Section Description
Excellent health is necessary for high quality of life. If you are not healthy you will not have the capacity, nor often even the desire for happiness. However, if you are healthy both mentally and physically, then, except where lack of freedom of action prevents it, or your life outlook is faulty, you can attain excellent life quality. Therefore, a major focus for expanding the quality of your life should be on improving and maintaining your health, and avoiding both mental and physical dysfunction.
In this section, we present the theory and practice of mental and physical health expansion methods. The body of information involved is so large that within the organizing categories at the left we only deal with general, miscellaneous, or comparative issues. Instead, most of the information presented in this general health category is additionally subdivided into the following subject matter categories.
| Use of Food | Exercise | Sleep | Fulfillment | Supplements | Medicine |
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Health is maintained by the body through a self-regulating, feedback-controlled, stabilizing system called homeostasis. One of the problems of your current biological body as developed by a "blind", Darwinian evolution is that the stability point of this system is constantly changing as you develop through the different stages of life. In infancy, you require assistance from others to maintain yourself, in childhood and through puberty still different assistance, and finally in old age, still other types of assistance, whether from others directly or merely from the technology of others. Only in young adulthood (20-30) does the body usually provide a point of physiological stability which is ideal for the human species as presently constituted. Thus, your goal should be to maintain the vigor, flexibility, resiliency, endurance, and immunity of healthy young adulthood while gaining the experience, happiness and wisdom only possible from its accumulation through the passage of time.
Under the category Use of Food, we present the most important of those measures which are needed for keeping the body and mind healthy at all ages. Without adequate food, health is not possible even in youth; but without the optimal choice of foods in both type and quantity, homeostasis will decline soon after youth.
Under the category Exercise, we present the next most important (after food) additional activity for achieving a healthy body, brain and mind, and maintaining these into old age. Again, in youth exercise can be ignored and the body, brain and mind can still prosper. This is partly because young bodies and brains are automatically more active. However again as one ages, exercise of both body and brain becomes increasingly important to intentionally practice, in order to maintain homeostasis.
Under the category Sleep, we present a far less well known adjunctive measure which is important for maintaining our health. Sleep is usually natural and easy in youth, and once again may be neglected without apparent great loss. But once more as one ages, adequate sleep (in quality as well as quantity) becomes of increasing importance to the maintenance of good health even as it often becomes more difficult to obtain.
Under the category Fulfillment, we present the well known fact that mental and even physical health cannot be achieved or maintained without happiness - that the state of the mind has enormous effects on the state of the body. Although this section is heavily related to that on life outlook, there are some practical measures which can be considered separately and which we do consider in this section.
Under the category Supplements, we present the health measures which are advancing at the greatest rate and which show great potential for maintaining youthful good health into old age. We also make it clear why supplements are not a substitute for the measures above. Just as each of these measures is not independently a panacea, supplements also will have optimal benefits only when they are added to them.
Under the category Medicine, we talk about how to interface with those in the health care business, whether this be to gain the necessary information to optimally execute your own self guided health care, or because, in spite of all the previous measures, you have suffered injury or debilitation from accident or disease. We discuss how the individual should approach and conduct this external health care including what sorts of professionals he should seek, how he should interface with them, and what he should do to stay in-charge of his health care. We make it clear that the only rational goal for seeking health care from others is to get complete control back into the hands of the seeker as soon as possible. Thus, the need for health care from others should always be, only if and when necessary, and for as short a term as possible.