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Water
Background
This information is about the specific health area mentioned above. It comprises a combination of textual and video information, on our site and on external sites. We will be adding new specific health areas and further information continually.
The idea is for you to understand more about the health area you are addressing before you get too far building your action plan.
General Information
Water and hydration are critical for life. Water is as important as food and hydration is as important as water;
A lack of water becomes an ongoing issue where you‘re forcing your body to function without enough water. Chronic dehydration, when significant, requires prompt medical attention. When left untreated, chronic dehydration has been linked to other health conditions like high blood pressure and kidney stones.
In older ages bad hydration can trigger dementia.
Drinking fresh water everyday keeps your body regulated and functioning effectively.
Top 5 Benefits of Drinking Water
Increases Energy & Relieves Fatigue. Since your brain is mostly water, drinking it helps you think, focus and concentrate better and be more alert. …
Promotes Weight Loss. …
Flushes Out Toxins. …
Improves Skin Complexion. …
Maintains Regularity.
Take the test and see how you fair. Our Water/hydration experts are on hand to support you.
Background Information
There is information available which will help you formulate your action plan – both on our site and on external sites.
On our site
WaterDrive
Where do we start with such a subject? There has been a lot of research on water and drinking thereof – reports, surveys, testing etc. Leading institutions, universities and academics from all over the world have had their say. It is all about 3 areas really: tap water, bottled water, filtered water. Which do you prefer? Benefits of each? See WaterDrive.
In simple terms, the food we eat and the clean water we drink feeds our body and creates energy, measured in calories. Basically If you eat and drink lots and if your body doesn’t burn off the same amount then the body stores the excess as fat for a day when you might need it. SIMPLE.
Harvard Health Publishing from Harvard Medical School have an article on hydration. you’ll need to sign in to see the full article – there’s an extract below.
The importance of staying hydrated
Published: June, 2015
A healthy person needs 30 to 50 ounces of fluid per day.
Drinking fluids is crucial to staying healthy and maintaining the function of every system in your body, including your heart, brain, and muscles. Fluids carry nutrients to your cells, flush bacteria from your bladder, and prevent constipation.
Older adults often don’t get enough fluids and risk becoming dehydrated, especially during summer when it’s hotter and people perspire more. “Older people don’t sense thirst as much as they did when they were younger. And that could be a problem if they’re on a medication that may cause fluid loss, such as a diuretic,” says Dr. Julian Seifter, a kidney specialist and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Warning signs of dehydration include weakness, low blood pressure, dizziness, confusion, or urine that’s dark in color.
FamilyDoctor have an article on why hydration is important – extract below.
Path to improved health
Look to water first
You should drink water every day. Most people have been told they should drink 6 to 8, 8-ounce glasses of water each day. That’s a reasonable goal. However, different people need different amounts of water to stay hydrated. Most healthy people can stay well hydrated by drinking water and other fluids whenever they feel thirsty. For some people, fewer than 8 glasses may be enough. Other people may need more than 8 glasses each day.
Other options
While plain water is best for staying hydrated, other drinks and foods can help, too. Fruit and vegetable juices, milk, and herbal teas add to the amount of water you get each day. Even caffeinated drinks (for example, coffee, tea, and soda) can contribute to your daily water intake. A moderate amount of caffeine (400 milligrams) isn’t harmful for most people. Here are the caffeine amounts found in popular drinks:
12 ounces of soda: 30 to 40 milligrams
8 ounces of green or black tea: 30 to 50 milligrams
8 ounces black coffee: 80 to 100 milligrams
8-ounce energy drink: 40 to 250 milligrams
However, it’s best to limit caffeinated drinks. Caffeine may cause some people to urinate more frequently or feel anxious or jittery. Plus, be mindful of what you drink. Some choices may add extra calories from sugar to your diet.
Water can also be found in fruits and vegetables (for example, watermelon, tomatoes, and lettuce), and in soup broths.
Sports drinks can be helpful if you’re planning on exercising at higher than normal levels for more than an hour. They contain carbohydrates and electrolytes that can increase your energy. They help your body absorb water. However, some sports drinks are high in calories from added sugar. They also may contain high levels of sodium (salt). Check the serving size on the label. One bottle usually contains more than one serving. Some sports drinks contain caffeine, too. Remember that a safe amount of caffeine to consume each day is no more than 400 milligrams.
Energy drinks are not the same as sports drinks. Energy drinks usually contain large amounts of caffeine. Also, they contain ingredients that overstimulate you (guarana, ginseng, or taurine). These are things your body doesn’t need. Most of these drinks are also high in added sugar. According to doctors, children and teens should not have energy drinks.
If staying hydrated is difficult for you, here are some tips that can help:
Keep a bottle of water with you during the day. To reduce your costs, carry a reusable water bottle and fill it with tap water.
If you don’t like the taste of plain water, try adding a slice of lemon or lime to your drink.
Drink water before, during, and after a workout.
When you’re feeling hungry, drink water. Thirst is often confused with hunger. True hunger will not be satisfied by drinking water. Drinking water may also contribute to a healthy weight-loss plan. Some research suggests that drinking water can help you feel full.
If you have trouble remembering to drink water, drink on a schedule. For example, drink water when you wake up, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and when you go to bed. Or, drink a small glass of water at the beginning of each hour.
Drink water when you go to a restaurant. It will keep you hydrated, and it’s free.
Sometimes the owner of a video will not allow the video to be played on external sites. If you see the video is unavailable on the left just click the ‘WATCH NOW’ link on the right and the video will play in a new window.
Hydration
This 10 minute TEDx talk explains the befits of body hydration. Summary shown below.
“Monitoring your body hydration is the key to maintaining good health. New, non-invasive instruments make it possible for people of all ages to scientifically take over monitoring their hydration level.
The implications are staggering: improved physical performance; improved health; improved longevity; the reduced incidence of disease; and lower health care costs. The inventor of the notebook computer takes us on his next challenge: creating a device that accurately detects hydration levels (through a simple breath sample) to identify when and how to create maximum body hydration.
Chris Gintz is the inventor of the notebook computer and other complex instruments. His newest invention, called the hydration measurement instrument, is a microwave rotational spectrometer for the scientific measurement of hydration that anyone aged 3-100 may use. His new instrument methods make it possible for people of all ages to scientifically take over monitoring their hydration level. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.”
In order for you to assess what you know about this health area, we suggest using a questionnaire. This might help you understand your situation in this area, or taking it might improve your understanding of the area.
You may be able to take this questionnaire online – either here on our site or on an external site – or download it and complete it on paper – it depends on copyright (and whether we’ve managed to build it on our site!).
The ways you can take a questionnaire:
Questionnaire on our site
Take Questionnaire on our site
You can take a questionnaire on our site. This will score the questions automatically and give you a summary showing what your score means.
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Find your initial focus
You might think that physical, financial and mental health are quite separate, and for some people they are. However, often a problem in one area has a knock-on effect on others. Losing your job can lead to anxiety and depression, which can turn you to drink and impact your health.
You might have a severe issue in one area but that can lead to problems in other areas, and the people treating you for the first problem won’t be equipped to deal with these linked issues.
For example, doctors and nurses can treat you for a physical problem but can’t advise you about your job or finances. Nor for the anxiety that comes with it, apart from prescribing some drugs, which might or might not be the best solution.
We encourage you to take a holistic view – we look at all areas and offer support across the whole spectrum.
Even this view of health is simplistic, as you’ll discover later if you go down that route. You might want to consider overall health, or wellness or wellbeing, which include additional types of health, such as occupational health (how you are in your job). Then there’s happiness and quality of life – how do these fit?
If you’re interested in that, click the link here to see more information.
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Health Areas in Domains
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Domains
We break down the overall concept of health or wellness into ‘bite-sized chunks’ that we can actually do something about. The first level we call health domains.
1. Emotional Wellness: Awareness and acceptance of feelings 2. Spiritual Wellness: A search for meaning and purpose 3. Intellectual Wellness: Recognition of your creativity, knowledge and skills 4. Physical Wellness: Need for physical activity and balanced nutrition 5. Environmental Wellness: Positive awareness and impact on your environment 6. Financial Wellness: Debt reduction, cash flow balance or financial future planning 7. Occupational Wellness: Personal achievement and enrichment from your career 8. Social Wellness: Contribution to your community
Health Areas
Within each domain, we have included a number of health areas. These are specific issues that you can tackle. Within each health area, e.g. Depression, we have built additional information and exercises which you can do to help in the area. You can create your own Action Plan to address this area, and see
Social: Communication Skills, Communication Styles, Domestic Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Love Partnerships, Mental Abuse, Parenting Styles, Sexual Addiction
Spiritual: Are You Sensitive, Mystical Guidance, Spirituality
Each health area has supporting information and its own questionnaire.
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Understand Health
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Physical, financial and mental health
One definition of health is:
Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
The NHS define health as: ‘We use a broad definition of health that encompasses both physical and mental health, as well as wellbeing. This means we are not only interested in whether or not people are ill or have a health condition, but also in how healthy and well they are.’
We believe we also have to consider financial health, as this can easily impact physical and mental health. Click the button to see an example of how these are connected.
What is Health? How about Wellness, Wellbeing or Happiness?
The Active Wellbeing Society (TAWS) define Health as a state of the overall mental and physical state of a person; the absence of disease. They define Wellbeing or wellness as a way of life that aims to enhance well-being and refers to a more holistic whole-of-life experience which also includes emotional and spiritual aspects of life. We expand on this definition of health to include financial health and mental health, to make it synonymous with wellbeing or wellness.
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Health domains
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We break down the overall concept of health or wellness into ‘bite-sized chunks’ that we can actually do something about. The first level we call health domains.
1. Emotional Wellness: Awareness and acceptance of feelings 2. Spiritual Wellness: A search for meaning and purpose 3. Intellectual Wellness: Recognition of your creativity, knowledge and skills 4. Physical Wellness: Need for physical activity and balanced nutrition 5. Environmental Wellness: Positive awareness and impact on your environment 6. Financial Wellness: Debt reduction, cash flow balance or financial future planning 7. Occupational Wellness: Personal achievement and enrichment from your career 8. Social Wellness: Contribution to your community
Health Areas
Within each domain, we have included a number of health areas. These are specific issues that you can tackle. Within each health area, e.g. Depression, once you have subscribed we have built additional information and exercises which you can do to help in the area.
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See which domains you should address
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Having established that we use 8 domains, you need to understand which you should concentrate on.
The 8 are:
Emotional
Environmental
Financial
Intellectual
Occupational
Physical
Social
Spiritual
You can take a questionnaire, which scores you in each domain. You can decide which domains you are strong in, and which you need to improve.
Another analysis shows which domains you should look at, but also which domains you want to look at.
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Locus of Control
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We want to help people in all aspects of their health – physical, financial and mental. We also provide detailed explanations of how overall health (or well-being) is measured.
We believe these things are often linked, so we try and address health holistically. We are building templates, questionnaires and exercises to help you identify what’s important to you.
We think people should try and take responsibility for of their own health as much as they can. See below for what that means.
People look at things differently. Some people believe things happen to them, while others believe they can influence what happens to them. Technically this is called the ‘locus of control’. People can have an Internal or external Locus of Control
So how do you see things?
Psychology Today have a 15 minute test which gives you a summary of your position you can buy the detailed results if you want to.
My Personality Test have a 10 minute test which gives you a summary.
People tend to take more responsibility (locus gets more internal) as they get older. However, external isn’t always bad – for example if you are physically unable to do some things you can accept it and focus on the things you can do. This American video explains the concept and gives examples of how this can affect relationships.
Internal
More likely to take responsibility for actions
Tend to be less influenced by others
External
Blame outside forces for what happens
Don’t believe they can change their situation themselves
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Add your attitude to change - see how you view changes in your life
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Do you need to change?
No matter how healthy you are at the moment, the chances are that there are some areas you could improve. It may be that you have a real problem in one or more areas, and you would like to make some improvements.
At YouDrive we accept that there are many different degrees of ‘not wellness’ in a large number of different health areas, ranging from physical illness such as covid-19 through mental illness such as anxiety through to financial problems like debt. We try and help where the problem ranges from ‘slight’ to quite bad’ – after this expert help and intervention may be needed.
However, especially in these times, we have to try and make these changes ourselves, possibly with some help from others, whether remotely or face to face.
The thing is, to make an improvement we have to change some things.
This involves changing our behaviour in some respects, and that’s not always easy.
Henry Ford, the creator of the assembly line, is quoted as saying “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got”.
Another way of looking at this: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” – attributed to Albert Einstein.
Consequently we need to make some changes. The problem is that we have already developed a lot of habits, some of which we need to break and replace by better ones. Some of our bad habits have become entrenched, and the bad results they create in turn engender further bad habits to develop – in effect the bad habits can feed on themselves.
We need to understand how we can make changes and stick to them, and that’s what this part of your health profile is about.
It will involve some learning, through reading, some videos and some additional information and also seeing how you react to change currently.
It will also ask you to consider whether you feel you are in charge of your future, or whether you feel it’s all fate.
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Assess your overall health using a health questionnaire
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At YouDrive we try and help people improve their health. We use ‘health’ but we understand there are other terms such as wellbeing or even happiness that reflect how we are doing in our lives – if you’re interested in the different definitions and ideas see our page on the subject.
We want to help whether you have a particular problem – physical, financial or mental – or if you just want to improve some specific part of your life or just make some improvements overall.
You’d be surprised, but there has been a serious amount of scientific work done in this area over the last twenty years.
So first we allow you to assess your current health (or wellbeing, or happiness). We do this by questionnaire. Which one is determined by the type of person you are:
You understand yourself well and want a quick overview of your health and wellness, and will drill down in any areas needing work
You want to do a more detailed assessment and then focus on areas you’re already aware of
You want to look at the whole situation in more detail across all the health domains.
By the way, we take your privacy seriously – we collect information that you choose to provide but we de-identify it as much as possible and will never share it with anyone without your explicit consent.
You can then drill down into some specific areas and there are more questionnaires to see your situation in these particular areas. We provide you with specific information and refer you to other potential aspects of help. Our next step is to build a personalised action plan – for now we will make a suggestion for you to develop your own plan and then after a time you can see whether this has had a positive impact by retaking the test.
In future we will be engaging with medical and behavioural specialists to devise action plans for individual people with specific situations.
We have an overall questionnaire which you can complete which will assess your current state.
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Values, Attitudes and Beliefs
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We all have our beliefs, attitudes and values – these have developed throughout our life based on who we are and what we have done. Let’s look at what these are.
The University of Reading explain: “People’s values, beliefs and attitudes are formed and bonded over time through the influences of family, friends, society and life experiences. So, by the time you’re an adult, you can hold very definite views on just about everything with a sense of “no one is going to change my mind”.
The combination of your personal values, beliefs and attitudes are your moral principles that guide you in life and affect your behaviour. However, your views can wildly differ to others and in an institution such as a school, these beliefs may be counter to the values of the school, child development or indeed the law.”
Let’s look more closely at the differences between beliefs, attitudes and values.
Beliefs
These come from real experiences – we think our beliefs are based on reality, but in fact our beliefs colour our experiences; also, an original experience e.g. when we were a child is not the same as what’s happening now. Beliefs can be moral, religious or cultural and reflect who we are. They can be rational (‘it gets colder in winter’) or irrational (‘I am never going to make something of myself’).
Attitudes
This is an immediate belief or disposition about something specific. It is a recurring group of beliefs and behaviours aimed at specific groups, people, ideas or objects. They will normally be positive or negative and we will always behave that way to the target group. Examples of attitudes include confidence (I can or can’t do something), grateful (I an entitled to / grateful for XXX) and cheerful (I am generally happy / miserable).
Values
These are things (principles or qualities) that we hold in high regard or consider to be worthwhile or right / wrong. They are formed by a belief related to the worth of something – an idea or behaviour. Some values are common (e.g. family comes first, the value of friendship) or cultural (which the whole community have – see video at Study.com here)
Expectancy Value Theory suggests you balance your beliefs about something with the value you attach to it. The Theory of Reasoned Action suggests that beliefs and evaluation about behavioural outcomes determine attitudes, and intentions lead directly to behaviour.
Beliefs
Expressions of confidence – can change over time
Attitudes
Learned predispositions to something – are subject to change
Values
Ideals that guide our behaviour – Generally long lasting and often need life changing experience to change
Iceberg demonstrating implicit and explicit bias – from Owlcation
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A Butterfly Life: 4 Keys to More Happiness, Better Health and Letting Your True Self Shine
Times of change can be a challenge, no doubt! Whether it’s a relationship breakup, job loss, or being diagnosed with a serious health issue. Or you may WANT things to be different, but it feels a little scary or overwhelming. The butterfly reminds us change can be beautiful, even necessary, in order to realize our full potential and live our best life.
