With little rainfall and no rivers or lakes nearby, Bellavista, Peru lacks the water needed for human consumption and crop irrigation. But the frequent fog that blows in from the Pacific Ocean is filled with moisture, so ....

Huge screens have been erected with basins below. In a single day, a single fog-catching screen can yield up to 100 gallons of water.

While you are more likely to be a fast-paced Palmertonian than a high-and-dry Peruvian, this story just might relate to you.

Do you frequently find yourself not fully understanding why you react to situations the way you do? Too often living in a sort of self-induced emotional fog?

If so, you need to figuratively do what’s been done in Peru.

Your fog catcher, however, will not be constructed with mesh screening and permanently placed by poles driven deep into the earth. Yours will be abstract, immediate, and made of nothing more than an awareness of the immediate situation.

Build it well and it will catch what leads to better physical and mental health.

Such awareness the Buddhists call mindfulness, and in a book about it, The Miracle of Mindfulness (Beacon Press, 1987), Thich Nhat Hanh explains how a lack of it lessens life.

“If while washing the dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us ... we are not alive during the time we wash the dishes ... [W]e are sucked away into the future — and we are incapable actually living one minute of life.”

You need to guard against getting “sucked away into the future.”

It does more than deprive you of immediate pleasant moments. It creates anxious ones and the sort of emotional unrest that hurts your mental — and surprisingly enough! — physical health.

The accepted estimate has four out of every five Americans at one time or another encountering the sort of stress that adversely affects them physically, and I’d wager that everybody — even Buddhist monks like Thich Nhat Hanh — has been adversely affected by it mentally. While exercise, deep-breathing techniques, and forms of meditation are suggested as the typical ways to reduce stress once you encounter it, there’s a way to feel less of it at its onset.

Recognize it. More specifically, recognize the situation producing the stress as the stressor, and you diminish its power.

And it is powerful.

A study conducted at Pennsylvania State University and published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity last January found that a bad mood compromises the way the immune system responds, increasing the risk of inflammation. While some inflammation is a needed response to infections and wounds, the chronic high levels of inflammation produced by constant worry can create chronic health problems, such as arthritis and back pain.

In fact, in Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection (Grand Central Life & Style, 1991), Dr. John E. Sarno argues that most of the back pain that four out of every five Americans at one time encounter has emotional unrest at its core. Though it is not related to back pain, I have a personal situation that supports Sarno’s premise.

Though once or twice during the school year I might develop the type of nasal congestion from allergies that makes my voice sound as if I’m sick, I rarely contract a full-blown cold. I haven’t taken a sick day for sickness, for instance, since just before I began a half-year educational sabbatical in January of 2001.

I mention taking a sabbatical because in my mind that’s what caused the cold that became the sinusitis that produced such facial pain that I couldn’t concentrate.

I signed up for the sabbatical before I ever met my students that year. When I did, I found them to be impressively polite, genuinely hard working, and really attuned to my teaching style and expectations.

In short, I was having a blast teaching them.

As the sabbatical approached, my guilty feelings about leaving them — especially since I knew I was leaving them in less-than-competent hands — increased.

As did the congestion in my head.

Finally, sometime during the sick day, I put two and two together. I realized I was, in a sense, making myself sick with guilt and worry.

Once I recognized this, it was as if a dam broke in my nose. I blew out a surprising amount of slimy stuff and I felt better immediately.

While this is the most dramatic story I can offer, I swear I have avoided dozens of potential colds since then simply by recognizing the tickle in my throat as a harbinger of getting one and asking myself, “Do you really want to get sick, or do you simply want to get in touch with what’s going on?”

That question leads to reflection. The reflection leads to awareness, so I moderate my workouts, think positive thoughts, drink a ton of green tea, and get to bed early — but only after getting lost in some good fiction, the best way I find to ease my mind.

And that awareness, I swear, also triggers my immune system into hyperdrive.