Health psychology. Psychological Factors Influencing Health Behavior

HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY
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Psychological Factors Influencing Health Behavior
The psychological factors influencing health behavior include lifestyle, personal characteristics, and stress disorders. Lifestyle entails daily practices and duties of a person in occupations, activities, diet, and fun. Lifestyle is the attributes or ways of inhabitants of a locality in place and time. According to Ziglio, Currie, and Rasmussen (2004), WHO estimates that 60 percent of factors that influence personal health and life quality are associated with lifestyle. In the world, thousands of people live in an unhealthy lifestyle, which may result in them to encounter diseases, disability conditions, or even the occurrence of death (Steele, 2019). An unhealthy lifestyle may also cause problems like joint and skeletal complications, metabolic-related disorders, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, and overweight. Researchers suggest that the relationship between health behavior and lifestyle should be highly considered.
Nowadays, there is a broad change that has occurred in people's lives. Alcohol consumption, malnutrition, smoking, drug abuse, unhealthy diet, and stress, among others, are all indicators of an unhealthy lifestyle used as the primary form of lifestyle (Chapman et al., 2009). On day to day basis, the lives of people are faced with new challenges. The emergence of new technologies within the fields of Information Technology such as virtual communication networks and internet usage, for instance, causes a significant problem to our world that endangers the mental and physical health of people (Chapman et al., 2009). Misuse and overuse of technology become a considerable challenge to attaining health goals.
Secondly, health behavior can be influenced by the personality characteristic of an individual. Personality traits are the significant predictors of the health results of an individual that impacts the health outcomes directly or through various mechanisms (Chapman et al., 2009). Roberts et al., (2007) states that three mechanisms are used to assess how personality characteristics affect the health outcomes, which include; coping with illness, health behaviors, and the pathogenesis, which are the characteristics emanating from the susceptibility to disease, different reactions psychologically, and the reactions to the outside stimuli. According to Neo et al. (2017), personality traits also affect the social cognition of an individual which affects the health behaviors; communication of affected individuals with the professionals in health; and associative processes through which the environments or surroundings becomes related to symptoms and disease behavior and poses as activators of disease presentation. To establish the central function of personality in the domain of health, the first step is to highlight that it affects all phases of the process of illness.
Stress levels also have effects on the health behavior of an individual. Stressors have a primary impact on the individual sensation of welfare, moods, health, and performance. In young people, the response of acute stress in healthy individuals could be commutable but commonly does not cause disorders in the body. Nevertheless, when stress menace is vast, mostly in aged or ailing people, cases oh health damage may be visible in the long-term outcomes of stressors. Psychological resources learned coping patterns, individual biological vulnerability, and the persistence, nature, and number of stressors affect the relationship between the disease and the psychological stressors. Health professional uses psychosocial interventions to treat stress-related illnesses, which in turn affects the chronic illness’ course. According to Zarotti et al. (2019), if individuals are exposed to extreme and intense stressors during their development years, they are subjected to long-running neurobiological outcomes and exposes them to increased risk for mood disorders and anxiety, medical morbidity, aggressive problems, and early death. More so, stress can result in other linkages of health, such as accidents, increased smoking, substance use, sleep problems, and eating complications.
The Medical Model and Health Behavior
Medical model in health is a model that submits that an illness has been detected and recognized by the use of a structures process of examination, representation, and differentiation concerning conventional standards procedures, for instance, tests, medical examination, or describing set of symptoms. The medical model illustrates that mental diseases should be treated as medical states commonly by the use of prescribed medications. Steele (2019) states that brain chemistry changes when mental illness is treated through medication. Mostly, the medication used may add or alter the chemicals that cause problems with anxiety, mood, perception, or any other issue. Medical model school of thought believes that mental illness is the product of psychological factors. This model treats mental disorders as a physical illness through the use of medication. Psychiatrists widely use this model than psychologists (Laranjo, 2016). Nevertheless, supporters of the medical model, therefore, view symptoms to be outside signs of internal physical disorders. They believe the actual cause of the illness can be eventually found out, and proper administra...