Tired of being barraged with a pile of files, you sit on your comfortable thinking chair with a cold beer or a hot cup of tea/coffee. You doze off before the sun does. To sum up, you neither felt the exhaustion nor thought about it, because you went into an untimely snore before that. The distorted routine of life, which is the peculiarity of post-modernism, is barely left with the impression of the lost normality. A normal day with a healthy morning, thoughtful and laborious noon, and peaceful night is as spasmodic as a day with two rainbows.
It is sadly true that life now is either business and money or no life at all. The value of internal and external health has unfortunately degraded or ironically prioritized as second to ‘real life’. Emotional and physical health is being ignored despite the fact that they are vital for a happy and satisfied life. Studies have shown that sitting all day, with no physical activity and does not involve a job, has high risks of fatality. An inactive body is equivalent to a rusted nail, susceptible to all kinds of permanent and fatal health issues, with higher risks of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. A human body is almost like a machine which needs to run at regular intervals and be lubricated to be alive and work for a long time. Avoiding physical activity to focus on gaining fortune is a trade of greater loss than profit. Fortune is directionless and indifferent like a river; it is the tangible sand of the offshore, or the healthy body earning it, that assigns a meaning to it. It is therefore important to live a healthy and active life to earn the desired future.
Last year, in November 2018, the federal government of America issued the new physical activity guidelines to encourage physical health among people. It spread the message of increasing physical activity, especially in adults, through walking, dancing, or doing the chores at home as it can improve health and brain function.
Charles Hillman, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northeastern University, helped to create the new guidelines by analyzing 10 years of scientific literature on physical activity and brain health. He said, “Every time you’re active, you feel better, think better, and sleep better.” The literature review he performed showed that only a few Americans were able to adapt to the necessity of physical activity. He says, “We’re victims of our own ingenuity, we’ve basically engineered physical activity out of our lives.” Dependence of human life on technologies like smartphones, cars, or automatic cleaners, are slowly eliminating physical activity from the centrality of life. This is facing a threat of degrading the very basic and only natural ingredient of human life: the human body and emotions.
According to the article Here’s is how you can ‘Feel better, Think Better, and Sleep better’ to avoid the impending danger, some guidelines were proposed. The first one was that adults should get at least 150 minutes of exercise every week. Two, a two-minute walk in the morning, a trip up and down the stairs at lunchtime, walking home instead of transportation and other such exercises in a day as much as possible. The heart rate can be pushed up by small chores like washing your car, walking to the subway station or cleaning the house. Regular exercise can reduce the risk of heart diseases, diabetes, and cancers as well. Lastly, children and adolescents aged 6 to 17 are advised to exercise for 60 minutes per day. Youth indulged in regular exercise were seen to have greater skills and thinking abilities.
Rudrani Kumari
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