We know that there are many spokes in the wheel of wellness and ways to achieve it, the way to be it, requires that we be the hub of many of them. Our lifestyle choices of healthy food, water, exercise and sleep are paramount. Other spokes of course include our smiling, laughing, enjoying humor in general and humor in the moment. It includes our social lives, friends, family and good relationships. It includes managing stress, expressing feeling, caring and being authentic.
A big spoke of wellness is having anxiety attacks treatment meaning in one's life and the sense that one is contributing to the world and in some way making a difference in the lives of family members, friends or the Earth Herself, in some cases, protecting it from the excesses of other humans! The base of wellness, at the end of it all, has so much to do with attitude. We take these truths to be self-evident!
Research has shown us something rather remarkable: the stress that comes from inequality in our society, in particular from economic inequality, may have more of an effect on our overall health than any other single factor. And conversely, in those societies in which economic equality is greater, in effect a larger middle class, they experience far greater health, happiness, longevity and well-being. Where there is less disparity between rich and poor, there is also a proportionate reduction in violence, teenage pregnancy, depression, anxiety attacks, suicide and homicide.
We would all imagine that economic inequality would certainly be a factor among many, one of those spokes in the wheel, but the research of Richard Wilkinson, professor emeritus at University of Nottingham Medical School and Kate Pickett, professor of epidemiology at University of York, uncovered through decades of research, indicates that the stress due to economic inequality was actually a primary cause of illness.
The type of health-care in the society was secondary as was even lifestyle choices, important as they obviously are. It didn't matter if the health care was privately administered, in a wealthy country or not, single-payer or otherwise. This is very interesting for lots of reasons, but no less because of our society's anxiety about the health care issue, and according to Wilkinson and Pickett, we're missing the boat. Even out the economic disparity between rich and poor and much of the health care issue is already solved.
Let's deconstruct this a bit. Why would anxiety treatment this single factor of economic disparity be so powerful a spoke? It ends up to be a very human phenomenon. The materially wealthy of a given community or nation tend to look down and pass judgment on the economically poor, sneering either verbally or non-verbally. There's a subtext, something to the effect of "Why can't these people get themselves together, always living off of hand-outs..." There's a sense of their own superiority and in contrast, the poor's inferiority. What the comprehensive research conducted by Wilkinson and Pickett suggests is that this judgment, critical sense and attitude has a debilitating, anxiety-producing effect, evoking questions of self-image, self-worth and even identity.
