What is Health?

By Guy Odishaw, RBCST

Bhakti Wellness Center July 2013 Newsletter – Featured Article

Have you ever wanted more of something? More cookies, more chocolate, more money, more support, more love, more work. If you are like most people the answer is yes. What all those thing have in common is you know what they are and where  to find them. I believe if you want to have more of something at minimum you need to know what it is. What about health, have you ever wanted more health?

Here is where the problem comes in, if you don’t know what health is then how can you get more of it? What is your definition of health? I have asked thousands of people this question, most often people define health by what its not. That is they will say, “health is when I don’t feel sick”, “when I don’t have symptoms”. This is fine as a place to start, we have defined what health is not but we still don’t know what it is.

This holds true for health care providers as well. In an informal survey of over 5000 health care providers less than 1% indicated they had at least one class on health in their formal professional education. If health care providers don’t know what health is and patients don’t know what health is, what are we working toward? It has been said that we don’t have a health care system we have a disease care system and I believe this to be true. I ask my clients, “would you rather manage  your debt or your wealth?”. In truth the answer is, “both”.

We need to manage both our disease and our health but health gets a short shrift because we don’t have a good relationship with it and we don’t have a good relationship with it because we don’t know what it is. How can we value it, how can we measure it, how can we know that the actions we are taking are having the results we want?

In Eastern medicine they talk about health in terms like balance and harmony, which are good words to use but what does that mean to us in the West? If you can stand on one foot does that mean you are healthy? If you have a good singing voice does that mean you are healthy? As beautiful as the Eastern medicine concept of health is unless I understand the philosophy of Eastern medicine these words don’t help me understand what health is.

I recently had a round table conversation with 8 health care providers from a broad spectrum of professions and asked them this question; here is what we came up with.

Health is:

• Being able to do the things you want to do in your life.

• Feeling good. Where feeling good means, feeling vital, motivated, inspired, engaged, you find life pleasurable, you find relationships nourishing.

• Resilience. You have the inner and outer resources to meet the challenges, of life. You bounce back quickly from difficulty, mental or physical.

• Acceptance, similar to resilience, you have the energy, inner spaciousness to accept what life brings you without being overwhelmed for an extended period of time.

My personal definition, inspired by Dr. Dan Siegel’s writings, is health is the coherent flow of energy and information. In what Dan calls FACES flow. F, flexible, A, adaptive, C, coherent, E, energized, S, stable. So health is a state in which we are flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized and stable in mind and body. This definition is both very general and very specific and that is why I find it so useful. There is much to be said about health and this definition of health but here I will address only one aspect in more detail.

Adaptability is a vital part of health and resilience but it is a double edged sword. The up side is somewhat obvious, it is helpful when we are able to adapt to new situations and surroundings easily with little disruption to our body and mind. For example going on vacation, adapting to a new time zone, a new bed, different food, cultural customs etc. If we couldn’t do adapt then change would be very difficult even deadly.

The other side of this is perhaps less obvious. We also adapt to low states of functioning. It is often said that we need to lose 60% of our function before we express a symptom. So you can be at 50% function and feel like you are doing just fine because you have adapted to that state as normal. I am always amazed when a client reports having no symptoms, they say they feel great. Then I put my hands on them and the first thing I feel is the disorganization, disharmony, layers of compensation in their system. The diminished flow of energy and information. I wonder, ‘how can they possibly feel good?’. Adaptability is the answer, they have adapted to this state of poor health as their new normal. These folks have lost, or never had, the ability to sense their level of health. They are operating on the basis of, ‘if it isn’t broken don’t fix it’. In other words in the absence of obvious symptoms they must be healthy. This simply is not true.

We must work to regain our relationship with our state of health. The first step is to develop a definition for health so we know what it is, not just what it is not. Then develop ways to measure our state of health based on our definition. Some ways to measure our health is to look at some of the qualities from the list above and do our best to objectively evaluate how they show up in our lives. How motivated to I feel day to day.  How passionate am I about my life? Do I feel inspired as I go through my day, most days of the week, most moths of the year? How are my relationships, are they nourishing? Do I have the energy to do what I want to do with my life in both short term and long term goals? As we look at each of these qualities in the various sectors of our life we start to see the answer to the question of what is my level of health. At the same time we start to see the answers to the next question of what can I do to improve my health? What kind of health care do I need? Again, here, by health care I don’t mean disease care, the treatment of symptoms.