Health Psychology: What Is It, Its Role, And More

If you have heard of health psychology for the first time and you don’t have any idea about it…don’t worry you have landed on the right page. In this blog, we will learn about what is health psychology and everything related to it.

So, without wasting any time let’s learn about it.

Introduction to Health Psychology

Healthy psychology is a unique area that is related to biology, behavior, psychology, and social factors that influence illness and health in us. Other factors in health psychology include behavioral medicine and medical psychology. They can be used interchangeably with health psychology.

Basically, illness and health are influenced by various factors. While heredity and contagious disorders are common, we can say that various psychological and behavioral factors impact our overall physical and mental wellbeing along with various medical conditions.

Health psychology basically focuses on the promotion of health as well as the treatment and prevention of illness and diseases. Psychologists who are trained and specialized in such areas are known as health psychologists. Their role is to focus on understanding how people actually react, cope, and recover from any type of illness.

Meanwhile, health psychologists also work together for the improvement of the healthcare system and the health care policy approaches introduced or implied by the government.

Facts Related to Health Psychology

• American Psychological Association’s (APA) Division 38 works for health psychology.
• APA’s focus is to understand and improve health illness by studying and researching the psychological factors that impact They also work for health policy and the health care system.
• Health psychology took its actual place in the 1970s for addressing the rapid change of healthcare. Reason being, the leading causes of mortality. And the researchers found that it can be linked to lifestyle. Therefore, health psychology emerged to increase life expectancy, lifestyle, health, illness, and more factors related to it.
• Health psychologists basically help people to live a better and healthy life by examining the patterns of behavior that impacts health, disease or illness.

Why and How is Health Psychology Different & Unique?

As we read above, health psychology focuses on health and illness. It becomes easy to help people by changing their behavior that contributes to illness or impacts overall wellbeing.

Let’s understand it with the help of an example, health psychologists who are working in this field will conduct extensive research for preventing unhealthy behaviors like smoking or consuming alcohol and along with this, they will also look for ways that encourage a healthy lifestyle like meditating or exercising.

Basically, this field is unique because health psychologists look upon all the related psychological factors that influence bad health and try to convert them into better health choices so that illness can be prevented.

Currently Studies Issues in Health Psychology

All of the Health Psychologists work with groups, communities, and individuals for decreasing risk factors, reducing illness, and improving overall health. They conduct extensive research in areas like:

• Reducing stress
• Weight management
• Improvement of daily nutrition
• Smoking cessation
• Reduction of risky sexual behavior
• Prevention of illnesses
• Grief counseling
• Hospice care
• Understands the effects of illness
• Improvement of recovery rate
• Teaching and applying coping skills in individuals, groups, and communities

Biosocial Model of Health Psychology

The major approach used for conducting research applied in health psychology is named a biosocial model. According to this model, health and illness are the outcomes of psychological, biological, and social factors.

1. Biological factors: Biological factors comprise genetic conditions and inherited personality traits.

2. Social factors: Social factors comprise family relationships, cultural beliefs, and social support systems.

3. Psychological factors: Psychological factors comprise personality characteristics, stress levels, and lifestyle.

The Practice of Health Psychology:

Health psychology is the fastest-growing field noted in the area of psychology. Due to the increasing numbers of people seeking help for mental health and physical health, more people are seeking health-related resources and information on the internet. Therefore, health psychologists are focusing on educating people about their wellbeing, behaviors, and health so that they can understand, improve, and educate others as well.

Topics covered by health psychologists are maintaining a healthy weight, maintaining a positive outlook, avoiding unhealthy or risky behaviors that can help in combating depression, anxiety, and stress.

Moreover, health psychologists also help people, groups, and individuals by training and educating other health professionals as well so that they can incorporate gained knowledge from the field of health psychology.

That’s all folks! I hope this blog helps you to understand everything you wanted to know about Health Psychology. Comment down and share your views on the journal of health psychology. For more such content, connect with us on all social media platforms.

Thanks for reading!

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