Michael Gintz

June 03, 2023: why isn't staying healthy getting any easier

1: Work isn't proof of failure

There is no naturally healthy way to live. Health, in almost all senses, is a rock you have to push up a hill. Getting enough exercise. Eating right. Keeping addictions, of all forms, at bay. Talking to people.

The difficulty lies in activation energy, to get over some temporary negativity to maintain a more continuous, and usually more meaningful, reward. Sometimes, of course, you're lucky on some fronts. You love working out. Healthy food already tastes good to you. You don't have an addictive personality, or you've been lucky enough not to have a serious encounter with something which could spark addiction in you. You don't have any particular anxiety about when, how, and how much to talk with those around you.

There is, of course, a relationship between how much activation energy you have for a certain task and how "healthy" you are, or how much of that meaningful reward you're taking advantage of. That relationship involves many factors, important among which is the person in question. Some folks are going to just going to have some things naturally come more easily, and others are going to have other things naturally be more difficult for them. But it is pretty universally agreed on that the relationship is negative. Looking at just yourself, the more insignificant your temporary negativity feels while pushing through it, the healthier you are.

This often comes with what I think is a bit of a mistaken

In some situations, people will reject this immediately. Even if you go to the gym 7 days a week, getting up and going might still suck. Even if you've decided you shouldn't eat something daily, that doesn't mean that the desire to have it every day is going to eventually completely disappear. Addictions that have gotten to you in the past could keep attempting to reintroduce themselves into your life forever.

Even if you communicate regularly and are comprehensively compatible with someone, it might still take effort to reach out.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't expect things to get easier with time. The more you work at something, the more you build it into your routine, the more natural it will come to feel. Your habits begin to feel like a part of you, you don't have to think as hard to decide to get out of bed, you learn to soften the blow when you make a push.

Sometimes that impact, though it gets weaker and weaker, never completely fades.

But that doesn't mean you aren't healthy.

It just means that your success continues on through the present. 2: Make a list, keep a baseline

The easiest way to succeed is to continue an existing success. The hardest is to create a new one. No matter how much work you may put in, and no matter how long it feels like all of your activation energies are so manageable that you'll never have to worry about getting stopped by them again, a time may still come where they flare up, where everything you have to do just feels impossible.

Sometimes the answer is the reward I'm getting is just that important, I've got to stick it out.

Sometimes it isn't.

Not everyone has to be a health food influencer, a bodybuilder, cold-turkey, a social butterfly.

You can be successful without going above-and-beyond. Just because you aren't the best at something doesn't mean you aren't succeeding.

But you should still try to figure out what succeeding is, and then accomplish it.

Make a list of things that are absolutely necessary to maintain your health or put you on the path towards it. This is not a list of stretch goals. This is not a list of how to achieve all of your wildest dreams. This is a baseline.

Mine is relatively short and simple. Three of the tasks are to be completed every day:

• Eat
• Walk outside
• Talk to someone

There are other tasks as well, but they're more peculiar to me. For example,

• If I feel unwell from what I suspect is lack of exercise, either run outside as fast as I can until I'm tired or run at least 6 miles an hour on a treadmill either for 15 minutes or until I'm tired, whichever comes first.

These are often a bit trickier to add to the list, but are important if they really are necessary to maintain a baseline.

For some, this list might consist of things that are more difficult. If you have determined that cold-turkey is the best way to go about curbing an addiction, then avoiding it belongs on your list. If you have a health problem which you absolutely must keep at bay, and there's some action you must perform regularly to do so, then that belongs on your list as well.

It's alright if the list changes over time. If you find something making your life worse, and you need something new to keep it at bay to maintain your baseline, add it to the list. When some problem is resolved, all of the tasks generated by it can be crossed off.

These aren't goals. In better periods, I have a pretty passable diet, I get a decent amount of exercise and time outdoors, and I talk quite a lot.

This list is for when everything just becomes blindingly difficult.

On the roughest of days, sometimes just checking these simple boxes is tough.

But at the end of those days, I get through these, and I call my day a success.