Making the Right Personal Decisions
What are lifestyle choices? What are acute and chronic problems? You’ll find out about this and more in this lesson.
Lifestyle Choices
A lifestyle choice is a personal and conscious decision to perform a behaviour that may increase or decrease the risk of injury or disease. I am positive you have already made lifestyle choices. If you exercise every morning by riding your bicycle, then you made a positive lifestyle choice to increase your physical wellness. If you choose not to drink alcohol, then you choose to avoid serious potential consequences, such as a car crash while driving drunk or damage to your internal organs, such as your liver. Those are all active lifestyle choices that benefit your health.
Bad Lifestyle Factors
Of course, many choices also harm you. Just take the alcohol consumption example. If you choose to drink, especially in excess or at the wrong time, then you increase your risk of death from something like a car crash. If you smoke, then you increase the chances that you get any number of different cancers, not just lung cancer.
Actually, one of the most important lifestyle factors that lead to premature death is obesity. Obesity, as a result of improper diet, exercise, or uncontrolled underlying disease processes, can cause everything from arthritis to heart disease to diabetes. All of which can lead to a very painful and, many times, shorter-than-usual lifespan.
Prevention Is Key
Many of the risk factors I described above don’t kill or irreversibly hurt you right away, though. Most of these things, like alcohol and tobacco abuse, cause chronic damage. Chronic refers to something occurring over a long period of time or over and over again. This means that you can still help yourself, your health, mind, and body, by stopping a bad lifestyle choice today.