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"At least you still have your health." But why is health so important?

Health is one of those things that people tend to take for granted. Until you are facing disease or injury, your good health, like a clean house, greatly goes unnoticed. When all your body parts are working properly, there is no pain to grab your attention, no chronic illness to debilitate your daily life.

Health is a state of mental and physical well-being in which everything is functioning properly and you experience a general feeling of vitality. Good health allows you to perform the tasks necessary and desirable to your daily life. Work, family, home and pastimes can be enjoyed and conducted without pain or interruption.

Good health is important because it allows people to focus on their interests and obligations. Poor health, in the form of injuries, disabilities, chronic pain, mental illness or disease, prevents millions of people from supporting, caring for or expressing themselves effectively. Anyone who has lived with chronic pain can tell you how the condition clouds every aspect of your life, making even the most mundane tasks into ordeals of suffering and despair.

Mental illness and addiction are just as unhealthy as any other debilitating disease. Judgment and abilities are lost, efforts wasted and relationships destroyed as the patient flounders through life, incapable of regaining that good health they thought was their birthright. For the majority of people who suffer with poor health, it is the loneliness and despair that ultimately destroy their lives.

People cannot survive in isolation. Condemned to a hospital bed, a mental ward or a lonely home, unhealthy people are instinctively, albeit unfairly, shunned and ignored. Misery may love company but most of us experience a lizard-brain aversion to spending any significant amount of time in the company of the unhealthy. The loneliness and isolation contribute to the mental and physical suffering experienced by the unhealthy.

On the other hand, people who are vibrantly healthy seem to attract success and respect without effort. Perhaps it is the same lizard-brain, which is constantly seeking s superior mate or partner, who fauns over and offers special treatment to the athletically fit. People who are healthy get promoted at work more readily, they are treated better socially and professionally and they tend to garner more respect.

Clearly, there are exceptions to every rule. Theodore Roosevelt was wheelchair bound and led the most powerful nation on earth. Stephen Hawking, world renowned theoretical physicist, is crippled with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). These are, however, the exceptions. Good health is important because it makes our lives more productive, socially strong and physically bearable.

Learn more about this author, Kate Johnson.
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