This page pulls together my most essential information about personal hygiene.
You’ll learn which are the first poor hygiene signs that speak about a person's poor personal hygiene and what are the negative effects they might have on that person's health and wellbeing.
After showing you the bad side of poor hygiene, I’ll show you the bright side of it.
You’ll learn why practicing good personal hygiene is so important in our lives and how you can take care of it like a pro by creating checklists, routines, and learning good hygiene manners.
I’ve tried to present the basics of everything you need so that you can make a habit of practicing good personal hygiene every day.
But, first, let's define the term personal hygiene.
Table of contents:
What is personal hygiene?
Personal hygiene speaks about a person’s awareness that it can achieving two important things.
The first important thing is that it maintains a person's own health. It’s important to understand that maintaining personal hygiene doesn't improve it but it just maintains it from getting worse.
The second important thing is that, by practicing good hygiene, the person prevents the spread of his microorganisms and viruses which may possibly infect other people around him. In such a way, he shows his willingness of maintaining a safe and healthy environment around him whether he is at work, at social gatherings, or at home with his family, which improves his social acceptance.
The popular personal hygiene myths
Personal hygiene is not rocket science. The idea of maintaining your body clean is simple, logical, and it’s common sense.
However, some people are taking their body cleanliness to extremes and usually give birth to different personal hygiene myths. Some popular myths you can find below.
- Myth: "You need to wash your head every single day".
The truth is that to maintain your hair clean it’s important to wash it regularly. But how regular, it depends from person to person because different people have different hair types, condition of the scalp, and hair length.
So, it’s not wise to tell everybody to wash their hair daily. Everybody should use common sense.
- Myth: "Using hand disinfectants excessively protects your health".
The truth is that alcohol-containing hands cleaning products clean the dirt, bacteria, or any other germs from the hands very well but using these products excessively wipes off a lot of good bacteria that maintain the microbial fauna of the hand skin healthy.
If you’ve ever used alcohol-based products, you have probably noticed that hand skin very after that.
- Myth: "Bad breath is just a sign of lack of oral hygiene".
Bad breath is an embarrassing issue.
That’s why when someone’s breath is too tough, we tell them to go and brush their teeth. But we don’t realize that a person's bad breath issue is caused by a health problem such as tooth decay, gingivitis, or an issue of the gastrointestinal tract.
That’s why some people notice that their breath stinks, they compulsively start brushing their teeth without realizing that they should also go and check with the dentist or a doctor.
- Myth: "Maintaining personal hygiene is a choice".
Some people believe that maintaining the cleanliness of their bodies is their choice.
If you live in the forest alone and you don’t want to take a shower today. That’s perfectly fine. But if you connect with people during the day who might be embarrassed by your body odor then your hygiene is not a choice but a necessity, if you want to be socially accepted.
The negative effects of poor personal hygiene
So, when someone neglects the need of his body for cleanliness the negative effects of poor personal hygiene add up affecting many aspects of your life. For example:
1. Social life
The effects of personal hygiene leave visible signs on your body. These signs are usually poor health signs or poor and non-attractive physical appearance.
These negative aspects of poor personal hygiene can greatly affect your social life.
2. Personal presentation
Personal presentation is your skill of communicating about yourself through your physical appearance.
The better you look the better is the message that you communicate to the people around you.
A poor personal presentation speaks about you as being a weak person who can not manage his hygiene, at least.
Imagine what would your coworkers think of you if you showed up at work with greasy hair, wearing smelly clothes, uncared long nails, etc.
Most likely many would avoid you all day.
3. Your career
Poor hygiene can greatly affect your career growth.
You might be a good employee but if your poor hygiene affects the team's efficiency, you hardly will be promoted into the management teams.
A study shows that 23% of employers are less likely to promote an employee with poor personal hygiene or physical appearance.
4. Romantic relationships
Poor personal hygiene lowers your chances of finding that one with whom you'd share mutually satisfying moments.
By having bad breath or unpleasant body odor, for example, you make it difficult for anyone to like you. Even your tolerant relationship partner might be turned off by your awful body odor, bad breath, or dirty clothes.
The importance of personal hygiene
Many people believe that practicing personal hygiene improves their health. But that's not the correct way of thinking about it.
The main importance of personal hygiene is in its preventive character. This preventive measure gives you the possibility to enjoy the main personal hygiene benefits.
Two of the most important benefits are preventing your health from worsening and preventing the spread of bacteria, germs, and other microorganisms.
How to practice good personal hygiene
1. Improve the environmental factors that promote good personal hygiene
Sometimes, the generic advice to wash hands or to shower more often simply doesn’t work if certain factors in your life are de-motivating you to follow good hygiene practices.
It feels like knowing how to maintain good hygiene but doing it due to the absence of motivating environmental factors.
The secret is improving your environment to make it easier to keep up with personal hygiene. This means earning more money, changing your location to a better neighborhood, or to a location that provides all the necessary facilities for maintaining good hygiene.
2. Follow a comprehensive personal hygiene checklist
With age your personal hygiene tips and checklist should change.
As adults, the personal care habits learned from our parents are already not enough to keep our bodies hygienic because you do more things during the day such as meeting more people than you used to or being in much more different circumstances.
As a grown up, there are more types of hygiene to be maintained.
Read more:
3. Create daily and weekly hygiene routines
Some areas of the body require daily cleaning while other parts of it require weekly cleaning .
Understanding this, you can break down the entire personal hygiene list into small but manageable daily, weekly, and monthly routines making personal care much easier.
Read more: How to Create a Daily and Weekly Personal Hygiene Routine
4. Follow the personal hygiene etiquette
The importance of personal hygiene and good manners are:
- It makes a person more acceptable and respectable in society.
- It makes someone a good role model to follow.
- It promotes good health physically, socially, mentally, psychologically, or spiritually.
Following a personal hygiene etiquette:
- Allows you to know how to behave appropriately around people to feel more comfortable.
- Protect the feelings of others by making them feel comfortable in your company.
- It makes communication clearer.
- It enhances your status at work by being perceived more capable, more professional, and more intelligent.
- It makes a good first impression about you.
Read more: Personal Hygiene Etiquette: The Way to Social Acceptance