Do you consider your health an expense or an investment? Many people consider it an expense both in terms of time and money.
You will often hear people saying "don't have the time to do all that exercise"‚ or "can't afford to eat healthy food". At the same time these people are often investing money in shares or savings for long term gains, or investing time studying to secure their financial future. But did you ever consider that your health is exactly the same?
A little bit of time and/or money invested in your health now may mean a lot of time and/or money saved later. Investing in your health for your financial future. The best financial investment you can ever make isn't in shares or houses, it is in your health. The returns on investment in terms of savings are better than virtually any other investment you can imagine. For example, consider this: for every dollar spent in Australia on getting people to quit smoking, we save $50. Another study has shown that investing in regular chiropractic care can lead to less x-rays and MRIs, less surgeries and less back pain related costs. In fact even when the cost of the chiropractic care was factored in, these people had lower overall health care expenditures. In other words these people got healthier and saved money at the same time. Investing time to gain time.
The other thing that people often miss is that when you invest time in your health, you actually gain time as well. For every hour that you spend in the gym, you will regain several hours. You will have more energy and enthusiasm and you will be more productive. So much so that the time you gain in increased productivity will be more than the time you invested getting fit. And that is not the only time you will gain. Did you know that in 2003, males could expect on average to experience 18.6 years of life with a disability, whereas females could expect 20.7 years of life lived with a disability? So despite the fact that we are living longer, there is a large chunk of our lives that we are effectively 'losing'. By investing in our health now we can reduce our chances of the lifestyle diseases that are driving those morbidity stats up. There is no question from the research that by changing our lifestyles we can reduce our risks of strokes, cancers, diabetes and heart attacks. This means that we can not only increase our lifespan but we can increase our productive lifespan as well.
So don't see time and money spent on health as an expense, see it as an investment. Any time and money that you spend on changing the way you think, changing the way you eat or changing the way you move is going to come back to you with interest, often more interest than you realise is possible; and certainly more than you could ever hope to gain by putting your money in the bank.
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