What does it mean to “be healthy”? Nowadays, there is still a belief that ordinary common sense is enough to understand health, and that the meaning of the concept of “being healthy” is intuitively clear to everyone in the same way. Usually this understanding consists of the judgment: “healthy means not sick.” Absolute health is considered an unattainable ideal, which is expressed as a simple sum of average medical standards - blood pressure 120/80, pulse 70-90, hemoglobin level in the blood 120-140, and so on. In fact, the state of health is equated to “no complaints, tests are normal.” This is due to the fact that in everyday life we ​​tend to attach importance to various disorders and imbalances much more often, understanding health only as the absence of illness. After all, many of us are still captive of the traditional medical model, which inspires us that pathology and disease are much more real and reliable phenomena than health and mental well-being. Doctors are sick with patients, and sick people are sick with doctors. Accordingly, a healthy person seems to be a faceless bearer of norms common to all; he is, first of all, a “person without defects.” But then it turns out that this is almost the same as “a person without properties.” Has the understanding of health always been like this? It turns out not. The ancient philosopher Democritus once wrote to Hippocrates: “People ask the Gods for health in their prayers, but They don’t know that they themselves have the means to do this.” In the 5th century. BC. Alcmaeon identified the definition of health as harmony or balance of oppositely directed forces. And the point of view of the famous ancient philosopher Plato was that health is expressed in the proportionality of the relationship between mental and physical. He said that health, like beauty, is determined by proportionality and requires the consent of opposites. Cicero characterized health as the correct relationship between various mental states, but the most general idea is reflected by Plato’s definition. The Stoics (Marcus Aurelius, Seneca) gave the following definition: health is not only balance (attunement and unison of soul and body), but, mainly, a state in which the soul and body obey the laws of the integrity of nature. And healing in the ancient world is considered as the restoration of lost integrity (and-HEALING), therefore, healing is the systematic provision of this integrity. Thus, Greek and Roman philosophers considered primarily the intrapersonal aspect of health, namely, the internal consistency of a person’s bodily and mental manifestations. To be beautiful and healthy, it is not enough to improve the body or just harmonize the soul, it is necessary to feel their optimal ratio. Gradually, as industrial society developed, this understanding of health was lost. And only in the last 20 years, scientists have again turned to studying the role of psychological factors in human physical health. Even a new science has appeared, health psychology - the science of the psychological causes of health, methods and means of preserving, strengthening and developing it. It was in the last 20 years that we began to hear that “all diseases are from nerves” and learned about the existence of a mysterious phenomenon called “psychosomatics”. Despite the fact that at the everyday level these concepts are quite strongly discredited, acting in a number of cases as an object of humor, scientists have obtained real scientific evidence of the dependence of health on the psychological and even spiritual characteristics of a person. In particular, it has now been reliably established that health the following psychological reasons have a significant impact: - behavioral characteristics (for example, aggressiveness, ambition and a fast pace of activity predispose to cardiovascular diseases); - attitude to life (optimism and pessimism, for example); - prevailing emotions (in particular, angry people have greater risk of heart attack); - values ​​and.