Triton 2025 - Magazine - Page 6
SEAFARER WELLBEING
Are you truly healthy, or in the middle zone?
Dr Clas Malmström – physician, psychotherapist, behavioural
specialist and motivational speaker – kept the AGM audience spellbound
as he discussed taking care of your own health despite the ‘very unnatural
circumstances’ in which we live as human beings today.
Are you truly healthy, or just ‘not ill’? Do you
avoid challenging or uncomfortable situations or
do you work to increase your tolerance for them?
Do you take responsibility for your own physical
and mental health?
Are you able to relax and achieve a peaceful
state of mind? And why should we skip the
word ‘stress’ and refer instead to our resource
mobilisation system?
Most people who consider themselves to be
healthy answer ‘yes’ to the question ‘are you OK?’
but that doesn’t mean they diagnose themselves
as 昀椀t, energetic, happy and in good health,
according to Clas Malmström; it’s more a case of
‘no pains, no bad itch, mentally I’m OK, so probably
I’m healthy’.
“We use the words ‘being healthy’ as a synonym
for being not ill, not diseased, not injured – but
that’s a very negative way of formulating your
thoughts. Most people don’t want to feel well –
they don’t even ask themselves ‘do I want to be all
right, happy, energetic, in good health?’ They just
want to be not ill, to be relieved from illness and
problems.
“Most people also think that between the two ends
of the scales there is only one borderline, so we
humans are either/or, and if we are not ill, it’s OK –
we are on the right side of the borderline. But that’s
not how it works.”
Between the two ends of the scale there are
two borderlines - beyond which you 昀椀nd either
pathological ill health/disease/infection or
wellness and 昀椀tness, said Malmström. And here’s
the thing: there is a middle zone too.
He warned against having a ‘passive attitude’
towards own health or wellbeing, urging
people to adopt ‘promotive competence’
and take deliberate action to get
themselves over the borderline into the
wellness zone.
“We need to look in that direction and
think, what do I need, what have I done
too little lately, what do I need to do
more or better in order to get over
this borderline? About half of those
6 / Triton 2025
1 2025
