Maintaining good personal hygiene is as important for your body as regular maintenance is for a car. Without maintenance, the human body and the vehicle rust and break down faster.
When your health is weak and physical appearance is poor, your well-being is affected.
On the other side, you experience a much better life if you support it with strong health, good physical appearance and self-esteem.
Today, you’ll find out what's the meaning of personal hygiene and why is it important for your general well-being. You'll find examples of how personal hygiene plays an important role in different aspects in life.
The meaning of personal hygiene
The meaning of personal hygiene is to maintain yourself healthy by reducing the number of unhealthy bacteria on the body through body cleaning activities.
The importance of personal hygiene
Maintaining high personal hygiene standards builds a positive baseline for your success in any aspect of your life like relationships, work, sport, health, social, etc.
The relation between personal hygiene, body cleanliness and grooming
To better understand what factors contribute to better personal hygiene, let's define the meaning of these terms.
Hygiene
Hygiene refers to all the cleanliness maintaining activities meant to prevent the spread of harmful bacteria, microorganisms and odors around the environment or between humans to reduce the chances of being infected with a disease.
For example.
You are much safer to live or work in a clean and healthy environment rather than spending most of your time in stinky, sticky and dirty places where you’re much more predisposed to catch harmful bacteria and get sick.
Body cleanliness
Body cleanliness includes all the cleaning activities like hand washing, showering, hair washing, teeth brushing, etc, meant to maintain your body clean and free of germs.
An adult applies these personal hygiene activities regularly to take care of his own body. The exception being the childhood period when parents took care of our hygiene for us.
Grooming
Maintaining yourself well-groomed includes activities that empower personal hygiene as well.
For example.
You are more likely to have good hygiene when you wash your head regularly, use skin moisturizers or wear clean and fresh clothes rather than not.
Be a hygiene conscious person
There are many types of personal hygiene and it requires some effort to maintain good hygiene. But if this effort results in cleaner and healthier environment, the conscious person is willing to help.
For example.
If you drank the water from a plastic bottle, don’t throw it on the ground. Plastic bottles decompose into the ground in hundreds of years, which means that you make more garbage than help to maintain the environment clean.
Hygiene conscious people believe that living in a clean and healthy environment begins with their willingness to maintain their bodies and environments clean.
Also, they understand that by neglecting good hygiene, they make themselves a lot of enemies because many people consider this to be disgusting, disrespectful or threatening.
Following good hygiene teaches you to differentiate between good and bad habits, which helps you to avoid the ones that hurt your well-being.
Hygiene conscious people are aware that it's better to:
- Maintain a clean and balanced diet instead of eating crap food.
- Shower regularly instead of doing it occasionally.
- Go to bed before midnight instead of staying awake late nights.
- Wear appropriate clothing according to weather conditions and etiquette.
- Keep the house clean and ventilated instead of living in a dirty and dusty place.
- Not to share personal care tools with others because that is not hygienic.
- Wash your dishes immediately after the meal instead of leaving it for later.
- Make up your bed as soon as you wake up instead of doing it after you come from school or work.
Such hygienic behavior has a positive impact on your health and well-being.
7 Examples when personal hygiene is important
1. Growing a child
A child does not understand the importance of personal hygiene. For him, hygiene activities are just a matter of fun and games played with parents.
For parents, on the other hand, it is important to teach their child how to maintain good personal hygiene. This assures them that their kid knows how to take care of himself when he becomes independent.
To teach the child personal hygiene skills, parents should perform hygiene activities by themselves, so that, children could mimic their behavior.
2. At school
The school is one of the first public places where children go to.
As students, children interact closely with each other, which leads to the exchange of bacteria and microorganisms between them. Especially, when they go through the puberty period. In this period, their body undergoes through specific anatomical changes like hair growth, sweating, pimples, etc.
For the first time, children face the need to maintain good personal hygiene to reduce the transmission of unwanted microorganisms between them and to prevent the number of infections.
This is why it's important that your child washes his hands after using the bathroom, before and after snack and meal times or wears clean and non-smelly clothes.
3. Public health
The public health depends on each single person. No matter if you are a healthcare provider or simply a patient.
Health care providers must respect the personal hygiene rules to control the spread of diseases to their patients.
For example.
A dentist must use sterile and hygienic instruments to avoid the infection o their patients with microorganisms from previous patients.
However, to control the spread of infections and diseases, each person must follow the rules of personal hygiene as well.
For example.
Each employee must have good personal hygiene to control the spread of diseases in the office as a way of maintaining a healthy environment for all the coworkers.
4. Importance of personal hygiene of reproductive organs
It is important to maintain your reproductive organs clean to prevent the transmission of infections, reduce offensive odors and to increase the chances of building a strong relationship with your partner.
For women, for example, it’s important to maintain more strict hygiene during menstruation period. This means changing underwear every day, washing the vagina daily, changing the sanitary napkin or tampons every 4 to 6 hours, not using soaps or vagina products. This helps to eliminate the unpleasant odors and keeps the vagina clean and healthy.
5. Personal hygiene - a sign of good manners
If you want to be perceived by others as a friendly and educated person make sure people feel comfortable within your company. Your presence around should not make them gagging or make their eyes watering.
If you manage to be that kind of person, chances are that many people will like you. They’ll consider you an educated, with good culture and 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.
But not all food is good for your health.
To provide your body with healthy nutrients, you need to eat fresh and non-contaminated food. But if your food is contaminated or expired it may cause 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 environment.
This refers to your kitchen, where you prepare your food, as well as to the restaurants, where you eat most often.
Personal hygiene, environmental hygiene, and physical appearance are extremely important in food handling and preparation, whether at home or in restaurants.
7. In the workplace
The habit of maintaining good personal hygiene plays an important role in the workplace, where you spend 8 hours shoulder to shoulder with your coworkers.
For example.
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 and which 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
Poor personal hygiene blocks other people's chances to see the best qualities in you.
You may be an interesting and humorous person whose personality remains unobserved by people who can't stand the unpleasant smell of your body or bad breath.
Poor personal hygiene acts like an obstacle for people who might be interested to know your personality a little better.
For example.
- 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 habit 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 attract people with your personality it's important to have good personal hygiene.
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. Having a good physical appearance you are welcomed into most social gatherings that you might want to attend.
Hint: try to mirror at list 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 suite hanging out with a person whose clothes are smelly and dirty. That doesn't happen.
Explaining the personal hygiene prevention methods and their relation to health and well-being
Disease prevention and health maintenance begins with good personal hygiene. This removes the obstacles that make you feel unsatisfied by the way you look or by the way other people perceive you.
Start maintaining the cleanliness of the fundamental areas of your body to improve your overall well-being.
Oral care
To maintain maintain your mouth clean make the habit to follow an oral hygiene routine at least two times per day. This basic routine should include teeth brushing, dental flossing and tongue cleaning.
Hands hygiene
Wash your hands regularly and maintain your fingernails trimmed and short.
Your hands are the dirtiest part of your body because you touch many dirty and dusty objects.
At the same time, unkempt fingernails and dirty hands look unpleasant which may embarrass people when shaking hands with you. Especially, when they notice that black line of much beneath your fingernails.
Body hygiene
Take showers regularly whenever you feel that you feel smelly and not fresh.
Showering is a great way to eliminate sweat or other body eliminations head to toe. While showering, pay attention to your armpit as this area releases the most odors.
Also, wash your feet thoroughly as well.
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, it is important to maintain good personal hygiene.