top of page

Mrs. Faulkner's Thought for the Week 26th February 2024

This week, in school, we will be thinking about keeping ourselves healthy. If we had said this ten years ago, people would have probably immediately thought of keeping themselves healthy physically- going to the gym, taking up a new sport and eating healthily. Nowadays, of course, we have had a mental health revolution, where it has become commonplace for people to ask for help to support their mental as well as their physical health. This cannot be anything other than welcomed. Men in particular who have traditionally thought they need to conceal their mental health struggles have now been encouraged by society to admit they need help, without it implying anything negative about their characters. Society has really changed for the better in very few ways recently, but this is one of them.

 

Keeping healthy has become increasingly harder for those of us in the 21st century.  There is so much access to cheap but not necessarily good food, so many leisure pursuits based around screens or sedentary activities and such easy access to substances such as alcohol and drugs, that a young person nowadays has constant competing pressures thrust upon them. Life was simpler when I was growing up. I remember waiting for my dad to come home on a Friday with the weekly bottle of pop- my preferred one was always Cherryade. On Saturdays, we were allowed sweets from my grandparents. The rest of the week, we could not afford sweets or pop- they were a special treat.

As manufacturing has improved its processes and food preservation has become more hi-tech, we now navigate our way through a series of additives and saturated fats. Improved labelling of food can still be confusing and we can never be absolutely sure what we are putting into our bodies

.

We are more in control of our physical fitness goals. We can have quite a lot of input into when, how and where we exercise. This is how the Internet can help, as there are huge amounts of workouts, exercise plans and ideas for fitting exercise into our daily lives. As we have become more dependent on timesaving machinery, we have forgotten that our bodies need a certain amount of movement to stay healthy. We now need to plan when to move our bodies to raise our heart rate and to keep ourselves supple, as it will not natural come through our daily lives.

Vapes have been in the news recently and we, as a school, have started to take action on it in school. Whilst still a small problem here, there are a very few students who try and vape between lessons. Teenagers are always going to rebel and this is just the latest fad. As always, they think of themselves as incredibly edgy and cleverer than the rest of us. As we all know, that is a developmental stage that we all go through. They have no way of knowing what is in these vapes, whether they buy them locally or order them from the Internet. People can easily exploit the average teenager with their clever use of colourful packaging or friendly sounding names. When you use a vape, you are putting your health in the hands of the person that sells it to you and they will definitely care less about you than you care about yourself.

All of these observations about modern life means that, to stay healthy nowadays, a person has to be focused and determined and avoid being distracted from their health goals. We have more exercise trackers and information than ever before, but we are unhealthier across the world. The availability of unhealthy options means that our willpower is tested almost every moment of the day, I do not think that it has waned over the years; it just has much more to contend with.

Health is the most important thing, which we possess. We may not all be dealt the same hand due to genetics but we can all maximise the way our bodies work and last, by identifying what we need to work on and remembering that health is a precious flower which needs tending and watering.

As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, “Health is the greatest possession. Contentment is the greatest treasure. Confidence is the greatest friend.”

Have a great week.

.

 

bottom of page