Dr. Peter J. Weiss

As we go about our lives, we make choices.

In fact, you can think of your life as a con­stant stream of choices.  We face many oppor­tu­ni­ties each day to choose our actions.

Think­ing about your health, you might focus on choices such as, “Should I have the cookie or not?”  “Do I get up early to work out, or sleep in?”  You can prob­a­bly think of many such exam­ples.

But your total health is much larger than you may be imag­in­ing.

I’ve writ­ten before about the inte­gra­tion of mind, body and spirit.  As human beings, each of us exists in whole­ness or total­ity.  These sup­posed “parts” are sim­ply ways of look­ing at dif­fer­ent aspects of who we are.

We are whole peo­ple and the choices we make regard­ing any one “part” influ­ences the oth­ers, for bet­ter or for worse.

I believe that, in regard to your total health, all of your choices make a dif­fer­ence.  There is noth­ing that you do that doesn’t impact your body, mind or spirit in some way.

The food you eat, the movies you watch, the friends you hang out with, and the mag­a­zines you read are all impact­ing your total health.  Every­thing mat­ters.

It’s a pretty sober­ing thought.

In the “total health” con­cept, this also means that every choice affects each com­po­nent of your well­be­ing.  So the deci­sion to eat a health­ier diet can be seen as a good emo­tional or spir­i­tual choice, not just the right thing to do for your body.

Unfor­tu­nately in today’s world, there are many ordi­nary and “nor­mal” activ­i­ties that may rep­re­sent bad phys­i­cal, emo­tional and spir­i­tual choices.  Why do you think we as a group are so unwell?

Wake up to this idea that every­thing mat­ters.  Per­haps you’ve been mak­ing some harm­ful deci­sions with your mind on autopi­lot.  Begin pay­ing atten­tion.

What changes would you make if — before you eat, before you shop, before you view, before you talk and before you lis­ten — you were ask your­self, “Is this a healthy emo­tional choice?” “What kind of spir­i­tual deci­sion am I mak­ing?” and “How will this affect my body?”

Per­haps that sounds a lit­tle imprac­ti­cal.

I cer­tainly don’t ask these ques­tions about every deci­sion that I need to make.  Yes, every­thing mat­ters to your health, but some things mat­ter more than oth­ers.

The choice between an eat­ing and apple or eat­ing a peach is not as sig­nif­i­cant as the choice between watch­ing a vio­lent movie or med­i­tat­ing.  Start with the choices that you feel are most impor­tant and work your way down to smaller items, but don’t for­get that every­thing mat­ters.

You can do it!