Body. Mind. Heart. Relationships.
These are the four parts that make us human and if they are not in healthy alignment, we are going to struggle. That means we have to ensure that we are taking care of ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally and socially. We need to move enough, we need to think enough, we need to process our experience effectively, and we need to build adequate relationships.
I reckon the physical is pretty obvious, because it is easy to track and just means move enough. However, it also seems to be a major challenge for many people, especially given how much information we have and how many ways there are to get exercise. I think that most of us these days don't move enough in our daily routines, often sitting for long periods behind screens both professionally and privately. Even when we know how bad it is for us, we struggle.
Our mental health is harder to evaluate and also probably difficult to deal with because it doesn't seem clear what we should do. But again, I think we are a honest with ourselves, we can probably change our behaviours to improve our condition. Increasing active learning, reducing passive consumption, spending time reflecting and writing, sleeping enough, free-thinking. Again though, intention matters in the activity.
Emotional wellbeing is a tricky one, because we have been conditioned to believe that all of our emotions are valid and should be acted upon, before we evaluate them. And because they are feelings, they always feel right in the moment and we rarely check for accuracy. We feel that our feelings are justified because we feel them, which is a very poor system of validation. So in order to improve our emotional wellbeing, we need to work out how to short-circuit or delay the response time and use the feeling as a trigger to start validation, not reaction.
Now here comes the relationships, which so many people these days discount and say that they aren't social, don't need others, or are introverted. I call bullshit. It is not that people can't be introverted, but I think that it is largely situational, where in some conditions a person holds back socially, in others they are the centre of attention. But more importantly, I believe that everyone requires relationships to be healthy, it is just that their preferences for how those relationships are structured might be different. It is like food, we all need nutrition, but how we get it differs.
I was talking about these things with my wife last night and I realised that when it comes to pretty much all of these areas, she and likely most others are making a fundamental mistake with how to improve them. It seems obvious perhaps, but I believe that most people are trying to "logic" their way into wellbeing and attempting to get their thoughts, motivations and feelings in the right spot before doing anything. Based on how we are fundamentally built, I think this is backwards.
The oldest part of our brain has been with us for a very long time, since the dinosaurs. The newest part of our brain developed only about 20 million years ago though, the prefrontal cortex. This is where we do our logical thinking, but it is pretty much impossible to convince the lizard brain to act differently through thought alone. What the lizard brain needs to learn is activity. It learns by doing, and that means that for the majority of the issues we face in those four components of who we are, we must act in order to affect them.
Thought isn't enough.
I have written several times about the process of human creation, of thought, word, action. We think an idea, we discuss with others or ourselves to develop it, we enact it. And while the idea is a type of creation, as is the development, it isn't until we make it that it comes into existence. It is the same for our human components, where we can't get tangible changes until we make them. And in my opinion, this means that the most efficient and effective way of improving our wellbeing and aligning those four quadrants, is to do.
Even if what we do isn't perfect or even close, each iteration means that we have more experience and collateral to use to improve the next attempt. And as we do this intentionally across those four sectors, we start to automatically bring ourselves into alignment, as each feeds into the others, and feeds off the others. The more we exercise these parts of us (move them), the better their condition becomes, if we are moving them in the right way.
Just like when we physically move we have to make sure we have the right form of movement, we have to do it for all things. However, the "right form" isn't overly important if starting out light and experimenting, which is what we should be doing with all four parts, especially those we are weakest in. We don't have to go hard at everything, we can ease in and adjust along the way as we start to improve our condition in that area. this won't get overnight results, but it will chip away at the rock to start to uncover the best version of ourselves - the version where we are healthy, body, mind, heart, and relationships.
As I was saying to my wife last night in regards to physical activity, unless it is intentional and consistent, it isn't going to happen. This is because we have designed so much of our life around being stationary, so we will never get enough movement through our daily routine. Similarly, we have made ourselves consumers of content, not thinkers of ideas, so our mental health suffers. And of course, our emotional health is impacted by both of those areas heavily, and enabled to be more volatile and demanding through our daily environment. And our relationships suffer, whether they be the ones we have with people close to us, strangers, or the uncountable amount of them with every facet of our life, whether it be money, class, looks, society, politics - and the list goes on.
These days, our general environment isn't built for our health and wellbeing, which means that unless we actively find ways to do the tasks that keep us healthy, we will fall into the defaults and end up imbalanced. So, the fastest way to get healthy, is to completely redesign our daily activities so that we are doing the things we need to do, by default. This isn't always possible in reality though, so what we then have to do is ensure that we are actively doing something daily across each of the four sectors. We have to intentionally move, think, validate our emotions, and interact enough.
It really isn't so hard.
Taraz
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