Wondering what’s the importance of personal hygiene? Let me explain with a short analogy.
We all love our cars.
Every day we check if it has enough gasoline, if it has enough oil, or if the tires are in good condition.
Why is that so important?
We spend so much money, time, and effort on doing regular maintenance on our cars to prevent losing short-term comfort while moving from one place to another.
But if we want to enjoy long-term benefit of living in a healthy and good-looking body then it's important to practice personal hygiene.
This is one aspect of your body maintenance.
Find below what is personal hygiene and different aspects of life when personal hygiene plays an important role.
What is personal hygiene?
Personal hygiene is a set of activities that maintain your body and environment clean. These cleaning activities reduce the spread of bacteria, microbes, or viruses from person to person, maintaining everybody safe and healthy.
The correct understanding of personal hygiene
As I've mentioned above, personal hygiene is a set of cleaning activities. But their main goal is not to treat health issues. Their goal is to prevent their appearance.
For example:
If your body shows signs of poor hygiene such as dental caries, brushing them more than two times per day won’t fix the dental issue. In this case, you'll need to visit a dentist.
On the other side, regularly performing oral hygiene activities would maintain your teeth in good shape for longer.
This is how hygiene-conscious people understand it.
They don’t count on anybody to maintain themselves clean and healthy. They count on themselves first. They behave in a way that keeps themselves and everybody around safe and healthy.
Hygiene conscious people are aware that it’s better to:
- Eat a clean and balanced diet instead of eating crap.
- Shower regularly to prevent releasing embarrassing body odors.
- Go to sleep before midnight instead of watching TV till late at night.
- Wear appropriate clothing according to weather conditions.
- Follow personal hygiene etiquette when communicating with people.
- Clean and ventilate the house regularly instead of living in a dirty and dusty place.
- Not share personal care tools to prevent the spread of microorganisms.
- Wash their dishes immediately after the meal instead of leaving it for later.
- Make up their bed as soon as they wake up instead of doing that after coming from school or work.
Such hygienic behavior has a positive impact on your health and well-being, which is one of the main personal hygiene benefits.
10 examples when personal hygiene is important
1. Growing a child
Due to his young age, a child can’t understand the importance of personal hygiene for children but their parents do.
Loving parents want to make sure that, when their kids grow up, they know how to take care of themselves.
That’s why one of the first personal care activities that parents teach their children is personal hygiene.
In such a way, parents want to know that their children know how to keep their teeth healthy, behave appropriately in society, and avoid any social embarrassment.
But personal hygiene for kids doesn’t stop here. It becomes even more important when children go to school.
2. At school
The school is one of the first public places where children go. Here, they interact and exchange microorganisms between them.
Also, during this period, the child’s body undergoes puberty. That's when the child's body experiences hormonal and anatomical changes such as hair growth, sweating, pimples, sweating, etc.
Your child’s ability to maintain personal hygiene plays an important role in preventing any sort of contamination from other kids.
3. Public health
On a societal level, public health depends on each person's hygiene. The more hygiene-conscious people there are, the healthier the society is.
On a niched down level, for example, health care providers or food handlers, have a bigger responsibility on maintaining public health. Because their work directly affects their clients. They have to respect strict rules of hygiene to prevent the spread of diseases.
4. Reproductive organs
It is important to maintain the cleanliness of the reproductive organs. It prevents the transmission of infections, reduces offensive odors, and increases the chances of building a strong relationship with your partner.
Women, for example, have to maintain more strict hygiene during the menstruation period. That means changing underwear every day, washing the vagina daily, changing the sanitary napkin or tampons every 4 to 6 hours, not using soap or vagina products.
5. A sign of good manners
If you want to be perceived by others as a friendly and educated person make sure that other people feel comfortable within your company. Your presence around should not disturb or embarrass them.
If you manage to be that kind of person, chances are that many people will like you.
They’ll consider you as being educated, with good culture and being a well-mannered person.
6. Food safety
People need to eat food to survive.
That's why eating 3 to 4 meals a day is a vital process for any person. The body needs healthy nutrients to stay healthy.
But not all food is good for your health.
Some food can be expired or even contaminated and it should not be consumed to prevent serious health problems.
To control food contamination, it’s important to wash your hands before and after meals, to use thoroughly washed and cleaned forks, spoons, and dishes, and make sure that you eat in a clean kitchen environment.
7. In the workplace
The habit of maintaining good personal hygiene in the workplace plays an important role in the safety of the employees.
At work, you spend 8 hours daily shoulder to shoulder with other coworkers.
In crowded offices, all team members share the same bathroom or kitchen facilities, where they leave their microorganisms. Cleaning these shared facilities and maintaining personal hygiene helps to control the transmission of bacteria between team members.
8. How does personal hygiene affect your health?
By maintaining the cleanliness of your body, you minimize the number of bacteria and microorganisms that could land on your body that could infect you with a disease.
On the other hand, poor body hygiene creates a perfect environment for harmful bacteria to develop.
For example.
- if you don't clean your mouth regularly, this increases the chances to develop tooth decay, teeth yellowing, carries developing, gums bleeding, or bad breath.
- if you don't shower regularly your body may release unpleasant odors which may dry out your skin and develop allergies or any other form of skin diseases.
- The lack of body cleaning activities may increase the risk of unhealthy bacteria getting inside the body and cause some form of intestinal disease.
It is important to understand that personal hygiene activities don't treat your diseases. Hygiene activities have the role of disease prevention and health worsening.
If you have a tooth or stomach ache you should go to a doctor.
9. How does personal hygiene affect your personality?
You may be an interesting and humorous person whose personality remains unobserved due to your poor personal hygiene issues.
A person may avoid hanging out with you due to the unpleasant odors coming from your body.
Colleagues may avoid introducing you to their friends if they know that some of your habits may seem repulsive to them.
A person who likes you may reject you after noticing the unpleasant smell out of your mouth after the first kiss.
That's sad. But this is how it happens.
If you want to attract people with your personality it's important to have good personal hygiene. Good personal hygiene is just the entry barrier.
10. How does personal hygiene affect your social life?
Having good personal hygiene, being well-groomed, and good looking gives you the green light into limitless social life. You can easily get in touch with any person and you're welcomed into most social gatherings that you might want to attend.
Hint: try to mirror at least the level of personal hygiene of the people you admire or want to socialize with.
In this way, you may easier get your foot in the door into the world of interesting and successful people.
You'll rarely see a good-looking businessman dressed in a suit hanging out with a person whose clothes are smelly and dirty. That doesn't happen.
Conclusion
Poor personal hygiene acts like an obstacle in your life while maintaining the hygiene of different parts of the body contributes to maintaining good health and physical appearance.
It is important to understand that maintaining personal hygiene does not cure diseases. If you have a bowel disease or have a toothache you should go to a doctor to treat it.
Without hygiene, the human body becomes dirty, has an unpleasant appearance, and becomes a source for developing infections and diseases.
To prevent these consequences, you need to be aware of the importance of personal hygiene and, after that, build a routine using this personal hygiene checklist and follow it.
