Health starts with "why"

How do we optimize health to perform our best? What foundational components of our behaviour, physiology, and psychology enable us to squeeze the most “juice” out of life?

Professionally, these are some of the questions I’m most interested in. However, in seeking to answer these questions we quickly run into problems of definition.

See, if we’re curious about the components of health that allow us to squeeze the most “juice” out of life, we are obligated to clearly lay out what we mean by “juice”. Is it time with family? Career accomplishment? Running marathons? Or is it crushing 12-year-olds on Fortnight with your buddies? Is it that Sunday morning cappuccino at your favorite café that is, for you, a gott-dang religious experience?

“Juice” is relative. Subjective. Specific to you, and your particular squeeze.

What you like to do is health

If juice is different, person-to-person, then health, too, will manifest differently for each of us. Stress-reduction and social connection for a member of a faith-community might take the form of prayer and Sunday mass, while the lamentable atheist/agnostics among us (myself included) might get by with mindfulness meditation and a weekly brunch with friends. Juice dictates health.

Currently, the World Health Organization uses a dated definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. A challenge is that under this definition there are certain to be exactly zero healthy humans on the planet at any given moment. Instead, we ought to think about health more practically and encompassingly. We ought to define health in a way that captures and holds space for the inherent subjectivity present in the way each of us approach life.

Here’s a start:

Health is our capacity to pursue personally meaningful life experiences and adapt to the challenges we face.

That's it. It's not that complicated. It's just personal.

For health, you need a "why"

The upshot of all this is a bit profound. It suggests that in our health as in our lives (and as Simon Sinek advocates for businesses) we ought to start with "why". As in why do we get up in the morning; what do we care about; what do we believe in enough to cut our teeth on every day. The why can be simple ("I want to feel good") or self-focused ("I need to be fit and functional to drive my startup side-hustle to success"); it can be for others ("I want to be a good example to my kids and my community") or absurdly grandiose ("I want to unite the world around my vision of _____").

Probably it's a little bit of all those things, and more. The only thing that matters is that it's yours, and you tap into it on the regular.