Getting healthy is not a straight line. It’s a mess.
I teach classes and provide coaching in the fitness industry, and virtually all of my students and clients want to achieve the same thing: getting healthier.
When I ask them what that means, most respond in familiar ways. They want to eat better, feel better, have more energy and work out more. Or they focus on outcomes like losing weight or reducing body fat.
I usually find that’s a good time to clarify what healthy is.
Health is not an activity or outcome. Health is defined as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being — not merely the absence of disease, illness, or injury (WHO, 1946).
I added the emphasis on the word “complete” because all three components matter tremendously when it comes to health. Here’s the kicker: So does perception.
Perceived health is just as it sounds: subjective. Self-rated health is one of the most widely used and recognized measures in clinical settings (Bombak, 2013). Even so, perception may be skewed. For example, someone who is physically capable of playing professional football may be mentally incapable of emotional reasoning in experiences that make them feel angry. Yet, this person may perceive as “healthy” based on his physical state of health.
The path for a football player to become healthier is going to be different than for a behavioral therapist who spends more time on the couch than in the gym.
Getting healthy is unique for each individual. It’s multi-dimensional. And the path to a state of health isn’t linear. It’s messy. It starts with planning, yet unplanned things happen. Practice helps, but this takes work. And sometimes we don’t want to work or feel like we can’t. Which leads to perception and the way we respond and reason through life.
At home, work, and in the community we are:
planning daily lifestyle conditions to become what we want,
practicing awareness (or not) of experiences to be what we want, and
perceiving arousal then responding (or reacting) to do what we want.
These three dimensions work together: lifestyle, awareness and arousal. The general ways these dimensions help being and becoming healthier are: managing a lifestyle progressing towards healthier conditions; practicing awareness skills to be purposefully ‘in’ (or present in) health conditions, and; knowing when, how, and what things arouse conditioned responses to do what is reasonably healthy.
Lifestyles are the blueprint to become healthy. Epigenetics is simple to pronounce but complex to explain. In the most basic terms, it’s the field of science determining how the environment turns genes “on” and “off”, also referred to as active or inactive genes. In epigenetics, lifestyle and environment both equal:
What you eat
What you drink
What you breathe
How you move
At a cellular level we literally become those four things.
Awareness is being in the actual moment. Mindfulness is the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally, to things as they are (Segal et al, 2007). Thoughts label an experience, therefore judging it. Reality is the actual moment. Awareness is:
Responses by choice
Focused attention on existence
Freedom from automatic reactions
Moodiness and old habits dissolve when we are mindfully aware.
Arousal is doing what’s believed to be reasonable. Emotions enforce our reasoning (Verweij, 2015). Arousal triggers our nervous system to decode how to reason something then respond emotionally. Yet, some of us have faulty decoding. This phenomenon, coined as sensory defensiveness, is inflated arousal from doing excessive reasoning. This results in health difficulties, including:
Avoidance
Anxiousness
Distractibility
Digestive and gastrointestinal difficulties
Emotions arouse our body to initially evaluate with a primal instinct to protect based on reasoning.
To get a grip on your health start with identifying what you want. Then simplify it by breaking it down with why you want that one habit to focus on. Then make it more simple. Set a specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound goal. Include accountability through support of friends, family, colleagues, and the necessary professionals. Choose people who provide genuine direction unique to your lifestyle, awareness, and arousal needs.
Getting healthy doesn’t have to be messy. With the best support it will be and feel closer to a straight line.