Your Time, Your Space, and Your Health

As you experience virtually every day, there is no shortage of expert advice about what you should do to become healthier.  Most “experts” sincerely believe that they know what is “good” for you.  And most are intent on having you embrace the health plan that they have developed.

Unfortunately, most experts also become so wedded to their method that they unwittingly ignore the fact that they do not know you and, so, they do not know your idiosyncratic strengths, weaknesses, and circumstances.  Of course, if asked, any sensible one of them would readily accept that you are a “special case;” it’s just that they have content to deliver and are blinded by their devotion to it.  Moreover, that blindness afflicts many experts regardless of their profession or skill.

Although I too am vulnerable to expert blindness, I continually struggle to minimize it.  That is why my focus is much less on promoting any given content and more on facilitating your understanding and application of personalized health-relevant processes.  Although I am in the minority in that regard, there certainly are other psychologists who share my beliefs.  Most of the rest of this blog will extrapolate from the work of two like-minded ones: Tim Gomersall and Anna Madill.

Gomersall and Madill (2015) underscore the health-relevant importance of an individual’s experience of time and space.  (For our purposes, read "space" as "place.") You have a history of behaving as you do and that history has been enacted in certain spaces.  Similarly, you are creating a history every day.  Both of these—your past and “current” histories—profoundly influence what you are doing and what you will do.  A central tenet of the aforementioned psychologists is that your particular times and spaces are interwoven and unique, and, therefore, unappreciated by most people who seek to “help” you.  They explain their views using diabetes as an example.

One issue concerned the patient’s assessments of real-life experiences preceding or following their diabetes diagnosis.  The investigator’s noted that the patients’ experiences often were different from what doctors had suggested or predicted.  Those discrepancies, in turn, often caused the diabetics either to reevaluate their past to make it consistent with the doctors’ information or to reject the information instead.  The second issue involved ways in which diabetes affected the patients’ times and spaces.  As one would expect, with increased illness severity, more and more limitations became obvious.  I offer as an example that a given person with diabetes might spend more time preparing unprocessed foods and eating at home, rather than at restaurants, to control his blood sugars and general nutrition.  The final issue centered upon the patients’ motivations to handle the limitations that did arise.  Some, for instance, were driven by an intense effort to deny their deficits while others accepted and tried to adaptively manage them.

The report by Gomersall and Madill was directed at health care professionals.  They wanted to encourage them to carefully consider the particular realities of their patients’ illnesses in terms of time and space, and to tailor their treatments accordingly.  In this blog, my purpose is to have you think about how your own times and spaces impact your health.  Whenever you encounter health-related information, whether provided by me or someone else, you will do well to frame it in terms of your unique experiences of time and space.  For instance, think about the time and space tolls required to apply the information provided, and the time and space benefits that could result if you apply information that is valid and health-promoting.  Know that your past and current experiences of time and space will make you either more or less receptive to the proffered information.  Ensure that you don’t blindly accept information simply because an expert told it to you.  On the other hand, do not summarily dismiss it either. 

Reference

Gomersall, T. & Madill, A. (2015).  Chronotope disruption as a sensitizing concept for understanding chronic illness narratives.  Health Psychology, 34,4, 407-416      http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hea0000151