The importance of personal hygiene is as regular car maintenance is for a car.
Without maintenance, the car breaks down faster while, without personal hygiene, the human body worsens its appearance and weakens its health and well-being.
Are you still interested in understanding the meaning and importance of personal hygiene in our life?
Continue reading.
The meaning of personal hygiene
The meaning of personal hygiene is to reduce the spread of bacteria and diseases from one person to another.
In simple words, each person should maintain its body clean and healthy so that to prevent infecting other people.
If each person would think and act as such there would be fewer contaminations from person to person.
The importance of personal hygiene
Personal hygiene is a set of activities that prevent the worsening of your health or state of mind.
Personal hygiene doesn’t promote good health. It prevents the worsening of health.
For example:
If your body is showing signs of poor hygiene like bad teeth, for example, brushing them more times than you used to won’t make your teeth healthier.
On the other side, having healthy teeth and brushing them two times per day would keep them healthy for a longer time.
Hygiene vs Body Cleanliness vs Grooming
To understand the factors that contribute to better personal hygiene, let's define their meaning.
1. Hygiene
Personal hygiene refers to maintaining the cleanliness of the body as a whole. A hygienic body prevents the release of your own microorganisms to others and getting them from others to you.
2. Body cleanliness
Body cleanliness refers to all the body cleaning activities such as hand washing, showering, hair washing, teeth brushing, etc.
You need to apply these body cleaning activities, on a regular basis, to maintain good personal hygiene.
3. Grooming
Personal grooming activities prolong the cleanliness effect of your body.
For example:
You have better chances to maintain the cleanliness of the body if, after taking a shower, you moisturize the skin, maintain facial hair, and wear clean clothes. That maintains the body fresh for longer.
Are you a hygiene conscious person?
It takes some daily effort to act on the different types of personal hygiene to maintain the body clean. But a hygiene conscious person, despite taking care of his hygiene, cleans after himself to maintain his environment clean.
He believes that a clean body is good, but a clean body in a clean environment is even better.
Want to know the difference between myths about personal hygiene and real facts? Click on the link.
Hygiene conscious people believe that living in a clean and healthy environment begins with themselves. They make an effort to maintain their body and environment clean and safe for themselves. They don’t count on somebody who will do that for them.
Also, they understand that by neglecting personal hygiene, they make it harder for themselves to connect with people.
This state of awareness helps them differentiate between the habits that make their life easier and the ones that create obstacles in their life.
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, which is one of the main personal hygiene benefits.
10 examples when personal hygiene is important
1. Growing a child
A child does not have the necessary awareness to understand the importance of personal hygiene. But their parents do.
Their parents are the ones who teach their kids their first personal hygiene activities such as teeth brushing or handwashing.
Children learn these habits by regular repetition under parent’s supervision.
For parents, it’s not easy to run after your child through the entire house just to wash his hands. Though, parents, who love their children and want them to grow strong and healthy, make the effort.
They want to make sure that, once their child becomes independent, he knows how to take care of himself and be healthy.
2. At school
The school is one of the first public places where children go to where they interact closely with each other, which leads to the exchange of microorganisms between them.
That’s when your child's hygiene plays an important role in preventing him from an unwanted contamination from other kids.
That becomes especially important when your child goes through the puberty period. In this period, his body undergoes through different hormonal and anatomical changes such as hair growth, sweating, pimples, etc.
This is when children face the need to maintain good personal hygiene to reduce the transmission of unwanted microorganisms between them.
3. Public health
Public health depends on each of us. Because it’s public, it doesn’t mean that you’re not responsible for contaminating the people around.
A bigger responsibility of maintaining public health, health care providers have.
Because they work closely with patients must respect strict rules of hygiene to prevent spreading the diseases of their patients.
For example,
A dentist must use sterile and hygienic instruments to avoid the infection of their patients with microorganisms from previous patients.
4. 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.
Women, for example, have to maintain a more strict hygiene during 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 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 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 like you.
They’ll consider you educated, with good culture and being well-mannered.
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 kitchen 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 as well. At work, you spend 8 hours daily shoulder to shoulder with other 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
You may be an interesting and humorous person whose personality remains unobserved by people who can't stand your poor personal hygiene issues.
Poor personal hygiene is 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 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.
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 your 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.
3 main personal hygiene prevention methods
Disease prevention 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.
Follow a personal hygiene checklist to improve your overall well-being.
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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, you need to be aware of he importance of personal hygiene and follow the hygiene routine.
