What do those funny personality quizzes have to do with your health? And are they any use, anyways?
How we approach our health is often as influential as any other factor. Our environment, genetics, etc., are very important, and often discussed as key factors in health outcomes. But we also have other, lesser-known distinctions that we often don’t even consider.
Consider the following. There are many popular personality typing systems. If you are familiar, various personality traits that we can possess as humans are divvied up and assigned names and scores and usually given various numbers or coded abbreviations. Basic traits we are all familiar with, like introverted vs extroverted. Flexible and spontaneous or structured and scheduled. Etc. etc.
The funny thing is that there is a little bit of the same thing when it comes to our health. We all approach things a little bit differently – but in the end, we want a great outcome. Health, fitness, performance, feeling good and looking great.
So what would some of these hypothetical differences in health approaches be?
How about the tendency to want to solve all of your problems yourself? Or some people tend to want to rely on the help of others? Some people think about their health frequently – while others don’t tend to think about it until it is quickly changing direction.
How about where you focus? Do just want to do what works, or is a philosophical framework to help guide your life choices? Of course, we all have aspects of each one, it is just that we may tend to favor one end of the scale or the other.
The thing is, is just like all of the differences among personality traits, they can be both positive or negative. One trait may serve you well for years, and then be a detriment when circumstances change. Or maybe a certain way of doing things has worked to prevent disaster but has also accumulated problems along the way, that then outweigh the value of where they first came from.
The point is, is that we are all different. And that maybe the real benefit of these types of ideas is being able to consider what we do, and why do them.
And just like there isn’t one magic system to understand how all of our different personality traits work, our health is also just as complicated – and variable. And that is why it helps to have someone that is full-time looking at the wide options of how we think about our health.
And like anything else, having that person who has the experience to personalize what’s most important for each individual. Because often times, no matter how much we learn about ourselves, those around us can often see our own patterns more clearly than we can ourselves.