Competition’s Natural Limits

Recent reports of a National Football League (NFL)  bounty program in the United States, paying and encouraging players to injure their opponents, are a stark reminder that competition has important natural or rational limits. In citing this example, however, we must immediately add that sports like professional football, in both its American and International varieties, is a modern preoccupation that already functions far beyond desirable natural limits for social competition – when judged from the standpoint of its net effect on the health and quality of life of its participants and fans.

After all, consider the influences of this most popular competitive sport of our times on the lives and health of those who participate in the sport or follow it avidly. In the case of NFL players, there is perhaps a five times higher risk of chronic cognitive health impairment and comparable risks of premature physical disability and degeneration. International football players fare somewhat better, but still are subject to greatly elevated risks of injury and long-term physical disability. We would add that in both of these and many other competitive sports, drug use is a widespread phenomenon - to enhance performance, to treat pain, and for escape from the unnatural stress and pressure of sports-related competition.

As for professional football fans, anyone who has been to a game in any professional-level league (and many below this level) knows firsthand the widely health-indifferent cultures that this sport and many other supernormally competitive pastimes reliably attract and foster. Such fan cultures are regularly and often strongly marked by patently unhealthy eating, excessive alcohol consumption, increased aggression and violence, elevated stress, obsessive and risk-seeking behaviors, and decreased enjoyment of essential but less stimulating life activities, to begin a list.

Our Focus on Ensuring Equality

HumanaNatura encourages communities to dedicate themselves, in principle and practice, to a new modern goal of progressive health and quality of life for all. While a community mission or focus of this kind may have seemed unrealistic or unattainable in earlier times, today it has become within the reach of most communities in the developed world and many in the developing world as well. This essential change in our human condition is a result of advancing health-related science, industrial technology and affluence, higher educational levels, and democratic political systems.

To implement health-centered action within a community in this way, we recommend that political leaders and health advocates use a repeating multi-step process that has three key features: 1) ongoing development and implementation of a community health agenda, 2) pragmatic and increasing action on more than 100 HumanaNatura community health factors, and 3) ensuring three bedrock social conditions that naturally foster human health and well-being advancement – high social transparency, reciprocity, and equality.

While the community benefits of social transparency and reciprocity are fairly well-appreciated and intuitive to most of us in modern political and commercial life, the need for relatively high social equality is often a more exotic idea and today remains difficult for some of us to accept as a community health foundation. This is in part because of culture and socialization, including our mistaken equating of free markets with free societies, and in part because, instinctively, we naturally wish to be more rather than less advantaged and secure relative to others or our environment generally.

Inspiring Health-Centered Life!

If you have begun to learn about HumanaNatura and our simple but complete system of four natural health techniques, you may be wondering about our special emphasis on seeking new health throughout our lives. The idea is different from the self-help advice we often receive, in both principle and practice. The difference comes in part because of our focus on health-centered life itself and in part due to our advocacy of a naturally open-ended and seeking approach to life and health, instead of one that is principally goal-focused and thus predetermined.

Usually, when either friends or professionals encourage us to improve our health and quality of life, we are advised to set and pursue specific goals, with a clear end in mind. We are told to turn our general desire for better life into concrete and measurable steps – whether to drop ten kilograms, stop smoking, exercise for a set time, or check stress attacks before they become unmanageable.

Growth over goals

Goal-setting in this way is of course important to modern self-mastery and has been show in research to lead to objectively higher states of health, well-being, and quality of life. This is especially true when our goals are 1) set in manageable short-term steps, and 2) placed in the context of a considered and compelling personal mission. But goals and missions alone are not enough.

Why? Because any attainable goal or cause, while perhaps useful to our health and life at a particular time, is always capable of being improved or built upon over time. This is true for individuals, for organizations and communities, and for us collectively as a species. None of us, as individuals and members of the human race, is a set or definable range of future possibilities. We all can and naturally will be improved up, just as we represent an improvement over species and cultures that came before ours.

To embrace this natural potential for growth in all living things is to mirror nature more deeply and broadly, and to become alive in a powerful new way that is at once ancient and eternal and fresh and ever new. It is to live naturally, if in a transformed way through advance human science and understanding.

Progressive health & life

That’s the principled part of HumanaNatura’s special advocacy of new or progressive health and life. In practical terms, our emphasis on new health means an ongoing commitment to growth and progress in our lives, throughout our lives, and in and throughout the groups we participate in, regardless of their size.

In this open-ended and seeking way that can underlie, elevate, and naturalize our goal setting, we create the potential for far more powerful and adaptive growth and progress in our lives and communities (and the transcendence of goal-focused life itself, as useful as goals may be to progressive life at any point in time). Waking up each day to our possibilities to new health, we expressly model our lives and groups on nature and natural evolution, especially its ceaseless forward movement toward ever new health and life.

In the HumanaNatura health technique that we call Natural Living, we use a seven-step process of self-assessment, creative visioning, and practical goal setting aimed at progressive health and life. We use a similar process for enhancing collective life and health in our Natural Communities technique. But both goal-employing HumanaNatura health techniques are intentionally cast as open-ended and set in our larger ethos of progressive health-centered life. In the most practical and important terms possible – our realized health and quality of life potential - the difference between our approach and traditional goal-focused health systems could not be more profound.

Imagine new health

Whatever your state of health and life today – whether you are sedentary and unwell or are brimming with well-being and vitality – new health and life are possible. inevitably, there is a least healthy and vital aspect of our life or shared life that can be replaced, and a most compelling new step we can take to create greater life and health. Often, there are many of each.

Imagine the possibilities of rising to the challenge and opportunity of new health each day, setting short-term goals and achieving new states of life and functioning, and then using this new state of natural life to move ahead to new health, again and again. The net effect is profound and increasing transformation, health-centered change that can far outstrip and alter even our most ambitious quality of life goals today.

We see this approach and astonishing progress in evolving nature and in evolving human science, leading to naturally intelligent  life on earth and now profound new human understanding in time. And this is how progressive life can work in our lives and communities too. We can commit to a progressive life of ever new health, intelligently seeking and seizing the possibilities unfolding before us as we grow, and creating open-ended natural life for ourselves and others.

Learn more

Learn more about HumanaNatura and our health-centered life philosophy and techniques at About HumanaNatura. When you are ready, begin our Personal Health Program and Community Health Program, in the spirit of setting and achieving health-seeking goals but always in the spirit of learning and advancing on our present goals toward new and better ones waiting beyond them.

Wishing you new health,

Mark Lundegren

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

Photo courtesy of Orange Tulips

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Ten happiest jobs

Recent news reports on the ten most and least happy professions in America, courtesy of the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, caught many people by surprise but really shouldn’t have. After all, each of the happiest jobs identified align well with established research findings on the key drivers of human happiness. As ably summarized by Richard Layard, these natural happiness drivers include things that are community, family, and health friendly; ensure adequate financial security; provide sufficient meaningfulness and work quality; promote social currency and personal freedom; and encourage compassionate, trusting, and thankful personal attitudes.

What should be equally unsurprising, but often is still a shock and strongly counter-intuitive for many of us, is that the least happy occupations identified emphasize income, technical focus, and/or positions of diffuse accountability within large organizations, and thus generally align poorly with the above happiness drivers. But since we live in a time where our natural sources of health and happiness are still poorly understood, and where incentives for wise status-seeking life are generally absent, we routinely pursue these unhappy occupations and make other objectively poor personal choices, in and out of work.

You can click  to learn more about the most and least happy jobs in America, but here is a quick listing of the top and bottom ranked occupations in the University of Chicago survey:

Ten Most Happy Jobs

1. Clergy
2. Firefighters
3. Physical therapists
4. Authors
5. Special Ed teachers
6. Teachers
7. Artists
8. Psychologists
9. Financial services sales
10. Operating engineers

Ten Least Happy Jobs

1. Information Technology Director
2. Sales and Marketing Director
3. Product Manager
4. Senior Web Developer
5. Technical Specialist
6. Electronics Technician
7. Law Clerk
8. Technical Support Analyst
9. CNC Machinist
10. Marketing Manager

If you would like to begin to explore the science of achieving lasting and healthy happiness in your life and work, a great place to start is with Mark Lundegren’s popular article, Balancing Health & Happiness, which was published recently by HumanaNatura.

Photo courtesy of Happiness.

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Checking perceptions

A key aspect of achieving more attentive and higher quality life is regularly checking our perceptions. Much like optical illusions, perceptual biases exist in all our lives, often limiting the power of our choices and leading us astray. A good example of natural bias comes from research just published by Harvard University, this time involving the newly re-ignited topic of wealth distribution in the United States. In the study, researchers surveyed people to see what they thought would be an ideal wealth distribution and the country’s actual wealth distribution, and also asked questions about their background and behavior. As the summary chart shows, people’s perceptions of actual wealth levels were significantly at odds with reality. But there is more here related to perceptual bias than this simple misjudgment.

In addition to revealing popular perceptions of society that are significantly at odds with reality, the study surfaced at least four of many underlying natural biases or blind spots we all are subject to: 1) overuse of information that is at hand or easy to obtain to assess reality (judging the world by what we immediately see around us), 2) stated preferences at odds with actual behaviors (since many in the survey reported not voting for parties favoring redistribution), 3) a consistent and likely innate intuition of what social conditions “ought” to look like (spanning respondents from different backgrounds and countries), and 4) the more subtle belief that our intuitive sense of fairness is roughly optimal (with the research team cautioning eager readers that an objectively optimal wealth distribution is still being researched and not yet known).

If you would like to look for and check these and other perceptual biases in your life, especially in important areas that may affect your health and quality of life, there is a fairly reliable way to start. It involves examining specific outlooks and choices that have one or more of three critical qualities:

• Importance – actions and outlooks with important consequences, which often involve complex issues and promote oversimplification
• Frequency – choices and behaviors that recur regularly, potentially leading to the repeating of past interpretations and decisions without considering better alternatives
• Certainty – outlooks and choices where we feel we are acting ideally, which are often good places to look for bias since this is rarely true

In checking your perceptions, you can start anywhere, even with the next few choices you make or actions you take, and gradually develop a new intuition for and control over your natural biases. Importantly, this process can and should include the essential self-awareness strategy of looking for evidence that both supports and counters our views and plans.

Read about the new wealth perception study at What We Know About Wealth and consider practical ways to get around perpetual bias via the popular HumanaNatura article Understanding Personal Empowerment. You can also begin to move toward more deliberate and optimal life via the Natural Living section of HumanaNatura’s comprehensive Personal Health Program.

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New balance

Do you struggle sometimes to achieve healthy balance in your life? Most of us do and could use help to create new personal balance. If this is an area where you would like to be more effective, you may be interested in a new article by Mark Lundegren, Balancing Health & Happiness, that was just published by HumanaNatura.

In the new article, Mark examines a summary of happiness research by Richard Layard and discusses the role that health plays in ensuring our personal and general well-being. While many happiness researchers narrow their definition of health and place it among seven key contributors to modern happiness, Mark shows that once both happiness and health are better considered, the two converge into a nearly identical modern ideal – one that has important lessons we all can use to immediately have healthier and happier lives.

Click to Mark’s new article via HumanaNatura Featured Articles and learn more about his innovative health-based approach to personal and organizational strategy at Mark Lundegren.

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Place matters

In HumanaNatura’s natural health system, the fourth and final of our science-based health techniques is called Natural Communities. This health-critical practice begins with the idea that our social environment is essential to our health, and guides practitioners in the steps to either find or create a healthier community setting.

The science of healthy groups and communities, and the study of their important health and quality of life impacts, is quite broad – ranging from public health and city planning studies to management and political science research – making it difficult for health professionals and the general public to appreciate its full scope and importance. A new study by University of Chicago researchers is thus useful because it makes the power of place more tangible, and reminds us that we may naturally habituate to poor quality conditions and underestimate the power of community life on our health more generally.

The new study specifically investigated obesity and diabetes changes among families in poor U.S. neighborhoods who were given the opportunity to move to less poverty-prone areas in the 1990s. Some did so, while others did not, creating a natural experiment in the impact of relocation and background community quality. Ten years later, the research team found significant improvements in diabetes and obesity rates (of about 20%) among the group that had moved. This impact is reportedly about equal to the expected change from standard medical interventions, and the findings are important enough to warrant investigation of other health consequences in this group.

Do you want to consider the power of place in your life or more generally? Learn more about the new study at Change Your Neighborhood, Improve Your Health, and explore HumanaNatura’s guidelines for healthy communities via our unique and comprehensive Community Health Program.

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Captured live

We all know that plants and animals, including people, evolve. Scientists have catalogued hundreds of now dominating genetic changes to our species that have first arisen in the last few thousand years. But important questions remain in this still relatively new field of study, including how often and rapidly such changes can occur, and if there are clear examples of genetic evolution by natural selection at work in our time. A new study by researchers at the University of Quebec has found the most recent known example of natural selection in humans. Importantly, the study suggests that changes in the dominant genes of a human population can occur much more rapidly than many scientists thought possible.

The new study examined well-documented child-bearing patterns on a relatively isolated island community of 30 families from 1799 to 1940. The generally uniform pattern of life on the island offered a largely neutral environment, culturally and socio-economically, permitting researchers to more easily study and statistically isolate genetic effects. The conclusion: a significant genetic change favoring early child-bearing was naturally and progressively selected over the period (evidenced by strong multi-generational mother-daughter transmission of the trait against nearly identical background circumstances across the community).

The new findings reinforce and make quite palpable the basic tenets of evolutionary theory, confirming and reminding us that we are part of the natural world and continually shaped and re-shaped by it. Learn more about the new research at Humans Are Still Evolving or Natural Selection Leaves Fresh Footprints, and about HumanaNatura’s evolutionary-based natural health system at About HumanaNatura.

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Cost of health

Any idea what the cost of health is? A new World Health Organization (WHO) study says that developing countries could greatly reduce about 60 percent of all disease and premature death for about $1.20 per person annually. Sounds cheap, doesn’t it? The new analysis focuses on chronic or non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in poorer countries and concludes that low-cost, high-impact steps to reduce NCD risks could dramatically improve health and quality of life in these countries. What are we talking about? Things like discouraging smoking and alcohol consumption, improving food supply and daily meal quality, and other measures to combat well-understood health risks associated with industrialization and increasing income in the developing world.

So why isn’t this a no-brainer? One reason is the force of tradition and culture, including the related fact of life that the benefits of health efforts are still widely under-appreciated – by regular people and political leaders around the world. Another reason is that not all these countries have popular governments, and of those that do, few have made progressive health and quality of life promotion their basic mission or focus. Add to this mix the influence of monied interests who benefit from an unhealthy status quo. Finally, consider the still only fair leadership by the developed world to show how an overriding focus on health and well-being can look in principle and alter life in practice. The sum of this equation: there remains both much work to do and enormous human quality of life impacts waiting to be had on the cheap today. Learn more about the new WHO study at $1.20 Per Person and explore HumanaNatura’s proposal for health-centered communities and nations via our Community Health Program.

Photo courtesy of Money.

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Real men

News channels have been buzzing the last few days with stories about new findings by Northwestern University researchers – who have concluded that married men undergo a significant “drop” in testosterone levels, when compared with their still-single cohorts. The researchers hypothesize that the lower hormone levels encourage sustained pair-bonding and child-rearing, and are a naturally selected human trait. Some commentators have used the study to mock the manliness of married men, while many more have felt compelled to stand up for men in committed relationships, as if their condition were less manly and somehow unnatural. But what is the real story, and who are the real men?

In our original life in nature, we would expect most adult men to be in relationships and raising children, and single men to be the exception. If their numbers grew too large, single men would have been a source of social instability and reduced general health, due to higher aggressiveness and competition (driven in part by psychological wanting and by the heightened testosterone the new study finds). Thus, the natural baseline in the study is married men, not single ones, and the real headline is that single men have “elevated” testosterone levels, as a consequence of being unnaturally single and encouraging them out of this condition and into stable relationships.

Overall, the heavily biased discussion of the new study, toward treating single men as the benchmark, is a great example of our general modern romance with the primitive “alpha male.” This is more of a problem than most of us realize, since the correct answer is that we are naturally far better served by more intelligent, cooperative, and adaptive “beta cycle” attitudes and behaviors, by both men and women. Learn more about the new study at Testosterone Dips and explore HumanaNatura’s strong emphasis on ensuring naturally healthier and superior beta-cycle life via Understanding Evolution and the Natural Living section of our Personal Health Program.