jaredsinclair.com
I'm a registered nurse. I make apps for nurses.
I live in Nashville. Contact me on gmail at jaredsinclair.rn
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Jay Parkinson,’s view of health as a holistic, all-encompassing concept. We’re accustomed to to think of health strictly in terms of the absence of pathology, which is a very narrow definition.
In nursing school, the mandated curricula required at least a passing nod to the holistic idea of health, and it was rarely anything more than that. The fact that holistic definitions are mentioned only in passing, even in institutions that are supposed to be centers of health expertise, reflects deeper assumptions about health in American culture.
Here’s Jay’s definition of health:
Healthy, happy living is about eating well; being active; having close relationships; enjoying sex; taking pride in what you do for a living; optimizing your environment; and moderating sabotage.
By that definition, almost everything about the average American’s life is unhealthy: fragmented personal and professional lives, cable tv news, fast food, sedentary habits, monotonous and underpaid work, environmental pollution, etc.
That this list is so long leads us to the knee-jerk assumption that Jay and others like him are wrong, or at least kooky weirdos on the fringe. We’ve even coined a name for such people: health nuts. Faced with the idea that so many of our habits are clearly unhealthy, we take the easy way out and redefine health by lowering the bar. Health becomes merely taking a few pills and otherwise doing what everybody else is doing. Leave the calorie-counting and anti-oxidizing to the Whole Foods fanatics.
But notice that last phrase in Jay’s quote: “moderating sabotage.” By this he means things like the occasional glass of whisky, or a holiday meal. This doesn’t fit our all-or-nothing health nut stereotype. That’s because being truly healthy isn’t about following a set of rigid habits. Health is measured by the direction your life is going. Where is the sum of your habits, diet, work, relationships, and environment taking you? Look back over the past few years. Are your relationships getting stronger, or slowly crumbling? Are you spending more time in front of the tv, or less?
We need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that healthy living is an aberration practiced by an obsessive fringe culture. Healthy living is accessible to all.
