Lifestyle Choices

Of all smokers who start smoking in adolescence and continue throughout their lives, half will succumb to a fatal tobacco-caused disease before the age of 70, losing, on average, 22 years of their life expectancy!

In the United States, cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable, premature death. As more and more women smoke, so their incidence of heart disease and lung cancer has increased — their death rate from lung cancer has increased by a factor of almost seven from 1950 until 1990 (with the death rate from breast cancer showing little change over the same period). Whatever its pleasures, smoking’s consequences are most unpleasant: chronic cough, hoarseness, asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, lung cancer, cancers of the mouth, throat, esophagus and bladder (all of which can be fatal), and increased risk of heart attack and stroke! (more…)

Do you physically act out your dreams? Injure yourself and/or your bed partner? Fly out of bed and have frightening dreams? People with REM sleep behaviour disorder actually attempt to act out their dreams. They kick, punch, leap and run from bed, often injuring themselves and/or their bed partners.

One case in England resulted in a man shooting his new bride to death while he was dreaming of being pursued by gangsters.

We usually can’t act out our dreams. During REM sleep a part of our brain keeps us from moving our arms and legs, although we can still breathe and move our eyes. REM sleep, in essence, is characterized by a highly active, dreaming, brain in a “paralyzed” body. When the normal movement-inhibiting mechanism fails, some people, usually men over the age of sixty, may develop REM sleep behaviour disorder and be able to act out their dreams. The risk of developing REM sleep behaviour disorder increases with age, and men are more likely than women to develop it. (more…)

Persistent bed-wetting, sleep enuresis, is considered a disorder after the age of five. It occurs in all sleep stages, and daytime bladder control can be normal. While the prevalence of bed-wetting in childhood decreases with age, about 3 per cent of adolescents between the ages of twelve and eighteen continue to wet their beds.”

Bed-wetting has a hereditary component. Approximately 77 per cent of children whose parents both wet their beds as children are bed wetters themselves.’ A congenitally small bladder, bladder infections, allergies, obstructive sleep apnoea or metabolic or endocrinologic disorders may be predisposing factors. Contrary to popular belief, bed-wetting is almost never emotionally or psychologically caused; less than 1 per cent of bed^-wetting has an emotional source.” (more…)

When you experience the death of someone close to you, or when you have lost somebody who has gone away or whom you have left, it is natural to grieve. In fact, a process of mourning is necessary in order for you to come to terms with the loss and adjust yourself to a life without the dead person.

GRIEF

Grieving openly is an acutely painful process which is not usually encouraged in western cultures. Even when people believe that grieving and openly demonstrating your feelings are good for you, their fear of the sheer power of the feeling of grief often makes them try to stop you or calm you down. The commonest alternative to grief is the prolonged numbness of depression which, unfortunately, can last years. Although the expression of grief differs in different individuals, there is a pattern to grief that is fairly common, consisting of three basic stages: numbness, despair and detachment. (more…)

PHYSICAL CHANGES Age 40 to 60

There comes the inevitable time when your body does not work quite as well as it used to. Perhaps it starts when you find you require reading glasses or, if you play sports, when you find yourself slower and more tired. Your body is more likely to ache and your joints tend to be less supple. None of these changes is particularly debilitating, but together they form a discomforting sign that you really are getting older.

The menopause

For a woman there is the much more dramatic change of the gradual or sudden loss of periods. The menopause usually occurs between the ages of 40 and 60 and the average age is around 50. The loss of periods may sometimes be accompanied by hot flushes, night sweating, and vaginal dryness as well as a number of non-specific symptoms, such as dizziness, headaches, insomnia, digestive troubles, and breathlessness which may be related more to the stress of emotional change than to the hormonal changes of the menopause. (more…)

Different people have very different fears about death and dying, and there are some who are not particularly afraid of it. Most people are more afraid of dying than of death itself— perhaps you worry about how death is going to come: what illness? how much pain? will it happen when I’m asleep? Perhaps you hope that when it does come it will come fast and not leave you with a gradual deterioration of function (for instance, loss of speech or paralysis). The worst thing is that you do not know what to expect. (more…)

Changing life-styles, more than any other factor, is considered to be the best way to prevent early death in our society.

When people in western society die before the age of 65, it is considered to be early or premature death. The four major factors contributing to early death are noted in figure 19.1. Human biology, which includes hereditary predispositions to disease, accounts for only a small share of the causes of early death. (more…)