HEALTH CLIMATE SURVEY

ASSESSMENTS HOME 

The Healthy Climate Survey is a deceptively simple tool for measuring

a.  how fit and healthy you are

b.  your risk of becoming completely dysfunctional.

HERE'S WHAT THE PROFILE LOOKS LIKE

Once you've registered you can complete the Health Climate Survey online. It looks like this. 

Here's what's happening to millions of people world-wide who are in bad physical and mental condition.

They come to work and put on a brave face, but underneath the surface they

n    experience frequent headaches

n    are tired because they don't get a good night's sleep

n    lack energy and vitality

n    have a host of painful musculo-skeletal complaints

n    are not aerobically fit

n    have libidos that are as low as a snake's backside

n    have trousers and skirts that are uncomfortably tight

n    have all manner of digestive complaints

n    drink too much alcohol and caffeine

n    are anxious, apprehensive and depressed

n    feel they're under appreciated at work and at home.

It's not a pretty picture and it's common in just about all the organisations we've surveyed. It's a shocker.

If you don't measure it you can't do anything about it.

THE PROBLEM

Based on our experience administering the Mind and Body Profile to thousands of people, there are a number of causes of the body system dysfunctions that are manifested in the workplace, among them

Low levels of physical fitness

Particularly in the sit down professions, the effect of cooping people up in cages leads to all manner of hypo-kinetically induced mind and body system dysfunctions. It's difficult - in fact well nigh impossible - to stay healthy in a sedentary occupation without a regular and systematic aerobic fitness, strength and flexibility training program.

We've reached the point in time where organisations who don't provide staff with the greatest encouragement and incentive to maintain reasonable levels of fitness, are at great risk of  reduced levels of productivity due to absenteeism, presenteeism and worker's compensation.

In some organisations it's reached the point where the cost of giving some people some time off during the week to improve their strength and flexibility is dramatically less the cost of rehabilitation programs and worker's compensation.

An inappropriate diet

- too much junk food and too little good food

An inability to manage the stress of life and work

The idea has been around since antiquity that ...

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.                                                                                Epictetus
 

Your difficulty is not contained, primarily, in the situation which gave rise to it, but in the mental state with which you regard that situation and which you bring to bear upon it.                    James Allen

Wrong job

Not being in the job that suits one's personality, intelligence strengths, training, passions and interests is a cause of all manner of distress.

Poor workplace design

Repetitive dull and boring work, whether it be on an assembly line or an office c an suck all vitality out of you. If you're a creative person, do something creative, whether it be making something or thinking of something.

Inattentive and dismissive management at work

- particularly by an employee's immediate supervisor. Most managers are too busy getting on with their job to manage. If that's the case at your workplace, get on the front foot and manage up. Take your manage out for morning tea once a month and talk about you and your work - at your expense. It will be a good investment in your present and your future.

Lack of a satisfying home life.

There are not many things worse than having an unhappy home to go to at the end of each day. If you can't change your situation, change your situation - but don't let your kids suffer.

Lack of a satisfying life that's filled with personal meaning and purpose.

THE BODY AS AN ECOSYSTEM

The body is made up of trillions of cells, grouped in organ systems.

It's an ecosystem where all of the organ systems are connected, where the function of one part of the system is intimately connected with the function of another; so that if one of them becomes dysfunctional there is a good chance it affects the smooth operation of others. That’s why we all need to keep focused on the Lifestyle Prescription® as a means of  keeping ourselves fit and healthy.

No more is this connection more strongly felt than in reference to the connection between the way the mind and the other body systems function. However, it’s not just the mind and the other body systems that are connected, it’s all the body systems that are connected. As I’ve said, dysfunction in one can lead to dysfunction in others.

It is conventional wisdom of the medical/pharmaceutical industry which has us believe that the connection between organs and systems is not a particularly close one. That’s why when you go to most physicians with a particular complaint, you’re likely to come away with a prescription for a tablet, which masks the symptom (ie pain in a particular organ)

Of course it is unlikely that the tablet will treat the cause of the complaint - as in tablets for high blood pressure, diabetes, reflux, or headaches. That's because the cause of the dysfunction is probably not at the site where the dysfunction is manifest.

Plus it's highly likely that there is more than one cause

In any case, there is unlikely to be a detailed search for the cause of the pain, the elimination of pain being seen to be the outcome of the visit to the doctor which has the highest priority. Both doctor and client collude to ensure the pain disappears in the shortest possible time, with the least amount effort on either part.

What's more the client, likely as not wants to get out of the surgery without paying anything for the doctor's trouble. Increasingly the hands of the dysfunctional are dipping into the pockets of the fit and healthy to pay for ineffective illhealth treatment. It's junk medicine at its best.

it’s increasingly unlikely that you’ll come away with a Lifestyle Prescription® –  a prescription which seeks to stimulate the body’s own recuperative power – through things like exercise, a good diet, the ability to manage the stress of one's life and one's work and meditation.

One of the great tragedies of modern, pharmaceutical medicine is that we’ve stopped treating metabolically induced body system problems with metabolic solutions. For instance, if you have high blood pressure you could come away with a diuretic which will drain fluid out of your body, rather than a lifestyle prescription® which will have you cool down an over-stimulated sympathetic nervous system, reduce your body weight, stimulate the elimination of toxic waste, unclog the pipes and flush out your liver.

Of if you have the flu, you’ll come away with a tablet to dry up the stream of mucus flowing from your nose, ignoring the fact that the mucous stream is an integral aspect of the body’s way of dealing with the viral infection.

Of if you’re feeling anxious, sad, grief-stricken, tired, angry, moody, despairing or vacuous; if you break into tears, feel blue or just plain dreadful, you can walk into a doctor’s surgery and in seven minutes come away with a prescription for a bottle of Diazepam.

Because of the inter-relatedness of all the key body systems we need to think further than just the relationship between the mind and other body systems, and start talking about a host of body system inter-relationships

●       the mind - muscle

●       the heart – liver

●       the lung – stomach

●       the endocrine – skin ….

Once we’ve got that concept firmly embedded in our psyche, maybe we’d be better able to look at the human being as a total, unified system instead of a group of parts stuck together. Traditional Chinese and other traditional medical cultures have a much better handle on these inter-relationships than Western medicine.

Instead, using the reductionist model we treat the body like a machine, made up of quite separate and distinct parts, each having little or no connection with the other parts. This is another of the great tragedies of modern medicine. If the pump plays up, we treat the pump and only the pump. In fact we’ve got to the point in medical plumbing history where we can replace the pump altogether and not give two hoots about the causes of the dysfunction in the first place.

If the exhaust system gets faulty we just stick a bit of muffler putty up it and keep going.  Using the reductionist model, the question of why various body systems and organs become dysfunctional doesn’t have to be addressed.

Motor mechanics, plumbers, carpenters and electricians, masquerading as physicians, and their indifferent patients masquerading as machines, conspire with each other to fix individual parts in the quickest possible time, with the most expedient means, regardless of the cause of the dysfunction or it’s relationship to dysfunctions in other body systems which may, or may not yet have appeared.  This is usually done with a symptom-masking pill.

Just treating the symptoms with pills is a very tawdry, lazy, and primitive form of treatment which only leads to more complicated and expensive medical treatments in the future. The other parts of the body which are dysfunctional and have a causal relationship with the problem that has promoted the visit to the doctor in the first place are not treated.

Now that the post-medical era has arrived you know that's all nonsense. It's a hoax, a fraud, a legerdemain spun by the pharmaceutical industry and its willing cohorts.

Intelligence

Whilst the mind is just another body system, it is not the only one involved in intelligence and communication. Intelligence is spread throughout the body.

All of the cells of the body and all the key body systems and major organs have their own intelligence - means of communicating between cells of like character and cells in other organs, memory …

Having said all that, the concept of viewing the mind as one key body system group (psyche) and treating all the other body systems as another group (soma) has been with us since time immemorial and is useful for the purposes of illustration.

As well as being an organ in it’s own right, one which has to manage it’s own function, it’s also the central processing centre for all the other systems. If something goes wrong with the mind, there is a high likelihood that it will affect other systems.

Psycho-somatic effect

For instance, when people get anxious their blood pressure can go up, they could get an irritable bowel, rashes, headaches and chronic fatigue. This is known as the psycho-somatic effect.

Somato-psychic effect

On the other hand, what is less well known is that when something happens to other body systems there is a high likelihood that there will be an effect experienced in the mind. This is the somato-psychic effect.

For instance if the body doesn’t get enough physical activity, essential fats and B group vitamins a person can end up feeling depressed. (I don’t now why this is so, but it is. Maybe someone in the future will work out exactly why and win a Nobel Prize. Between then and now the ‘why” doesn’t matter.)

The corollary of this is that if someone is feeling sad, anxious and miserable there is a high likelihood that a Lifestyle Prescription® involving

●       regular vigorous exercise

●       a refined cereal and sugar free diet

●       food supplemented with vitamins, minerals, essential fats,

         glycoproteins and 'octane boosting' nutraceuticals

●       meditation to warm up an under-stimulated sympathetic

         nervous system

●       autosuggestion to positively stimulate the sub-conscious

●       counseling to encourage the person to complete the past

●       and life coaching to encourage the person to live the

         present and create a powerful future

will lead to a dramatic improvement in how the person feels.