many years when you were young that was their job. Lion kings know this is part of the circle of life. I've known many people who find it extremely stressful to be a full-time caregiver to their aging parents, especially when they're ill or compromised by Alzheimer's disease. Remember to take respite. Just as a mother needs a break from care giving to her children, you, too, need a break from care giving to your parents. Respite allows you to recharge. But consider this ambiguity - Measures of enacted support assess the degree to which one partner effectively helps the other cope with an existing problem (from outside the relationship), which requires that both partners attend closely to and converse about distressing circumstances--an interaction likely to engender negative affect as well as the possibility of positive affect. Moreover, even if the supportive interaction succeeds, the germane affect is more likely to be relief (i.

e. , resolving a negative situation) than joy (i. e. , experiencing a positive situation). Thus, social support may not be prototypical of the appetitive system in close relationships. Rook (1998) drew a related conclusion - The types of negative interaction typically studied tend to be broader than the types of positive interaction (which, more often than not, feature support given under distress). Rare are studies of interactions focused on purely positive interchange--affection, companionship, shared activity, and just plain fun. Such is the negativity bias in social science research that in a large and otherwise exemplary survey of mental health in America, Veroff, Douvan, and Kulka (1976) asked 2,267 respondents to describe the last time something really bad happened to you. Our personal habits keep us well or prevent us from being well. If you smoke, drink or lose sleep because of excess, you are not the individual although you might be. Smoking, drinking and losing sleep work to our detriment, and it takes extreme discipline to quit. Smoking fills our bodies with carcinogens, and works to keep us tired and lethargic. Giving us enough time to devote to all areas of our physical needs, our nutritional needs, our fitness needs, the need for time quite contributes to our level of well-being. The way we allocate time to these needs, and the choices we make to meet those needs, allows us to distribute well. There are so many opportunities to stop and question our efforts to maintain optimal health that we do not even take the time to start the review. But it is beneficial for our overall health, the quality and quantity of our lives, to make every effort to be well, healthy, individuals. You take magazines every day, and you are bombarded with health and fitness information. Ads and articles that are designed to convey much needed information to the reader about the state of fitness and health in America today, and what we as responsible citizens should do. It should not be surprising that despite the stresses associated with providing care to elderly parents, children continue to do it. It is more than an act of love.

Mother Nature would tell us we do it to because we are hardwired to feel that nurturing our parents is a responsibility, and by continuing this responsibility, we increase the chance that our children will take care of us, in turn. This value is hardwired. It explains why so many people feel guilty when they neglect their aging parents. Deep down we feel we are doing something wrong--in effect, we are ignoring what our DNA tells us we should be doing. And, too, society scorns people who neglect their parents. It's a universal value. That's why, just as we feel outraged at child abuse, we feel outraged when vulnerable seniors are taken advantage of or neglected. Respect your elders by showing care for your elders is Mother Nature's stern admonition. They did not ask respondents to describe the last time something really good had happened. Establishing that negativity effects are stronger than positivity effects requires that the specific instances be equally extreme. Unfortunately, outside of true experiments, this is seldom the case. The negative events and interactions studied in relationship research tend to be more extreme than the positive events, and hence their greater potency may be unremarkable (Rook, 1998). Few positive events are equivalent in evaluative extremity to bereavement, spousal violence, sexual or emotional betrayal, or rejection by an admired other. 4 Thus, the predominant conclusion from existing work might be rephrased as strong negatives are more potent than mild positives. Although this criticism may be less germane to experimental studies that use artificially constructed stimuli, even then, as Skowronski and Carlston (1989) noted, it is difficult to equate stimuli for their degree of positivity and negativity inasmuch as judges possess the same normative and extremity biases that research participants do. Another issue concerns accumulation bias. Because positive interactions are more common in everyday life than negative interactions, examining the impact of events one at a time may understate the overall importance of positive events, given that the accumulation of more but weaker positive events may sum to a greater total effect than fewer but stronger negative events. Perhaps a year's worth of pleasantly affectionate conversation at the end of each day is more important than two major blow-outs simply because the former conversations occur more often. I want you to stop, and think for a moment. How do you determine your current fitness and well-being levels?

Will your regular doctor have you every time you go if you believe yourself to be fit and well? Certainly not. It also does not give you a method to determine status by yourself. Fitness centers abound in this country, and most have counsellors who can test your fitness level. What about your level of well-being? Are they one and the same? They are not one and the same, but they rely heavily on each other to keep you healthy. Being fit and being good are totally different conditions. Everyone Is a Critic, Says Mother Nature You might get upset at your partner or your boss because you feel they are always criticizing you. This is probably true, but don't take it personally, because they are hardwired to criticize you, frequently. Countless studies by social psychology colleagues demonstrate that the first and most important judgments that are made about another person are evaluative: good or bad, cold or warm, nice or mean, friendly or hostile. We pick up many other types of information, but the primary judgment we make is either positive or negative. This can be traced to the fact that the mechanisms that integrate your brain's software with its hardware are highly emotional in nature. Your brain evolved in this manner because emotional information helps you adapt to your environment. Positive evaluations tell you the situation is friendly- negative evaluations tell you the situation is unfriendly, and in the case of your ancestors, hostile was often life threatening. Early in life you are programmed to evaluate whether a situation is hazardous or safe. Those who evaluate a situation quickly and accurately give themselves an edge. They make better decisions. Laboratory observations typically overlook this issue of accumulation because of time constraints. Nonlaboratory methods are better suited to identifying strong, salient, and discrete events than to the accumulation of milder, less striking events--for example, studies that ask participants to recall events that took place in the past few weeks or months.

In contrast, researchers sometimes aggregate multiple events over short periods of time, such as a day or week. Little is known about how experience accumulates over time and situations into meaningful units, but one thing is clear - Simple averages and frequency counts, the predominant indexes in contemporary research, may be misleading. For example, two negative events of valence 1 and 5 have the same average impact rating of 3 as five positive events each rated as 3. Yet the former 5 is likely to be experienced as more influential than the latter 3s, as suggested by the peak-end rule (Feldman Barrett, 1997 Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber, & Redelmeier, 1993). Falling in love, discussed later, is one. That is, recollected general levels of affect tend to overemphasize moments of peak intensity as well as affect experienced at the end of a given episode or event. The predominance of cross-sectional research over longitudinal studies may have emphasized the impact of negative events. Generalizing from crosssectional work requires assuming similarity in the time course of adaptation to positive and negative events. Your well-being rating depends on your immune system, and what vitamins, supplements and nutrition you provide for your immune system. Fit people can sometimes get sick. Well, people can sometimes be unfit. However, when you combine the two, and use solid principles based on clean living, exercise, and a healthy diet, you reach a state of balance where you are both fit and well. Most individuals do not take the time to fully understand the benefits of being both fit and well. We read and absorb the information that is given to us through the media and health organizations, without ever asking ourselves whether we are getting all the information we need, or just the part that is cost-effective to be seen or heard. Fitness gyms need your monthly fees in order to remain operational. They have no real concerns about the state of your immune system. Fitness is a condition of the body alone. Those who take too long in their evaluation, or evaluate the information inaccurately, end up in an unmanageable situation. You are hard wired to evaluate because the information evaluation evokes can protect you.