Happiness is one of those traits which is described as both a mental and emotional state. For example, you can mentally be happy at an event or for someone else while your overarching mood is sad. However, being happy is also an emotional state where we feel genuine joy coursing through us. It is often hard to capture happiness and to bottle it. However, the state can lead to higher levels of contentment, which is something that is more sustainable in the longer term. Of course, it is an entirely subjective matter, and what makes one person happy may be very different from how someone else might think about it.
The term eating disorders covers a number of specific conditions which all impact on a person's ability to eat normally. This can be due to an issue with their physical health which impairs normal eating, but it is more common for it to be associated with mental health conditions nowadays. Individuals with anorexia nervosa, a mental condition, will frequently view themselves as unhealthily overweight and consequently restrict their diet abnormally, for example. It can lead to them becoming underweight, sometimes dangerously so. Eating disorders are known to affect women more than men in the West, although both suffer from them. In numerous cases, these disorders are combined with other issues, such as substance abuse, anxiety and depression and even abusive relationships.
A habit is a behaviour that becomes second nature over time, usually by repeating it frequently. Like skills, therefore, habits can be formed at any time in life although they tend to be easiest to take on when young because the brain is more open to generating the neural pathways necessary to make behavioural patterns stick. Of course, habits can be good and bad. As such, healthy habits are all about making new patterns of behaviour that are good for both our mental well-being as well as our physical health. Scientists reckon that the average daily repetition it takes to form a habit – healthy or otherwise – is 66 days although some people will achieve this much sooner and, others, much later. Deciding to commit to a healthy habit in the first place is the key to being able to get into them.
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