What it Means to Live a Healthy Life
When we talk about health and being ‘healthy’, what exactly do we mean?
Although the world has involved more of the mental aspect of health, we still tend just to imagine a fit body. However, living a healthy life goes beyond both the mental and the physical.
As you chase a better version of yourself and work towards your dream lifestyle, it’s good to keep the following as a mental checklist.
You wouldn’t want to become miserable or ill as a consequence of chasing and reaching your goals, so why not get what you want and be as healthy as you can be doing it?
This is how to master your health, in every way.
Physcial
As physical health is the most obvious, it’ll be the one we cover first.
Exercise is definitely one of the biggest contributors to having a healthy body, but it also greatly improves people's mental health. But what exercise should you be doing?
First of all, cardio. Doing some cardiovascular training is essential, which means engaging in activities that raise your heart rate, like running, cycling, or brisk walking, to strengthen your heart, improve circulation, and boost overall endurance.
What might be a little less obvious is doing some form of resistance training. To maximise your physical health, including a form of resistance training, is a good idea, as having more muscle mass has been shown to improve sleep quality, support cognitive functions like memory, improve metabolic health and boost longevity, among other benefits.
Doing resistance training doesn’t only mean lifting heavy weights, it can mean callisthenics, kettlebell workouts and even pilates.
Another big contributor to a healthy physical being is nutrition. Choosing a good diet is difficult, with accessibility and price being factors; it can be quite challenging to sustain an optimal diet.
However, doing so can be the difference between merely getting by and truly thriving, influencing energy levels, immune function, mood stability, and long-term disease prevention. These are just some of the factors.
When talking nutrition, the list is endless, just eat well.
Next, we have sleep, and when talking about sleep, there really isn’t much to say besides that not sleeping well can completely eliminate all benefits from both exercise and nutrition.
New science has shown that sleep is much more important than most people think. I won’t list the benefits, just get your sleep.
Okay, I know what you're thinking: who has the time, life is hard, blah, blah. I’m not giving you instructions on what to do; I’m giving general information about what makes a healthy body. As I said, it’s a mental checklist, not instructions; what you decide to include is completely up to you.
Psychological
The psychological aspect of health is a slightly touchy one; it’s a vast topic that can be highly subjective, but this is what is typically needed to thrive mentally.
The first thing I’ll cover is emotional intelligence.
“Emotional intelligence can be defined as "the ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own emotions effectively. It involves aligning your feelings with actions that serve your long-term goals and well-being, even in challenging situations."
This is one of the most important aspects of having a healthy psychological well-being, as being able to identify and regulate our emotions will help with stress, resilience, self-esteem, better mood, better self-awareness and better decision making.
Next, we have mindfulness, which can be described as “Mindfulness is the practice of being present and aware of your thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surroundings in the present moment without judgment.”
Mindfulness is being here, now. And when you think of what the opposite of mindfulness suggests, which is being in the past or future, it’s quite obvious as to why this is something that should be practised.
After all, there must be a reason people sell all of their belongings to go live on a mountain just to master it.
Okay, now, growth. If we’re not growing, what are we really doing? That’s why some form of personal development is essential.
If we’re not growing, we’re dying, and we feel it. We may not directly think the thoughts “I am dying”, but we subconsciously know it to be true. This is why to maximise our psychological well-being, we must be continuously growing in some way, mentally or physically.
Now let’s talk about the social side of things.
Humans are wired for connection. No matter how independent we think we are, having meaningful relationships is a huge part of feeling good mentally.
This does’nt mean the more friends the healthier the mind, you need strong and meaningful connection with a selection of people, whether it be just friends, or your partner or family.
Isolation can be one of the worst things for our mental health, so ensuring you have meaningful relationships is another important aspect of psychological health.
Existential
To keep this from being too long, I’ll keep this brief.
Another major aspect of overall health, especially psychological health, is the existential side of things.
This includes purpose and true meaning. It’s doing what you were meant to do, unapologetically. It’s doing the stuff you love, the stuff that attracts you and draws you in, and doing it without fear of failure or fear of rejection.
It’s avoiding the boring, and the miserable, it’s avoiding the conformity of social norms and parental pressures, it’s living.
Existential is living the life you were made for, not living the one you were conditioned to. It’s freedom, it’s energy, it’s passion.
You can perfect everything that came above this section, but without doing what you truly want to do, you’ll live a life full of regret.
So, go and do what you were made to do, go and be alive.