Preventing Sickness & Enjoying Well-Being
“If you don’t have your health…” goes the saying. There is nothing more central. Hearing another lecture about how we should eat more broccoli and take the stairs instead of the elevator, is not going to change anything. You may have a wellness center nicely equipped. Yet despite this, our country’s and companies’ health care costs continue to spiral upwards, led by diseases of life-style choice over-eating, eating the wrong things, stress, sitting, insufficient sleep and exercise, and addictions, and poor public hygiene. We dug deeper to find new answers.
Click on image to view the opening title sequence to the video with audio:
Some of these “choices” people make are unconscious, stemming from past traumas. Some result from manipulative advertising of bad foods and substances. From this comes everything from higher incidence of the common cold and flus to major diseases. Job dissatisfaction from a feeling of not being heard or recognized leads to chronic depression… and the cycle is obvious…it leads to poorer job performance, alienation and downwards. We show how to break the cycle. We look at why people choose to be sick. Secondary gain such as attention or time off. It’s possible to get the gains without being sick. We offer alternatives. We put health in a new context of a group and buddy-system approach and a community within the company. We shift from the simple prevention of illness to the embracing of well-being.
What’s the subtext or inner meaning? Organizations themselves can be “sick” and dysfunctional and full of stress. Wellness, particularly when pursued and experienced as a team effort with individual immediate reward, is a perfect template for the goal of making the whole organization healthy. The balance of mind and body under stress, first learned in Defusing Violent Confrontations, is now brought to the fulfillment of seeking advanced states of wellness and of sharing that with others.
The not-for-profit Integrated Benefits Institute comprised of PhD’s doing studies across industries nationally, found that sickness costs employers $5400 per year per employee. For a thousand employees that is $5,400,000 per year. This does not include the cost of insurance premiums or administration. It is sick days, long-term disability stemming from illnesses, and what is called “presenteeism” meaning present for work but sick, reducing productivity.
