Realizing a Healthy Lifestyle by Discovering Our Unique ‘Middle Way’

Health is one of the few things that comes close to a universal value; most people want to be healthy! Sometimes we make choices that are more pleasing in the short-term but aren’t super healthy in the long-term, but the balance is something that we all strive for to not only stay alive, but to thrive and be happy in both the long-term and the short-term. This balance can be such a seemingly elusive challenge, especially with such a mess of health advice, supplements, advertisements, diets, exercise regimens, theories, and much more that leave us wondering if we are really living healthy lifestyles and what that even means anymore.  We know that we don’t want to be sick, isolated, chronically exhausted, or depressed, so at least we have ideas about what being healthy isn’t. Unfortunately, I believe that the discussions about what health is often lack the nuance that we all need when it comes to the real-life balancing of emotional health, mental health, physical health, spiritual health, and all of the other innumerable potential categories that we may consider a part of holistic health.

Most conversations about health that I have witnessed in my lifetime have consisted of unquestioned assertions about health with reference to some seemingly objective truth about what is best for us humans.  These are statements like “running is healthy,” or “eating vegetables is healthy,” or “getting around ten hours of sleep a night is healthy.”  While these statements are probably truer than not for the average person, I feel that most of our discourse regarding health fails to sufficiently take the individual’s context into account.  We need to ask, “Healthy to whom?”; “Healthy to what extent?”; “Healthy for what reasons?”

We are in luck to live in an age where we have bountiful access to quality scientific literature and information, since science is capable of shedding so much light on how particular behaviors or factors can affect people’s health in specific ways. It is vitally important to know how to identify a well-done study, with variables relevant to your question, and no confounding biases (like $$$).  The mobile devices that we all have at our fingertips are capable of finding unimaginable answers to very specific questions in just a few seconds, as long as we choose to utilize them instead of dismissing our questions or assuming that we have enough experience to know everything about a particular topic or question.  Careful observation of your own feelings, values, and how different variables affect your physical and mental health – combined with excellent research and listening to other observant and introspective individuals – can offer us much more nuanced conclusions about what balance of different kinds of things will be the healthiest for us!

While there are many habits and daily lifestyle practices that the vast majority of people around us (in our society, country, or whatever group) would most definitely benefit from (in the U.S., perhaps consuming more vegetables, eating leaner foods, reading more books, and exercising more), this does not mean that the highest-mileage athlete on the college cross country team needs to run more to be healthy; or that the strict vegetarian needs to eat more salads and leaner foods; or that the book-reader who rarely watches TV needs to watch less TV.  Doing too much of any of these things (that some people assume are always healthy because they are thinking about these activities relative to what they are lacking in their own particular lifestyle) will also have negative effects.  Sometimes these general prescriptions that society seems to agree upon to ‘be healthy’ have very toxic effects for people who do not need more of these things to be happy and medically sound.  There really are people who need to exercise less, consume more fats in their diet, or read less books so that they can make time for other habits that may have an even more positive effect on their overall well-being, no matter how rare these exceptions may be.  If we are to become a society that more fully appreciates every individual’s capacity for decision-making, intuition and critical thinking, then it is absolutely vital to be specific, accurate, and careful with our words and thoughts of what health may entail for a given individual or group.

Living a healthy life is a balancing act, and leaning too far in any direction will be detrimental to some aspect of your well-being.  It can be overwhelming being a person with so many needs and the ability to recognize your own needs and be responsible for them, but fulfilling our needs is just life and it doesn’t have to be a chore.  Instead of feeling like life is nothing more than completing some weird checklist that some guy named Maslow made (see Fig. 1), it may help to think about them as helpful reminders of what basic things you need to do and how to organize your life in order to attain all of the freedom and happiness of the self-actualization and growth at the top.  Self-actualization is a great way to think about what it means to be living your best life, and it has helped me at many points in my life to assess how I am doing as a person.

One of my favorite philosophy professors at Lawrence once half-jokingly said that all of my responses to class discussions were something along the lines of “take the middle path,” and that I must really love the Buddha. “Should we be complete moral saints who devote our entire lives to the service of others and never take time for our own creative endeavors, or should we completely reject morality because there’s no single perfect moral system that always works?” How about something in the middle. “Do we have free will even if the interactions of all the particles in the universe are predetermined?” Kinda. Understanding what is healthy for us must take a similar route. Extremes just usually aren’t the way to go, but figuring out where these extremes lie and where the middle is located is the challenge of our lives, although we can gain understanding through experience and learning from others.

I have deeply resonated with all of the bits of wisdom that I have ever heard attributed to Siddharta Guatama.  Moderation and balance are the keys to just about every one of our lifestyle behaviors. The Buddha attained enlightenment when he realized that the ‘middle way’, or the path between self-indulgence and depriving oneself of all luxuries, was the best way to live.  Almost all of the important observations I have made about my own life have taken the form of a spectrum of sorts: “Oh! I’m not doing X enough,” or “Oh! I’m definitely doing Y too much, and I’m being too extreme, so I need to tone it down.” The most important and most difficult part is being able to think about things in your own life in different ways and with different frameworks or lenses for understanding them so that you can build that scale of moderation with suitable endpoints, and so you can determine which of these spectrums or scales are the most important to gauge yourself with.

Health is relative to the individual, and holistic health must be relative to what that individual wants to get out of life, how their mind works, their personal history, and what experiences they value the most (assuming they have put in the time and effort to effectively reflect upon and form quality life values).  This means that something that seems healthy to one person might actually be pretty unhealthy to another person.  Someone may spend much of their life turning over different possibilities in their head about what kind of life would be most fulfilling to them and experimenting with different options and experiences, only to realize that they really do just want a white picket fence, a golden retriever and a traditional Christian wedding.  Another person may spend the same amount of time turning over the just as many possibilities in their head and experimenting with just as many life experiences only to realize that they will never be fulfilled unless they spend the rest of their lives as a shaman living in a yurt in the Amazon Rainforest leading Ayahuasca retreats and making as little negative impact on the environment as possible.  And both of these are legitimate lifestyle choices that may just as likely lead to fulfillment, happiness and health for each individual.  The person with the picket fence might scoff at the thought of drinking psychedelic tea in a rainforest with poisonous creatures lurking around every corner and no functioning plumbing, but the person drinking the psychedelic tea might scoff at the thought of constraining one’s consciousness by living according to the tenets of an overly ascetic religion with a history of genocide in a suburb with a boring-colored fence.

But we don’t need to scoff. Both of these people can still be great, healthy people. There’s a huge margin of error for what may be considered ‘healthy’ for other people, and their middle path might look very different from yours because they may be navigating toward middles that fall between very different endpoints from yours, depending on what they need and where their life has taken them.  If we want to concern ourselves with health (which I obviously think is a great topic to focus on!), then perhaps we can share our opinions and experiences with more humility in the form of a suggestion or story, instead of as a patronizing, oversimplified prescription for someone else’s lifestyle.  Perhaps we can also offer some scientific theories or data rooted in causation (and not simply correlation) that we feel may be helpful for others to consider. I know that I definitely need to work on my hypocrisy and on understanding the differences between my values and those of the people that I love, such as my family, when I am trying to help them make healthier lifestyle choices.

By offering these considerations, I don’t want to detract from the authority of parents who tell their kids to eat their veggies and go to bed on time, or the P.E. teachers and health coaches that just want to help people make healthier choices, because sometimes it is a pretty good bet that the advice from these people will be more helpful than not, mostly because they probably know more stuff about these specific topics and have many relevant experiences to back it up.  In my opinion, there is more than enough research and human experience out there to say that incorporating exercise into your life is better than living a sedentary lifestyle, so I will continue to encourage people to exercise, but I understand that people have different abilities, needs, and values.  I want the reader of this post to be happy and healthy, and for them to be able to proactively help the people around them live more healthy lifestyles, because the song “We’re All in this Together” from High School Musical wasn’t written for nothing. Our world is a community, and with the proper frameworks for understanding, we can help each other navigate our own individual middle paths with the knowledge that we’re all in a similar boat.

‘Healthy’ is not a finish line, and it’s not just an objective concept.  Everyone is different and we must treat others with the space, consideration, and the respect for their own life values that they deserve.  The concept of health is not cut and dried, and I hope that we can all work on having discussions about all types of health in a way that carefully acknowledges the amount of careful thought and relativity that is needed in establishing what is healthy for us or for the people we care about.

Love, Josh

3/25/2021