How Healthy Is Healthy Enough?

How much time and energy should we devote to looking after our health? Everyone seems to have a different answer. For some, every decision in life depends on what might be expected to produce the greatest benefit to their individual health.

For others, the pursuit of a healthy lifestyle simply gets in the way of the joys and pleasures of a life well-lived.

Where you sit on this continuum is likely to be the result of numerous factors. How healthy were your parents growing up? How much time and money do you have to spend on your health? What’s your motivation to live a healthy life? How much do your surroundings influence your willingness to invest (or not) in your immediate and long-term health?

Health Is Important. Yeah, We Know… Kind Of.

There is no shortage of quotes and phrases emphasizing the critical importance of maintaining good health. Ralph Waldo Emerson encapsulated this idea when he wrote, “The first wealth is health.” Lee Strasberg echoed this sentiment with, “Good health is the most important thing. More than success. More than money. More than power.”

Similarly, Leigh Hunt highlighted, “The groundwork for all happiness is good health.” These all serve as timeless reminders of how integral our society recognizes health as being for well-being and contentment in life.

And yet, in practice, we routinely act in ways that contravene our immediate and long-term health. We eat foods we know aren’t good for us, drink alcohol knowing we’ll feel rotten the next day, smoke cigarettes, adopt poor posture by slumping in our chairs, and spend excessive hours in front of screens, fully cognizant of the adverse impact these behaviors have on our health.

What Even Is “Balance”?

Despite stressing the critical importance of health, we may feel that a life devoted solely to health, at the expense of all other pursuits, would leave a lot to be desired. We have the sense that a life where each moment was dedicated to maximizing health would be limited.

How much improvement to our health would be necessary to justify a life without indulgence? A life devoid of risks, treats, and pleasures appears to contradict what many of us consider to be essential for a fulfilling life.

We often talk about the need for “balance” when making decisions about our health. But this begs the question, what exactly are we balancing? Are we all balancing the same things, and do we each have access to the same set of scales?

The concept of balance in health is highly subjective and can vary widely from person to person. It raises important considerations about our individual priorities, resources, and environmental contexts in pursuing a balanced approach to health.

Trade-offs

We make decisions that directly affect our health multiple times a day. These decisions involve specific trade-offs between different priorities and commitments in our lives, as well as the numerous behavioral strategies we employ to cope with the stresses of life.

For example, we often encounter choices that involve a trade-off between instant gratification and long-term health benefits. We might opt to indulge in an unhealthy meal today, fully aware that a healthier diet may help to improve our health and extend our lives.

Similarly, decisions about how to allocate our financial resources can result in trade-offs. For instance, we may believe that investing in a gym membership would motivate us to exercise regularly, but we might also consider that the monthly payments could be better directed towards a house deposit.

These everyday decisions highlight the complexity of balancing pleasures, priorities, and the pursuit of health.

Constraints and Individual Differences

Sometimes, our decision-making when balancing various health-related trade-offs is impacted by physical and cognitive constraints. These may include not having sufficient knowledge to understand the long-term effects of each course of action or not having the financial resources to enact a certain choice.

Other decisions are more directly impacted by differences in our individual psychology. Some of us are more impulsive than others, prone to addiction, or are limited by the inhibitory mechanisms that manage our behaviors.

Context Matters: Environmental Influences of Health Choices

In addition to the influences of personal constraints and individual differences, our health decisions are significantly impacted by the environmental contexts of our lives. Understanding the impact that differences in our lived environments can have on our behaviors can help to explain the differing levels of effort that we each devote toward looking after our health.

The Uncontrollable Mortality Risk Hypothesis states that those who are more likely to die due to factors beyond their control should be less motivated to invest in preventative health behaviors. Humans have evolved psychological mechanisms that respond to cues of risk to determine how much effort is needed to invest in long-term health.

When people are exposed to health risks beyond their personal control, they are less likely to do those things that are within their control to take care of their health. For example, if you strongly believed there was little you could do to avoid being the victim of serious violence or a fatal traffic accident, would improving your diet and exercise regime be at the top of your list of priorities?

This means that devoting less time and energy to looking after health, and prioritizing other things like finding a partner or accruing resources, may actually be an adaptive response in environments that are unsafe and uncertain.

This helps to explain why people who make “unhealthy” decisions or who are less devoted to the pursuit of health than others may not have simply succumbed to poor decision-making; rather, these decisions may represent a contextually appropriate response to their lived environments.

We could all make healthier choices. However, recognizing the varying contexts of the lives of others and the impact that context can have on health decision-making can stop us from moralizing health and stigmatizing those that perform unhealthy behaviors.

Deepening our understanding of the contextual factors that drive health behaviors may lead us to cultivate environments and personal circumstances that tilt the scales toward healthier decision-making.