The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Healthy responses

  • Healthy responses and behaviour: Manners in public service

    Nigerians are indeed comical in many respects and when it comes to corruption, hilarious. Recently, it was claimed that a snake swallowed N36m from a public office.  That was still in the air when a politician claimed monkeys carried away some N70m of public money under his care.  It is a jungle out there and animals have all become avaricious or have humans become animals?

    In considering manners, we regard humans as a family of neighbours.  And who is my neighbour? This is a big question and perhaps one of the biggest questions for any society and indeed for all humanity.  It is a question that is too big for hypothesis and theory and research and investigation and reasoning and intelligence and law, but not bigger than the human heart.  Jesus Christ was asked this question and in all his wisdom, he did not answer it with a sentence, he told a parable.

    Who is my neighbour? This question can never be answered enough in a lifetime, not practically.  However, it is a question that leads to a healthy society. This is because the neighbour is the person that is always near us, the person we pass by and never see again, the person we share resources with, the person we serve, the person we provide for, the person we relate to, the person that depends on us to do the right thing at the right time in the right place in the right way, the person that depends on us to get things right.

    The public servant is a powerful person.  The public servant has the power to add good or evil to people’s lives.  Some good or some bad passes through the public servant unto others.  The public servant meets people directly, indirectly, in real life, or on paper and determines what happens to those persons, what they get and what they do not get, what they can enjoy and what they will not enjoy,  whether the persons know it or not.  Public servants determine availability and quality of feeding, housing, and transportation for a society; provide services, goods, and utilities; develop infrastructure; provide means and standards for educational and healthcare facilities; direct the economy; protect freedoms, rights, security, privacy, and dignity of all members of a society, etc.

    When public service turns from serving the neighbour to serving oneself, humans become like animals and – it’s a jungle out there, the survival and the thriving of the fittest or the greediest, or the opportunist, or the audacious, and the progress of civilization and development becomes confused and slow while threat and insecurity heighten.  Mental conditions abound and like the lion and the fox, humans rely on pure evil to feed and survive.

    Beyond the well lamented “corruption of greed” and the well tolerated “corruption of need”, there is that question: who is my neighbour?  There are no neighbours in a jungle.  Neighbours exist in civilized society.  The more we diminish the neighbour, the more like jungle we become.

    Public servants that use public service to enrich themselves, depriving the public of benefits, really insult their constituencies. It is bad manners and a betrayal of trust.  Public service or the lack of  public service that induces or causes frustration, deprivation, discomfort, disappointment, anger, poverty, misery, threat, fear, insecurity, rancour, hatred, rebellion, crime, or other negativities really needs to face this question: who is my neighbour?

    At present, the parable of the Good Nigerian is not ready for telling.  Someday, a new generation may rise up and with a better understanding of the neighbour and of public service, a generation that is mentally, spiritually, and physically prone to peace, fairness, and progress.  Various aspects of people’s lives: bodily health and capacity for work, mental well-being and fitness, personal fulfilment, etc., are related to the kind of public service they receive. Those who are parents and teachers, irrespective of their own personal mistakes, have a duty to sensitize their wards to manners in public service.

    Dr. Theresa Adebola John is a lecturer at Lagos State University College of Medicine (LASUCOM) and an affiliated researcher at the College of Medicine, University of Tennessee, Memphis. For any comments or questions on this column, please email bolajohnwritings@yahoo.com or call 08160944635

  • Healthy responses and behaviours: Relaxation

    Relaxation is a deliberate effort to break away from stressors especially normal or usual stressors such as duties and work.  It is often a break from overpowering mental states, feelings, emotions, and passions. Relaxation may also be a break from an environment or from associates.  Relaxation consists of physical relaxation, mental relaxation, and spiritual relation.  For one to become properly or totally relaxed, the three should go together.

    Relaxation diverts life from stress and harm. On the one hand, it is a control mechanism that limits the amount of exposure to stress, the duration of exposure to stress and the overall level of stress we experience. On the other hand, it is an avoidance mechanism that blocks a person from being harmed by stress.

    Relaxation techniques are numerous and may vary from a few minutes of breathing exercise to an absolute retreat.

    Relaxation is not escapism, or avoidance of responsibility or avoidance of social connectivity.  Relaxation is a means to recover, improve, re-focus, re-energize, and increase in life.  Escapism leads to dysfunction, relaxation leads to improved function.

    Family life is an important platform for relaxation – physical, mental, and spiritual.  We should take care of our families and our families should take care of us and our needs.  Unfortunately, many families end up as centres of stress.

    Relaxation can be done alone or collectively, momentarily or for a period of days, spontaneously or by guidance.  We shall discuss various ways by which we can relax.

    Before we go on to discuss how to relax, we can contemplate why we need to relax as needed.

    Why do we need physical relaxation?  We need physical relaxation every now and then because the body is finite. The body has its thresholds and breaking points. The body’s life is at its best when in a state of homeostasis or balance.  Our daily activities can cause depletion or elevation of components of our bodies and can as well produce wear and tear on various parts of our bodies.  There is a need for recovery periods for bodily repairs, rejuvenation, balancing and strengthening.  This dynamism involves all the body organs and systems: the brain, the heart and blood vessels, the eyes, the digestive system, the immune system, the hormonal system, etc.

    Why do we need mental relaxation?  We need mental relaxation every now an d then because the mind is a flux of good and evil and is easily tilted by environmental factors and experiences. Mental relaxation enables one to dominate experience and generate wilful responses of choice. Our actions are sometimes driven rather than chosen because we have not been able to exercise the mental faculty fully against environmental factors.  Environmental factors that over power our thinking could be other persons, events, propaganda, climate, finance, illness, religion, culture, etc.  Mental relaxation, even if for just a brief few seconds, helps us in rationality and avoidance of regrettable consequences of our living.

    Why do we need spiritual relaxation?  We need spiritual relaxation to connect us or to keep us connected with our origin and our end, the meaning of our lives and the consequences of all we are and do in life. Much of our stress in life and the sufferings and pains we experience are from lack of spiritual positioning and relaxation.

    There is ample reason for learning the art of relaxation.  A little bit of prior relaxation – bodily, mental, or spiritual – may be important before leaping at an opportunity, dashing for some profit, or going headlong into a responsibility. Relaxation can save us from errors and troubles. For example, without astute relaxation, interest can become obsession, care can become fuss, and duty can become mania. Be it for the father or mother of a family, or the boss of a business, or the leader of an organization, the art of relaxation is a very important aspect of holistic health.

    Dr. Theresa Adebola John is a lecturer at Lagos State University College of Medicine (LASUCOM) and an affiliated researcher at the College of Medicine, University of Tennessee, Memphis. For any comments or questions on this column, please email bolajohnwritings@yahoo.com or call 08160944635

  • Healthy responses and behaviours: Crying

    I am in Lagos, Tues Jan 23 2018 and I wake up at 3.30 am to go to ease myself.  I look at my cell phone for time.  I see an unsolicited text message from 2221.  I look at the thread: Fuel; we don’t have supply Mon 14.53; Ten killed, dozens injured in Borno under-aged suicide blasts 1/18 15.02.  There were previous killing news.  People are groaning: “Cry, the beloved country”.

    Crying is a physiologic response to pain: physical pain, mental suffering (such as sorrow); or spiritual suffering (such as distress).  We all feel physical pains: such as itching, burning, and aches.  We all feel mental suffering such as heart break, loss, failure, regret, shame, lack, deprivation, and desperation.  We all experience spiritual suffering such as distress, empathy, sympathy, want, and agony.

    The physiologic response to pain involves release of tears from the eyes (lacrimation).  Lacrimation can be induced by onions and noxious stimulants by direct action on the eyes or through inhalation and irritation of the mucous membranes.  A girl once told me how her mum told her and her siblings to rub a menthol balm on their eyes to help them to release tears when their wicked father died so that the father’s people might not accuse them of murder.  They did not kill him but they were relieved and not sad when he died. Crying is more than lacrimation.

    Crying is a complex physiologic mechanism involving the face and facial expression, the respiratory system and breathing patterns, secretory mechanisms including tears from the eyes and mucus from the nose, as well as the muscular-skeletal system and specific demonstrations as we see when a child goes into a tantrum or an adult experiences a  sudden catastrophe.

    Crying is an overt response, a signal to the surrounding (e.g. other humans, a child’s parents) that something is wrong or unacceptable.  It makes a natural connection that engenders a social response from sympathy to support.  When we cry alone, the benefits of crying are limited.

    Crying is a complex response.  The brain and many nerve pathways, voluntary and involuntary, are involved and many hormones are released during crying. The mental and spiritual capacities are involved.  The feelings, emotions, passions, and the heart (the capacity to love or hate) are all involved.  It means that to be able to cry well, we need to be fit and healthy in body, mind, and spirit.  Inability to cry is unhealthy.

    Crying is a social response. It calls for attention. It is contagious. It initiates bonding with other human beings. It generates spiritual connections and propagates sympathy, empathy, and compassion.

    They say grown men don’t cry.  They do.  They just have a higher threshold for crying than women generally have. Crying can get in the way of action and men, especially young men, are hormonally wired for emergency action. Inability to cry may be a danger with men that are leaders.  Leadership cannot afford to be slow in sympathy, empathy, or compassion.  In family life, we thus have two leaders: a man and a woman.

    Sometimes we do not know how to cry or have forgotten how to cry.  If we look back and look now, we see that all the world’s greats cried for something.  Jesus wept over Jerusalem. President Obama cried when a mad man went on a shooting spree on children in a school. Many songs that we sing are from people who felt pain, sorrow, or distress.

    Inability to feel pain, sorrow, or distress at other people’s miseries is a psychic paralysis.  We ca see disaster upon disaster: cheating, injustice, oppression, victimization, rape, terror, poverty, deprivation, disease, kidnappings, accidents, deaths – without sighing, without crying.

    The popular stories of the Bible tell us about Jesus’ heart.  One day, after preaching for long, he refused to allow the people (thousands) to leave without being fed because they may faint on the way.  His baffled disciples did not have food and saw no sense in his objection. The people got fed and there were left overs.

    Sorrow and compassion, bring miracles out of good leaders.  Where there is a will, there is a way. Celebrity sympathy may be common but the world always needs sincere empathy. Lack of sorrow, hardness of heart, blindness of vision, failure of will power – are all part of the syndrome of psychic paralysis. The poem “Leisure” by W. H. Davies says “What is this life, if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare”.  If we do not observe, we may not empathize.

    History tells us that one reason why misery abounds is that there is a class that allows it and sometimes is guilty of it. The danger with being elite is that the elite can be so absorbed with their own good life that they cannot observe misery; they don’t shake, they don’t shiver, they don’t shudder at the site of misery, and certainly, they don’t cry.  To be continued.

    Dr. Theresa Adebola John is a lecturer at Lagos State University College of Medicine (LASUCOM) and an affiliated researcher at the College of Medicine, University of Tennessee, Memphis. For any comments or questions on this column, please email bolajohnwritings@yahoo.com or call 08160944635

  • Healthy responses and behaviours: Laughter

    Today we are going to seriously talk about something funny – laughter, a behaviour.   LOL.  Yes, you may be familiar with Laughing Out Loud.

    The study of humor and laughter, and its psychological and physiological effects on the human body, is called gelotology (Wikipedia) and in the next couple of articles we are going to be gelotologists.

    Laughter is the sound we humans make when we are mentally or physically stimulated into a pleasant excitement.  Some other species of primates demonstrate laughter behaviour.  Laughter consists of rhythmic contractions of muscles of the diaphragm and other parts of the respiratory system with expulsion of air and sound from the respiratory system.

    The stimulus for laughter can come from inside of us – internal stimuli – and these include thoughts, imagination, memory, wishes, and bodily stimuli such as we get from tickling sensation.

    The stimulus can also be and most probably is often stronger from external stimuli such as words, actions, and behaviours of other persons as well as events and scenes that we experience.  In fact, laughter may be better understood as a social behaviour, connecting humans.

    The physiologic mechanism of laughter involves the chest muscles, lungs, the throat, the voice box, the nose and the mouth and a person can laugh wholly or partly from these components.  Parts of the brain are involved in the coordination which may be involuntary or voluntary.

    The overt physiologic involvement may extend to the eyes which release tears, the blood vessels which dilate and in Caucasians may produce blushing, the central neurones which release endorphins which are natural pain killers, the immune system which stimulates protective cells, as well as modulation of hormonal responses that reduce the release of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline.

    As a natural human behaviour, laughter can occur in all humans.  Like sneezing, coughing, and crying, laughter is similarly expressed in all humans irrespective of language, culture, sex, age, religion.  Though a natural response, laughing is also a learned behaviour, therefore the stimulus to laughter and the mental modulation of laughter varies with age, sex, education, and cultures.

    The English language has words for various forms or degrees or intensities of laughers: the chuckle, the titter, the giggle, the chortle, the cackle, the belly laugh, the sputtering, the burst, the snicker, the snigger, the guffaw, and the snort.  Each definition is funny and worth looking up.

    Laughter can be controlled up to a limit after which we burst out laughing.  Each human being has a laughing threshold.  Some laugh more easily or more readily than others. Generally, positive experiences and states in life (such as success, achievements, wealth, status, well-being, fitness, friends, good companionship, good food, good news, etc.) lower our laughing threshold and we laugh more readily and more easily. On the contrary, negative experiences and states in life (such as failure, frustration, misery, humiliation, illness, stress, enemies, loneliness, hunger, threat, etc.) raise our laughing threshold and we laugh less readily and less easily or may cease laughing altogether.  The raising and lowering of the laughing threshold is possibly adaptive psychology parallel to homeostasis physiology.  In the physical physiologic realm, if we feel hot, we sweat and the body temperature is lowered.  In the mental realm, if good things come we laugh easily; if bad things come, laughing is hindered or disabled. Our mental state and capability may become reflective of and commensurate with our experience.

    Just as physiologically, we can exercise and build up muscles and increase our running speed and control our breath, we can train our mental function too.  Laughing can become a learned behaviour and especially a coping behaviour.  In fact, we learn to utilize and manipulate laughter in many, sometimes diverse, ways such as: situational laughter as a cover up, stage laughter as when an actor plays a role, or simply to bond with others.

    Thus laughter can be elicited in various psychological states – some positive (e.g. happiness, joy, excitement, relief) and some negative (e.g. embarrassment, confusion, nervousness).  It may be spontaneous such as in success laugh or happy reunion laugh or it may be deliberate such as in courtesy laugh or the evil laugh. To be continued.

    Dr. Theresa Adebola John is a lecturer at Lagos State University College of Medicine (LASUCOM) and an affiliated researcher at the College of Medicine, University of Tennessee, Memphis. For any comments or questions on this column, please email bolajohnwritings@yahoo.com or call 08160944635