Today’s society can give you many conflicting ideas on what it is to be a man. Being a man is not just about your outward physical appearance or the gender in which you were born. To be a man involves taking care of your physical, emotional, and social needs and generally accepting who you are. As a man, you have to be healthy in all spheres of life. While society today allocates the man to take care of others, the first responsibility is to you.
Understanding Health
The World Health Organization described health as the state of physical, emotional, and social wellbeing. As people earlier thought, being healthy is not merely the lack of physical illness. Therefore, the three major areas require your attention and nurturing when it comes to your health. Have a look at each of the three critical areas of health.
Physical Health
Bodily health gets achieved when there are no illnesses and the body functions at its peak. Some of the contributors are:
a) Enough Sleep
A typical adult requires at least seven hours of good sleep for the body to obtain enough rest. Sleeping gives the body and mind time to relax and rejuvenate for a new day. Lack thereof makes the body suffer from fatigue.
b) Body Composition
This is a term generally referring to how much fat or muscle you have and is used by medics to analyze how healthy you are. A young man should have eight to eleven percent of body fat. As the age increases, the body fat range also increases. However, the highest average percentage of body fat in a man is 24%.
c) Blood Pressure
Normal blood pressure for any adult should be below 120/80mmHg. Anything above that shows high blood pressure disease symptoms brought by stress or obesity.
d) Stable Bowel Work
Bowel work can be put as your body absorbing nutrients from food and expelling the waste. When the system is clean and functioning correctly, digestion and excretion happen without a hitch. However, stomach aches, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea are signs of an unhealthy bowel.
e) Hormonal Background
Hormones play an active role in our day-to-day lives, especially after puberty. Checking your background for any hormonal issues helps identify any problems early enough and address them accordingly. Testosterone is a significant hormone in any male and plays a huge role in muscle growth, deepening of the voice, hair growth, and is vital for sexual development. Low levels of this hormone suggest an underlying disease.
f) Growth Hormone
The pituitary gland produces the Growth Hormone, which facilitates growth in children and tissue maintenance in adults. However, in cases where there is a deficiency a men’s HGH therapy required, an endocrinologist can prescribe a synthetic Growth hormone that doctors use in hormone therapy. However, it is not advisable to self-prescribe it.
g) Libido
Libido refers to the sexual drive in men. Libido levels can alter depending on mental and physical body wellness.
Mental Health
i. Manage your Emotions
The easiest ways to have good mental health are understanding your emotions and learning how to express them appropriately. This also involves taking control over your emotions instead of them controlling your behavior. When you manage your feelings, you will not bottle up your feelings but find the appropriate time and method to communicate them.
ii. Adaptability
Adaptability is the ability to fit into new environments and circumstances. This ability comes when you have an open mind that readily accepts change. Adaptability keeps you ready to face challenges and survive in the current evolving world.
iii. Seek to Take Risks
Be bold enough to take risks and try new things. This mentality will expand your mindset and open you up to opportunities you would have missed if you remained hidden in your usual routine ways.
iv. Feel Comfortable with Your Own Body
Being comfortable with your appearance boosts your self-confidence and gives you boldness when you are among people. Loving yourself also helps you appreciate that no one needs to fit in a cocoon of ideas made to make your self-esteem crash.
Social Life
i. Begin Opening-up
Keeping to yourself is a dangerous habit and mostly a sign of a troubled mind. However, when you open up your life to others and allow friendships to grow, you get moral support and new growth opportunities. As the saying goes, no man is an island. Therefore, you cannot thrive when staying as a loner but by interacting with people and allowing healthy relationships to flourish. As you open up and interact with new people, make efforts to sustain friendships through intentional communication.
ii. Be able to Learn and Change Perspective
Interacting with diverse people opens your mind to various ways of life and different perspectives in handling issues. Through relationships, you can learn new habits, change old unrewarding practices and adopt a new mindset. This way, you can grow your life and become better every day. Embracing the perspectives of others also helps you sustain friendships. Though you don’t always agree with every person’s way of thinking, understanding them and learning how to handle them will help keep them in your circles.
iii. Don’t be Afraid to Ask Help
Humans generally like to seem like they can handle their issues. However, many people fail in their endeavors due to failure to ask for help when they need it. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness but rather a way to show that you are human and need others to become better. Therefore, it is sometimes necessary to lower your ego and get someone to help you out where you are stuck.
Conclusion
From the above analysis, it is evident that being a strong man requires you to strengthen the three areas of your life. When one area lacks, you will not be whole. Secondly, the three spheres are interconnected, and thus they affect one another. None is less important than the others. Having a poor social life influences your mental health through loneliness and seclusion, bringing physical bodily damage. Physical unhealthiness puts a toll on your mental health, which may cause you to withdraw from your social circles. Therefore, it is critical to understand that you must ensure you are in an all-around healthy state to function effectively in this society.
