What Is Good Health?

What does it mean to be healthy? What is Wellness? For a long time, I associated the term good health with firm muscles or a flat stomach, or maybe I just didn’t consider its meaning much at all. As a younger man, in my twenties and early thirties, I certainly misunderstood or blissfully ignored the basics of well-being. I was a man who sat in a car for many hours each weekday so that I could sit in an office for many more hours each weekday (the whole while dreaming about doing something different with my life). I had a nice existence—a wife, a supportive family, a steady income, and some fun on the weekends—but I wasn’t really in touch with my body, my mind, my creative dreams, my emotions, or my soul (at least not on a consistent basis).

As that younger man I tried, in fits and turns, to find balance and good health. But the grind was always too formidable an enemy. Professional, financial, and personal responsibilities (along with youthful restlessness) left me too busy and stressed to find much quiet time or inner peace. So I was mostly content to live on soda, coffee, cigarettes, takeout food, beer, muddled ambition, and too little sleep. And when things weren’t going well, there were prescriptions to fix that. I lived on antianxiety medications (which actually caused me a lot of anxiety, among other problems), and when the pills and the lack of exercise they encouraged caused high blood pressure, there were prescriptions for that, too.

Eventually the whole arrangement blew up in my face as I approached my midthirties. At my wits end, I asked myself where this whole thing called “my life” was going. I found myself confused, angry, and out of shape. I was careening toward some sort of bottom, so I decided that I would begin to pursue actual health and true happiness, even if it killed me. Because the other arrangement was already killing me anyway.

The first thing I did was quit the Paxil and Xanax that I’d been taking for almost a decade and a half. The pills were prescribed to me in college for anxiety—and they had worked for a while—but now they were contributing to malaise, fatigue, high liver-enzyme numbers, high blood pressure, anxiety, spiritual disconnectedness, and a host of other problems, and I figured that my life would be better and more authentic without them. However, I didn’t know about this mystery illness called “Withdrawal” (also known as Benzo Withdrawal and SSRI Withdrawal), and when I stopped taking the medications, my life immediately got worse instead of better.

I was sleepless, restless, without appetite, depressed, and suffering through strange mental symptoms. I couldn’t make sense of words or time or emotions. I had pains—strong pains, frightening pains—in every inch of my body, and this all went on for a few hellish years (yes, years, no joke).

The doctors I saw were either uneducated or in denial, and for perhaps the first time in my adult life, I realized that I was the one who was charged with nurturing my own good health (not doctors!). In the midst of that breakdown, I also realized, for the first time in a long time, that good health wasn’t just about losing weight or avoiding hard drugs or major surgery. It was about every aspect of our spiritual and emotional and mental makeup. It was a complex, but wondrous, picture.

 

Crawling Off the Bottom

As I began crawling back from a certain breakdown, I did, for sure, take steps to get physically healthier. I quit smoking cigarettes, I cut back on alcohol, I began walking and then running, and I also started eating better. I was eventually able to wean myself off of all blood-pressure medications, and for the first time in my adult like, I could proudly say that I needed no orange bottles from the pharmacy to survive.

But as my withdrawal and healing continued, it became clear to me that good health had other aspects, ones that were perhaps even more important than the physical.

Emotional health was crucial, I realized. And as the pill residue continued to leave my system in sweat-soaked thrashes, and as my own emotions returned to me, I began to value them all the more. I began to realize how often we, as a society, are willing to suffocate our negative emotions at the expense of the good ones, and I considered how important a diverse emotional experience is to an authentic human experience.

And not all of my emotions were pleasurable. I began having many nightmares about past heartaches and failings—things that dated as far back as high school or even earlier—and I began to realize that everyone must make some sort of peace with past demons if they want to find peace and joy moving forward. I realized that smiles and laughs and relaxation are our birthright, not vices to be guiltily enjoyed when no one was looking.

Then, as my mind settled a bit—as my capabilities of logic and reason returned—I began to doubly value the miracle of my brain and my consciousness. A nearly straight-A student in college (I received one B that I still contend as false), I had always prided myself on my intelligence, and when it was momentarily stripped from me, I prayed and prayed for it to return. And in those conversations with God, I realized that spiritual health was a part of the equation, too. Actually, it was the equation. God was in me and I was made from Him.

On my knees looking up to the dark skies and crying, I realized that a fervent and personal spiritual connection was necessary for good health. I realized that I wasn’t obligated by God to serve the stresses, rituals, and political confusions of obsessive church attendance and formal religion, and I once again began reading the Gospel messages on my own and considering how the Source of those messages was speaking to me directly.

 

Maybe the World is Wrong

During the course of that wilderness journey that was my later thirties, I began to see true good health as a four-quadrant picture that I refer to as Total Health: It is physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental health. Those four elements perpetually overlap each other, and if any one of them is ignored, the others suffer.

Total Health is something that we don’t easily understand, because it isn’t a concept that is sold to us on a daily basis. Instead, we are told to simply keep the hectic treadmill moving at all costs. Joy be damned. Dreams be damned. Emotional and spiritual needs be damned. Soul be damned. Maybe we are falling apart (or worse yet, hollow) on the inside, but if we can keep a job, a car, and a home while attending an occasional church service and getting a vacation per year, we are fine. If we can just get to the gym and to the doctor occasionally, we are paying attention to our health.

But then, when a breakdown happens, we realize that true good health is about so much more than outside appearances. It’s all, really, on the inside. It’s deep and authentic, and it’s as necessary to our daily existence as clean air and water.

We can be at an ideal weight with muscles rippling out of the tailored dress shirts our nice salaries pay for, but if we aren’t creatively and emotionally satisfied at our jobs—if we are just going to the gym every night to work out frustration that will return with the next day—then we are ignoring the emotional and mental aspects of good health, the aspects that are attached to pursuing our true professional dreams. And if we are taking medications that block anxious thoughts or depressed feelings, but those medications are, in turn, blocking our inspiration and the nuances of our unique emotional experiences, then a crisis of the soul might be in the making.

And we need to build self-confidence, too, and learn to speak our minds and make valuable contributions to the world as ourselves. Enjoying good mental, emotional, and spiritual health means realizing that we are valuable—realizing how we are valuable as individuals—and then taking small strides toward personal development each month. It isn’t enough to just go through the motions in life, that isn’t true good health.