Photo Credit: Brothers for Life
Interesting excerpts from what I’ve been reading this past week. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, but there is one theme that I detect: behaviour is integral to the maintenance and promotion health…but it’s hard to predict, hard to control and hard to change:
Dan Heath at Fast Company gives us some reasons, and they don’t include lazyness. He explains that self control is limited: “Psychologists have discovered that self-control is an exhaustible resource. And I don’t mean self-control only in the sense of turning down cookies or alcohol, I mean a broader sense of self-supervision—any time you’re paying close attention to your actions, like when you’re having a tough conversation or trying to stay focused on a paper you’re writing. This helps to explain why, after a long hard day at the office, we’re more likely to snap at our spouses or have one drink too many—we’ve depleted our self-control.”
Julia Whitty at Mother Jones has written a mother of an article about population, which she dubs “the last taboo”. Yes, it’s controversial, and yes, it’s a good read. She writes: “Driven by inescapable biology that seduces us with the joys of sex, we populate, and then some. We plan our families. Or we don’t. Two hundred million women have no access whatsoever to contraception, contributing to the one in four unplanned births worldwide…Planned or not, wanted or not, 139 million new people are added every year: more than an entire Japan, nearly an entire Russia, minus the homelands and the resources to go along with them. Countered against the 56 million deaths annually, our world gains 83 million extra people every year, the equivalent of another Iran.”
How do you create policy that changes behaviour? Well, one way is to call in the celebrities. The World Cup opens this week in my adopted country, South Africa, and a public service campaign, Brothers for Life, has been launched, showcasing famous sports stars and encouraging men to stand up and take action against HIV transmission. Both South African and international celebrities have signed up to help promote the campaign.
Or maybe we should just turn back the clock to a simpler, happier time. NPR claims that we were five times as active before technology made us sedentary, and that getting 10 hours of sleep a night will make us smarter and faster; and Gideon Rachman at the FT speculates on whether we should concentrate on the promotion of happiness rather than wealth – an interesting proposal for the promotion of health and well-being, in my mind.
