Leisure and Pleasure: Healthy, Useful, Pleasant: Why Don’t We Do It?

Abstract

Health, both as a term and as a central topic in the media and public communications, has become very popular in the last decades, although not everybody understands the same thing when talking about being healthy. It seems that health is present in our minds permanently but escapes from our hands if we try to catch it to find out what we should do to preserve or promote our health. It is also strange to realize that very few of us recognize that we ourselves should and could do the most for our own health and that waiting for society to care for us can hardly ever result in preserving our health. Thus, promoting health-related activities is of utmost importance in our lives. It seems, however, that health is a complex phenomenon with multiple dimensions. Figure 8.1 shows the major dimensions that primarily