Introduction to HIAX Health

Health is important in itself but also for winning at life. It's also hard, but that's okay!

Health is important because it forms a base for any activity or pursuit in life. Good health can improve your life in countless ways while poor health can make life a misery.

Think of it as upgrading your video game character or avatar with better strength and stamina stats as well as a stronger constitution. Regardless of how you want to live your life, having a baseline of health is a non-negotiable and I would argue that health should be your number one value.

Table of Contents

• Health and Life: Where does it fit?

• The surprising benefits of good health

• How to Win at Health (or what is the goal?)

• Health is hard: A realistic overview/ pep talk

• Benchmarks for Health

• HIAX - How I Approach Health

• Questions to consider and journal on

• My Reading List

Health and Life: Where does it fit?

I like to think of health as giving us the ability to fully experience life and live to our potential without poor health being a distraction or limit.

Poor health can limit us via acute or chronic illness, pain, or simply the lack of physical ability to do certain things. Exploring mountains or playing with your children might be off the cards if physical fitness or strength is poor.

The balance is optimizing and fine-tuning health, to get the most out of it while not spending all our time and bandwidth on it to the detriment of other life domains.

The surprising benefits of good health

➡️ Increased capacity and performance in life. Good health increases performance in life. You literally get more 'action points' each day.

➡️ More experiences unlocked. You get to do more when you are firing on all cylinders. Random mountain bike trip? Sure, let's go. Quick soccer match with the kids. You're on.

➡️ Life is literally better. Life is a sum of your perceptions [link] and healthy activities neurochemically stack the odds in your favor. Consider how life feels when you are hyper-stressed vs. after a week of good sleep

➡️ You think better. Good health leads to clear thinking and fires up the subconscious mind. A lot of great ideas occur while walking or in the gym and nothing helps us think more clearly than a good night's sleep.

➡️ We get sick less. When you're sick the only thing you can think about is getting better. Good health means you get sick less (and live longer to enjoy the harvest of a good life).

➡️ Good health compounds (but so does bad health). This means that it gets easier over time as positive action creates more positive action. You just need to start

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.
~ Chinese Proverb

As with any life domain, the pursuit of health can be a powerful vehicle for personal development and a tool to level up your experience of life or a dangerous trap that can be used to mask the need for deeper work (think of an obsession with body image masking insecurity or obsession with minutiae covering up a fear of taking action and possibly failing).

How to Win at Health (or what is the goal?)

The goal is to have optimal health with minimal effort to allow both maximal performances but also time and bandwidth to explore other areas of life.

It takes time and effort to get the flywheel moving so you need to apply sufficient time, energy, and headspace to build momentum initially. But once it's going it becomes nearly effortless and can run in the background.

Given that health is such a fundamental pillar AND it compounds, this is something that needs to be addressed early and aggressively. Once it's moving it fuels everything else. If it's neglected it can cause everything to come toppling down.