Health is a crucial and complicated matter of people’s life. It is essential to explore health from many different aspects. Health depends of every personal situation that may impact on human being therefore it is required to look at it from an individual perspective (Y158, cited in L185 Block 3 Session 2, p.7). Factors that may reflect on an individual’s health can be distinguished as internal and external. This essay will concentrate more specifically firstly on psychological aspects, as an element of internal factors and secondly on school interventions, as a part of external factors, followed by examples.
Internal factors have a great importance on people’s health. Among them biological and psychological aspects can be identified, which influence an individual’s health. The reason why biological factors are so important is that often they determine levels of health (or sickness) and may predispose people to act in certain ways (Y158, cited in L185 Block 3 Session 2, p.5). Next, psychological factors are also significant. A person’s beliefs and understandings about their health and illness can strongly influence their choices (Y158, cited in L185 Block 3 Session 2, p.5). There are three categories of psychological factors. The first of them is beliefs, which arise from interactions of an individual with social forces including family, friends, relationship, laws, TV/Media and institutions (Y158, cited in L185 Block 3 Session 2, p.7).The second psychological aspect is emotions. Emotions are connected to a person’s day to day experiences, which can bring particular emotions and consequently a particular behaviour of an individual. As an example here can be drinking alcohol, which may give a mistaken impression of feeling better. The third of psychological factors is habitual behaviour. Usually these are behaviours that in the long term
References: The Open University (2012) L185 English for academic purposes, Block 3 Session 2 ‘Text 2.1: Factors that influence the health of an individual’ [online], https://learn2.open.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/717531/mod_resource/content/1/Block%203%20Text%202.1.pdf (accessed 02 February, 2013). The Open University (2012) L185 English for academic purposes, Block 2 Session 2 ‘Text 2.4: OU student assignment for Y158 Understanding Health’ [online], https://learn2.open.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/717534/mod_resource/content/1/Block%203%20Text%202.4.pdf (accessed 03 February, 2013). The Open University (2012) L185 English for academic purposes, Block 2 Session 3 ‘Text 3.4: OU student assignment for Y158 Understanding Health’ [online], https://learn2.open.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/717539/mod_resource/content/3/Block%203%20Text%203.4.pdf (accessed 07 February, 2013). Word count: 626