We get up in the morning and we wash our hands after using the toilet. We brush our teeth, we take a bath with soap, we shampoo our hair, and we wear clean clothes. Why do we do all this? Perhaps we’ve never really given it much of a thought simply because these “good habits” have been instilled in us since a very early age.
In addition, we consciously or unconsciously make efforts to replicate the same habits on our children. The fact is even though we’d been “taught” these practices at home or school, they’re a very important part of our overall health and well-being. Yes, they are our personal hygiene habits, which when taken care of well, can play a very significant role in our everyday life.
Here we attempt to shed some light on the importance of maintaining good personal hygiene practices to help improve our physical, social, and psychological health.
Top Benefits of Following Good Personal Hygiene
Before we proceed any further, let’s take a minute to define what really is personal hygiene? To begin with, it’s personal, meaning it’s your very own, which clarifies at the onset that taking care of it is entirely your responsibility and doing so would yield benefits only to you.
Now, some of the most common personal hygiene habits that we’ve been learning since our formative years of childhood include:
- Washing hands before eating any meal and each time after using the toilet
- Brushing teeth
- Taking a shower daily
- Washing hair regularly
- Trimming nails
- Keeping our private parts clean at all times
Now, we need to follow these practices not just within the comfort and privacy of our own home but even when we’re on the go. This is to say that traveling or being anywhere outside our comfort zone should no way be an excuse to not follow good personal hygiene. Make a start and stock up your home with bulk hygiene products so you never miss your personal hygiene routine.
In fact, truth be told, personal hygiene is of utmost importance during travel. This is where your body is highly prone to attract bacteria and germs of all kinds from different environments that you get exposed to. Not to forget, the dishes that you eat from at a restaurant or the restrooms that you use when traveling are laden with germs. All this has a direct impact on our health. While traveling, carry bulk hand sanitizer products for you and all your friends/family with you on the tour. Let’s learn how.
How Personal Hygiene Practices Affect Physical Health
There is a direct connection, which gets established between maintaining your personal hygiene and your physical health. The cleaner you keep your body, the less sick you’re likely to fall. Simple as that! Let’s elaborate on this a bit.
This simple fact may have been a part of your science lessons at school but it’s only natural to forget or even overlook it as we grow older, possibly because of tighter work schedules. You’d be tempted to rush to the cafeteria to grab a bit after a long and seemingly, endless meeting at work gets over. You may forget a simple task in between – washing your hands. The result: you make yourself susceptible to some not-so-simple problems such as diarrhea or gastroenteritis.
While how you could’ve simply prevented it was by washing your hands with soap or even using a hand sanitizer in absence of soap. Also, don’t forget to keep your nails trimmed and tidy at all times, especially if you like or are used to eating by hand. Our fingers are direct carriers of numerous microbial germs, which are a result of interaction with pets, people, and even non-living things lying around us.
Then again, washing only hands isn’t enough – your whole body needs a thorough clean-up every single day of your life, simply because all the germs that the body attracts through the day from various places get collected in the form of body odor. Now that’s not a very pleasant thing, is it? This is why we have showers/bathtubs and bathing gels/soaps of all kinds to keep both odor and germs (the primary cause of diseases) at bay.
How Personal Hygiene Affects Our Social Health
Health is not just physical; it encompasses several other aspects too which include mental, emotional, social, and psychological. Moreover, perhaps you’d be surprised to know that simple things like personal hygiene can have a huge impact on the way we interact with people in our social environment.
Man is a social animal and it’s so very true; it’s hard to imagine ourselves locked up in a cabinet all by ourselves. We need to interact with people around us to stay happy. In addition, happiness is a clear indicator of good health. Now if we fail to take care of our personal hygiene, our body stinks, our mouth perhaps exudes bad breath without even our knowledge or our hair are infested with lice or dandruff!
The result: not many people are going to be interested to be anywhere close to us. On the other hand, if you have a clean and well-groomed personality, you needn’t make much effort to make friends; people would only follow you on their own. And the best part is, you don’t even need to put on heavy perfumes or artificial fragrances – just keep your body clean and tidy, that itself can work magic!
How Personal Hygiene Can Impact Psychological Health
This again is very important because how you stay psychologically says a lot about your health condition. Poor personal hygiene and its fallouts as mentioned in the above section can often result in depression, primarily because you become more of a put-off for people around than a magnet.
To Sum Up
It’s all a vicious circle – taking care of your body leads to good health and because you’re healthy, you like to look after your body and look good.
