When it comes to health and wellness, mindset plays a vital role.
For example, maintaining a positive and hopeful frame of mind is good for you.
With that being said, being so positive and optimistic that you overlook obvious potential dangers could have the opposite effect.
It could actually increase your odds of suffering from some kind of calamity or setback.
With that being said, there’s also an important question to be asked here:
Is throwing caution to the wind—at least, for the most part—a better way to live your life?
Or is it better overall to embrace a more cautious mindset?
Nowadays, a lot of people debate the merits of the ‘you only live once,’ or ‘yolo’ philosophy.
In other words, they think to themselves:
Well, if I only live once, then is there really any reason to be afraid of things? Shouldn’t I just pretty much do whatever I want, and say ‘to heck’ with the consequences?
There are many reasons for why this can be a tempting philosophy.
However, it’s also true that if you’re not careful, you can actually seriously diminish the quality of your overall life experience by choosing to do the wrong things at the wrong times.
And this is where the age-old concepts of balance and moderation may very well come into play.
As it turns out, there’s probably a healthy dose of rationality to be considered when thinking about applying the you only live once philosophy to your own life journey.
Yes, you do want to live your life to the fullest.
You want to experience the best range of health, wellness, and happiness outcomes that are possible for you.
And if you act completely based on fear, you’ll quite possibly leave a lot of happiness, satisfaction, and fulfillment on the table.
With that being said—it’s also true that you need to remember that health and wellness are also at least somewhat dependent on not only your literal physical health and wellness (for example, your diet, exercise, and sleep), but also on the quality of your experiences.
You can have some amazing experiences in this life—and some of them may require a certain amount of courage to engage in.
For example—taking the leap to get married, making the decision to have children, changing careers to find a job that’s better for you, and going back to school (even though such an option may seem frightening at first) could all be examples of big life changes that, while scary, may actually benefit you more in the long run.
And even though there’s some risk associated with all of these things, it’s also true that the risk associated with never making any risky moves in life is probably higher in the long run—by all the metrics that matter.
In this sense, the idea of applying the ‘yolo’ philosophy to your way of thinking may not be such a bad idea.
The key is really to look ahead into the future, and to do an overall cost-benefit analysis on not only your life, but also the activity in question.
When you take a step back and really look at all of the different variables at play, what do you see?
Do you see that engaging in this activity gives you a decent chance at increasing your health, wellness, and happiness—to such a degree that it’s worth the risk?
If so, then telling yourself that you only live once may just be the key to give you the nudge you need to step into ‘adventure territory’ and leave the comfort zone behind.
