The Pleasure Principle
by Barbara A. Brehm, Ed.D.
What images come to mind when you think of a healthful lifestyle? An emaciated macrobiotics devotee munching on nuts and twigs? Your aerobics instructor who exercises at least three hours a day? The lean and mean marathoner you see pounding the pavement on your way to work every day? A health spa lifestyle where every activity is devoted to helping you look and feel good? Slender, young magazine models?
Several things are wrong with the images. Some are turn-offs: They make a healthful lifestyle look like a prison sentence. If a low-fat diet means plain dry toast every day, who needs it? If exercise is seen as uncomfortable, bothersome, burdensome or humiliating, why not do as W.C. Fields suggested: Whenever you feel the urge to exercise, lie down until it goes away.
Some healthy lifestyle images are attractive, even inspirational, but unobtainable for most of us. When we compare ourselves to them, the disparity is too discouraging. We'll never get there; we feel frustrated with our feeble attempts and throw in the towel. We develop an all-or-nothing attitude: If I can't lose 10 pounds in two weeks, I might as well not bother to try. If my muscle definition hasn't improved noticeably by the end of the month, I'll quit this nonsense.
A good attitude is the cornerstone of a healthful lifestyle for several reasons. First of all, a healthful lifestyle will have much better health-promotion value if you enjoy it. Worrying too much about what you eat or whether you are following the best exercise program is harmful to your health. Becoming self-absorbed and obsessed with your risk factors significantly decreases the benefits you would otherwise accrue from your healthful lifestyle program. In fact, research is beginning to show that cultivating an optimistic, positive outlook is an important heart-health risk reducer, while hostility, cynicism, alienation, self-absorption and loneliness are the Type-A characteristics that increase your risk of heart disease. Lifestyle change without this positive attitude means you are missing important pieces of the health promotion puzzle.
Unrealistic ideas about how to achieve a healthful lifestyle are self-defeating because they set you up for failure. You can never do enough or achieve enough. Successful exercise programs are ones that are feasible. They are realistic In terms of time commitment, accessibility and cost. Most of all, they fit into your lifestyle.
Dietary changes must fit, as well. Many of us know people who are either "on" or "off" a diet. Very restrictive diets are an unnatural way of eating, based on monotony and self-denial. They are difficult to live with, and people following such diets often experience frustration, fatigue, depression, low self-esteem and uncontrollable food cravings. They go off the diet and overindulge in the "forbidden" foods. The stress created by restrictive diets is worse for your health than being somewhat overweight and enjoying your food. This is not to say you should throw caution to the wind and indulge your way to a heart attack. There is no denying that good nutrition; not smoking and moderate exercise are connected to good health. But the way we respond to this connection can be the difference between a healthy desire to take good care of ourselves and an unhealthy obsession with following the "perfectly correct" lifestyle.
Feeling good is the opposite of feeling stressed. While chronic excess stress and negative emotions lead to harmful physiological changes, positive emotions create health. Pleasure and positive emotions are often associated with a relaxed contentment and feeling of well-being. Such feelings activate the relaxation response, a physiological state characterized by lower heart rate, blood pressure and breathing rate, and muscle relaxation, lower levels of stress hormones and improved immune response. While a chronic stress response leads to an assortment of negative health effects, a frequent relaxation response helps prevent these ills because it tugs your body in the other direction. Positive emotions also seem to have an effect beyond the relaxation response, and lead to healthful physical changes. Besides, if something like your exercise program makes you feel good, you will want to keep doing it - for the rest of your life.
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