Health Psychology

Health psychology is the 'use of psychological principles to promote health and to prevent illness' (Taylor, 1990). In other words, health psychology uses the knowledge and ideas from psychology to cut down on health risk factors, and promote healthy behaviors. Health risk factors include things like stress, overeating, and putting yourself in danger, including, for instance, not buckling one's seat belt, habits that increase chances of contracting illnesses. Being over-stressed is in fact a health risk factor, because stress can contribute to psychosomatic illnesses. Health promoting behaviors are any behavior that promotes health, and include things like good exercise, little stress, buckling seat belts, wearing a helmet, and healthy eating. Using health psychology by cutting down on health risk factors and increasing healthy behaviors can greatly increase ones chances of living longer.

Health psychology has three focuses. The first is to prevent future health problems. A common example of this is anti-smoking campaigns, which aim to prevent future health complications caused by smoking by prevent people from taking up smoking in the first place.

The second focus is to help change the behaviours of people so that they may not become a health problem. Smoking, again, is an example of this. There is an equally large focus on helping people quit smoking as there is on helping prevent smoking in the first place.

The third focus of health psychology is to help those with terminal illnesses lead a better life, helping reduce such things as depression or anxiety. The focus here will be on the quality of life, and attempting to increase it.