24. How health mindsets affect Americans’ actual health and which windows to open to minimize exposure when sharing a ride.
Health mindsets used to be a rather obscure topic for me, borderline hard to comprehend. What do I think of when you ask me about health? Good food, exercise, meditation, passion for something. But for many of us, it can be the reverse; first thoughts coming to our minds may be disease, cancer, weakness. An interesting study from 2018 published in Annals of Behavioral Medicine dug into the details of how American people think about health, and how their mindsets are related to their actual mental and physical health.
Americans’ Health Mindsets: Content, Cultural Patterning, and Associations With Physical and Mental Health — medium difficulty read. Conner et al. divided their work into two studies, with increasing depth. The first one asked participants a few open-ended questions, including “what does being healthy mean to you?” or “what keeps you from being your healthiest self?”, as well as requested some overall self-ratings of health. The researchers then divided the answers into groups, depending on overreaching themes present through the answers: behavioral, medical, psychological, physical, social and spiritual. The results were then analyzed to find patterns of thought, including the most common definition of health. Turns out that for over 41% of participants health is basically an absence of illness, and the most used theme in such definitions was psychological one (meaning people tied meaning of health to feeling particular kind of way, some state of mind.) For cause of health, behavioral was by far the most common theme, mentioned by over 90% of participants. Interestingly, this theme was mentioned less among older people, whose answers indicated medical and spiritual themes instead. Also older respondents tended to mention more themes overall than younger people, as did participants with lower socioeconomic status, compared to ones with higher status. How do such mindsets influence health? Turns out that the number of themes was positively correlated with number of chronic diseases and bad mental health days — the more themes mentioned, the worse respondents’s health. The second study was based on closed ranking based questions, where participants shown their associations between certain habits and health, as well as rated their general health through a few lenses. The results shown some more interesting patterns, like that associating certain cause themes with health corresponded to worse wellbeing overall, and vice versa. There are far too many findings, including some subtle ones that need to be researched further, to describe them here. I definitely recommend this read, even more so as dr. Jennifer Eberhardt is one of its authors.
As there is hope to get out of the current pandemic through masking, distancing and vaccines, COVID-19 continues to be our day-to-day reality. One of the common things many people have to often do is car rides. Being in an enclosed small space with a person who’s health state we cannot be sure of can be a stressful situation, also due to higher possibility of exposure to the virus through exhaled aerosols. What is the best way to setup an air circulation in the car to minimize our exposure?
Airflows inside passenger cars and implications for airborne disease transmission — medium-easy read. Mathai et al. conducted a number of numerical simulations (also partially verified by experiments) to understand how different open-window configurations modified the spread of aerosols exhaled by the passenger or driver in a 5-seater car. In particular, they have analyzed the spread between front-left seated driver and back-right seated passenger, picturing a setup with maximal distance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best results by far are achieved by having all 4 windows fully open, resulting in almost no particles having a chance to travel from one person to another. However, as this is often impractical, other configurations results do bring some surprises. For example, opening windows farthest from both travelers (front-right and rear-left ones) results in less particles spread from driver to passenger than if each of them opened their own window. However, opening the third window on the rear passenger side increases the transmission again. In contrast, protecting the driver from the passengers aerosols is more effective when their respective windows are opened, and even more effective if any three are down. The authors describe the airflow in an easy to understand yet detailed way, and provide some suggestions about finding the safest way to travel. Also, the core findings are very well demonstrated through simple graphics. Timely, digestible and practical research — definitely worth spending time to read!
