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 s...