Break Ups Can Break Your Physical & Psychological Well-Being!

Couples Must Accommodate Each Other’s Needs to Prevent the Ship from Sinking!

Relationships are beautiful: mom & daughter, father & son, best friends, lovely sisters/brothers and above all husband and wife! The kinship between parents and children are irreplaceable, but couples share something special and unique that can never be replaced or compromised. Sadly nowadays, many marriages end in divorce or separation for reasons unknown, though many of them are easily avoidable, solvable or acceptable from either side! Individuals nowadays are not ready to compromise on anything-right from their meal to careers to life partners! If something does not seem right, we tend to replace it immediately without giving a second thought about mending or correcting it. Even children nowadays want the best of everything and parents are not ready to settle for anything less than the best for themselves and their kids.
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Some couples offer couple goals to the world according to some of our newspapers and media! What exactly are these couple goals? Finding time whenever possible and meeting each other, although it is going to be just for a few hours? Taking candid photographs and posting it on social media with creative sentences and hashtags? Relentlessly taking efforts to buy the best of things for your better-half? Yup! All these things make our lives beautiful, some kind of a musical story! But there is something more to this-love, compassion, understanding, compromising, realizing each other’s needs, not crossing over each other’s private space and above all, standing by your spouse through the thick and thin of events, things and everything else.

Psychological & Physical Health
Marital status is associated with both psychological and physical health and when a marriage ends in divorce, one of the ways it affects health is through health behaviors such as smoking, drinking and exercise. A new study by the University of Arizona shows two prime factors affecting a person after divorce-a greater risk of increased smoking behavior and decreased efforts of physical activity. The research was a long-term study of healthy adults aged 50 years and above. The data from these participants were collected every two years starting right from 2002.

A total of 5,786 people participated in the study out of which 926 of them were divorced/separated and the remaining people were married. The data collected included details about life satisfaction, exercise frequency, smoking habits, the participant’s level of inflammation and lung function. Results showed that:

1. People who were divorced/separated had a 46% greater risk of dying during the study than their married counterparts (this propped up as the research also kept track of people who passed away during the study)
2. Separated/divorced participants, specifically female, experienced lower life satisfaction than married participants comparatively. This in turn led to lower levels of physical activity, a risk factor for early death.
3. Divorced participants smoked more than married ones which led to poorer lung function and in turn, increased risk of mortality.

The results are clear and the moral remains unaffected, still we don’t get an answer as to WHY divorce leads to increased smoking rates and decreased exercising. The research team feels that one possible explanation would be that, divorced/separated individuals don’t have a spouse who holds them accountable for their health behaviors. For example, if one of the spouse smokes and the other doesn’t, one might try to influence the other’s behavior. But, when relationships end, we lose this connect and control of our health behaviors.
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Also, divorce/separation does not end up in negative health consequences all the time. On the contrary, it might even improve the quality of life of individuals who have come out of/terminated their unhealthy/unhappy/tormented relationships. Death of a spouse takes emotional agony to the next level and the consequences are grave in some cases. Discussed in www.firsteatright.com are few such situations and solutions to lessen your melancholy and move forward in life.

People who brood over their separation/divorce should never be left without asking these two critical questions:

1. Are you smoking?
2. Are you keeping yourself physically fit and active?
   
   

When the answer to any of these/both of these are positive, its time for intervention! Dive into their core reason for psychological imbalance, correct it and everything else including smoking and activity fall into place improving both, psychological and physical health of the person. Lets make things simple, uncomplicate the complicated, untangle the loops and mend things on their way to hold-on to our relationships strongly and pursue our things in life with a light heart.