Heroes Not Zombies

I’m a Lord of the Rings fan – both the book and the movies. One of my favourite scenes is this one –

I find this inspiring. I think this is what we can do. If you have passion for life, you light a beacon. That beacon spreads light that changes lives. If I had to write down one tip for a better life it would be this – be passionate. Passion is flow. The Chinese have a concept of Chi – a kind of energy. Csikszentmihalyi espoused the concept of “flow“. In modern, Western terms, we are able to be very aware of energy. I often ask medical students to take a score from 1 to 10 where 1 is the worst possible energy they can imagine and 10 is the best possible and to tell me what figure they’d apply right now to describe their own energy state. They can all easily state a number. Then I ask them to do the same thing for their mental energy and they find that equally easy. Then I ask them how they came up with the numbers they picked. What did they assess, and how did they do that? What criteria did they use? Which parameters did they pick? They don’t know. We assess our own energy levels holistically and intuitively. We don’t have to break it down into components, and the strange thing is that the energy we are measuring is not measurable by either instruments or others. Only we are capable of assessing and experiencing our own energy levels.

I think this “energy” idea is related to flow. Flow can be thought of as the Western equivalent of Chi. When the flow is strong, and we are “in the flow” then we feel well, our energy feels good and we alive and healthy. When our flow is weak, we’re unwell. Passion is both a product and a cause of this flow. When we are passionate about life, our energies flow, our creative abilities surge, our resilience is strong and we touch, and are touched by, others. Passion is contagious.

Pass it on.

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Research by Danny Dorling at Sheffield University has shown clear links between inequality and death rates.

Sure, there’s a kind of intuitive logic to the fact that poorer people suffer poorer health, but a slightly less intuitive finding is that the amount of social inequality (as indicated by the differences in income between the poorest and the richest) impacts on death rates in all countries, rich or poor. So, within any one country, when social inequality gets greater, mortality rates rise. Danny Dorling’s research has shown that this is an age dependent factor – he’s shown that the larger the inequalities in a society, the greater the mortality in people from 15 – 65 ie. people of working age.

there is an age related mechanism that results in higher mortality being experienced in societies where there is greater social competition, all else being equal. Higher rates of income inequality tend to reflect more competitive rather than more cooperative societies. Whatever the mechanism that results in harm from competition (or protection from cooperation), it has its strongest effects in early to middle adulthood.

One of his conclusions particularly struck me –

social inequalities as reflected through unequal incomes are damaging to health for those living in both rich and poor nations, and the direct mechanisms for such damage are likely to vary by area. Psychosocial stress is unlikely to be the only route by which income inequality damages health. However, the underlying mechanism may be similar—that, because humans are social animals, human health is best protected when people cooperate.

It’s that last phrase that really interests me. “…..because humans are social animals, human health is best protected when people cooperate”

It’s always been the case that the big impacts on the health of populations doesn’t come from the skills of doctors, or the power of drugs, but from the changes in the contexts of peoples’ lives. Education, housing, sanitation, food and water, and income are still the most powerful levers of power in the creation of health.

Yes, of course, there’s lots we can do as individuals. We can make choices about our own lives. And when we are sick individual treatments can make a difference, but if we want more people to have more health, if we want to reduce suffering from cancer, heart disease, mental illness and a host of other diseases, the big gains come from changes in these areas. How we behave towards others, whether or not we value competition or cooperation more highly, impacts on the prevalence of disease and on death rates in people under the age of 65.

One of the things I love about the net, is how it gives us a chance to build our links, to share ideas and thoughts, to encourage and inform each other. In short, to cooperate. And, well, who would have thought it, turns out that’s good for you!

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