In a recent blog posts we looked at tips to keep your heart healthy. One of those was to lower your stress levels – which leads us to this post exploring the relationship between physical and mental health in greater detail.
The connections between physical and mental health
Your body and mind are more interlinked than you might possibly think. The Mental Health Foundation says that physical health issues significantly increase the risk of someone developing mental health problems – and vice versa.
If you think about it, on a purely common-sense level, that makes all the sense in the world. Physical health problems create blocker to normal day to day tasks and connection with others, which can make a person feel isolated and misunderstood. This can, in turn, lead them to withdraw, keep to their comfort zone, and fall back on comfortable but unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Over time, this vicious cycle can lower someone’s confidence and further impact their resistance to stressors, which not only increasingly damages their physical health, but creates an even greater dependency on those unhealthy behaviours.
Below, we’ll explore this dynamic in more detail.
How does mental health affect physical health?
As a general rule of thumb, positive mental health gives you a more solid foundation for better physical health. It definitely doesn’t guarantee you won’t develop a health condition, but it gives you a greater chance of not doing so.
As reported by WebMD, poor mental health has been linked to many harmful health conditions, including:
- Chronic diseases like asthma, diabetes, arthritis, cancer and cardiovascular disease
- Sleep problems like insomnia and sleep apnoea
- Damaging habits like smoking and drinking, which can increase the chances of developing one or more of the above issues.
Conversely, positive mental health not only makes you less likely to develop a health problem, it also makes you more resilient to adversity – including unexpected health challenges.
As a result, it helps prevent you from turning to the unhealthy coping strategies that can cause the start of the vicious spiral in the first place.
How does physical health affect mental health?
The relationship between physical and mental health should also be considered in terms of how the former affects the latter.
While good mental health can be seen as the foundation for good physical health, maintaining good physical health in turn provides lots of benefits to those experiencing emotional hardship.
In its post on physical and mental health, The Mental Health Foundation explains that physical exercise releases feel-good chemicals into the brain called endorphins, which can drastically improve your alertness, energy and mood.
From a lifestyle perspective, being physically active also increases the chance that someone will have access to the kinds of interpersonal connections that can offer much-needed support and guidance when their mental health takes a knock.
For instance, whether it’s regularly doing Park Run, going to the gym or pool, joining a sports team, or even taking up an online yoga class, active people who value their own wellness tend to put themselves in situations where they’ll meet others who share those values, and who can perhaps relate to their stressors and struggles.
On the other hand, WebMD says people with physical health conditions (it gives psoriasis as an example) can experience emotional and psychological distress that negatively impacts their overall quality of life. This can lead to stress, depression and anxiety from fear of other people’s stigma and rejection.
The more active you are, then, the more resilient and connected you’re likely to be – and therefore the less rejection you’re likely to feel or experience (at least initially) when faced with a limiting health concern.
What the link between physical and mental health means for your heart
Here at WEL Medical we specialise in supplying life-saving equipment for people who’ve experienced sudden cardiac arrests – of which there are around 30,000 each year outside of a hospital setting, but only a 10% survival rate. So, we’re understandably interested in how the connections between physical and mental health can lead to less heart conditions and less lives lost.
The truth is simply that being slightly more active and being mindful of dips in your mental health, can together improve your chances of avoiding a heart condition.
Of course, that doesn’t mean exercising regularly protects you entirely against such an issue – something that the collapse of Christian Eriksen at Euro 2020 clearly demonstrates. However, the British Heart Foundation reports that being active can reduce your risk of developing heart conditions and circulatory diseases by as much as 35%. So that’s good enough for us!
Some ideas to manage your physical and mental health
Our heart health piece mentioned seven things you can do to boost your physical and mental health for the better. These are all also helpful when considering the overall link between physical and mental health:
- Eat healthy
- Get active
- Drink in moderation
- Manage your weight
- Don’t smoke or vape
- Avoid second-hand smoke
- Seek sustainable support and connection to lower stress levels
For more on all of those, see the post in question, Tips to Keep Your Heart Healthy.
What if you’re already struggling?
The important message here, however, is that while doing all of the above tips to 100% would be brilliant, many of us can face challenges that makes that impossible, and changing everything all at once is never a recipe for success. Often, quite the opposite!
It’s important instead to be mindful of the relationship between physical and mental health, do what you can to live a little better each day, and when needed, to find the right resources that can help you make a more dramatic positive change, one step at a time.
Would you know how to save a life if you needed to?
Two of the NHS’s five steps to mental wellbeing include learning a new skill and giving to others. You can accomplish both by purchasing an iPAD AED for your local community, club or business, learning how to use it, and teaching others to use it to save lives.
For more on our iPAD AED range, see the blog posts below, visit our AED shop, or get in touch to have us talk you through the range’s many benefits.
