My idea of what health is can be summed up by the Australian Aboriginal people’s beautifully defined belief that health goes beyond just the physical well-being of the individual to the social, emotional, spiritual and cultural well-being of the whole community.

Modern definitions of health speak of prevention of disease or illness. Some others including more holistic practitioners will refer to physical, mental and emotional wellbeing. A few cultures would include the spiritual dimension. The idea of the well-being of the community being intrinsic to an individual’s health is not a popular idea. Coming from a relatively more collectivist culture, I see health as a function of my community (be that my extended family, neighbours, relatives), but I also see the community as a determinant of health. Personally, I am healthier when I live in a larger community of people than when I’m by myself or just with my husband. The social aspect then, is a sizeable contributor to my health. This includes factors like cooking and eating together, sharing or exchanging meals with neighbours, the conversation and bonding over a dinner table, the comfort of mom’s cooking, and the security of feeling like you’re a part of a bigger whole. This also extends to illness, where being unwell results in being looked after by family & friends, where more often than not your grandmother will have a passed-down-through-the-generations herbal concoction as an answer to your condition, and where once again, the feeling of security comes from the safety in numbers and the knowledge that almost anything you need is a phone call away You’re never really alone.

It follows naturally then that the health of my relationships is vitally important. The ability to have strong, loving relationships with open communication is incredibly important, as is the time to nurture them. If I had to choose, I would pick an emotionally wrought confrontation over peace-keeping suppression of resentments.

Work has been another crucial element of health. Being engaged in work that inspires, challenges and evokes passion does a great deal more for my immunity and sense of well-being than most extraneous factors. I know this simply from having experienced both sides. As an actress, I’ve worked hours and in conditions that were stressful and far from ‘healthy’. Sleep depriving shoot schedules, erratic eating hours, unhealthy set food, exposure to extreme weather and frequent travel should have been a surefire recipe for illness and it sometimes is. However, the period marking my move to a new country where I couldn’t work for almost a year and a half, saw the beginning of ill-health. During this time, my immunity was non-existent, and although some of it can be attributed to the move, I’d also lived in enough new places to know that lack of engagement with something I loved doing and the corresponding sense of fulfillment, was the prime reason. It couldn’t have been clearer than when most of my health problems disappeared just as I started at ITP.

As a result of my profession, my view of health is intertwined with physical fitness. Diet and exercise have a sizeable role to play here and there are direct correlations for me between lack of fitness, fatigue and mild depression. If there’s one thing I would choose to work on, it would be my attitude to exercise. I have never been able to make exercising a part of who I am, having seen it mainly as a weight loss tool. I enjoy weight training and am bored by cardio, though of late have found interval training to be interest sustaining and challenging. I would love to be able to do Yoga regularly, and athough I do different classes from Pilates to Zumba to Salsa, I’ve yet to develop an attitude where I exercise for its own sake.

To the list, I would add Spirituality (the ability to believe in something larger than yourself whatever that may be, but this is personal) and Purpose. The latter is more along the lines of Dan Dennett’s definition that the secret of happiness is to find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it. It involves a sense of contribution and connection.

I believe in Growth, the ability and the importance of pushing beyond our boundaries, of identifying and confronting our fears, to prevent complacency and to actively seek out opportunities to grow physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually.

I’ve started reflecting a lot on friendships. The quality of  friendships have been shown to have a profound impact on health, weight and behaviour.

Visualizing stress levels-both yours and your partner’s

Funnily enough, I’ve been working on this concept (without knowing it was called exformation) in one of my classes called Product Poetry. In that class, the attempt is to create a device that would allow couples to tune in to each other’s emotional and mental lives in a more meaningful way. One of the ways my partner and I chose to work this concept was to design a device (in the form of a watch/bracelet/other such wearable that is in contact with the body) that measures a person’s rate of breathing and visualize that back for that person and also on their partner’s device. One of the main factors in stress reduction is that we are rarely aware when our breathing is off-kilter and the ability to have that visualized could evoke that awareness. The next step would be for your partner (who is not in the same physical location) to be able to ‘see’ your increased breath rate/ stress and affect it by breathing slowly himself. This would change the visualization of his breathing on your device and allow you to calm down through the act of syncing your breath rate with his.

This is a loose conceptual video of the idea that we made for the Product Poetry class to show the concept:

http://itpincantations.posterous.com/product-poetry-concept-video

2. An extension of that idea is related to Rapport. Connect with another person, especially a stranger or someone you haven’t known very long calls for rapport which is unconsciously created when two people are in sync. For eg, when two people are in sync, one person will tend to unconsciously mirror the other’s subtler actions, like folding their hands when the other person does, play with their hair etc.

Mirroring can also help facilitate that rapport. Something as small as being aware of your pace of speech or tone vis a vis the person your talking to can help in modulating this behaviour. For, eg, I’ve noticed that I talk faster than a lot of people and when I’m talking to someone who speaks slowly and softly, we’re not connecting as well. Changing my pace and tone to match theirs has had a positive effect. So in this regard, having a device that could visualize certain factors like pace, tone, breath rate, of both people could be very interesting. Apart from feedback in that immediate moment, there would be some useful information to be gleaned about the emotional tenor of our conversations and even our relationships. What if a couple’s conversations/discussions/fights etc could be visualized on a larger projection and could be seen over time? In a study, Dr John Gottman developed a model to predict which newlywed couples will remain married and which will divorce four to six years later. His models employed Paul Eckman’s method of analyzing human emotion and microexpressions. He argued that an excess of sentiments such as disgust, contempt etc that came through the voice and expression were corrosive & boded badly for the relationship of the couple under observation, while outbursts of anger without these nuances were still healthy. In that regard, being able to see the interplay of emotions between you and your partner, or any other relationship could create the necessary awareness needed to change and improve the health of the relationship.

FantasyDevice