Health as Plumbing

Written by Kevin Chen

It’s time to think about your health.

That statement alone has a lot of weight attached to it, as if something is wrong, or about to wrong and you need to pay attention to it. After volunteering to write this article, I realized a couple different things about my thoughts on health.

1. Health is like plumbing.

When do you think about your health? One of the first things I realized after volunteering to write this post is that I started thinking about my health and questioning whether or not I’m healthy. Another thing I noticed a little while later is that the times at which I thought about my health were almost exclusively when I wasn’t being healthy or when I was eating (or thinking about eating). For example, “Should I have that 3rd, 4th or (n)th coffee? Am I eating a balanced breakfast? Should I really be eating fast food again?” That’s when I think about health.

Unlike happiness, where you can have happy moments or feel happy, health might be more of a subliminal conscious state that you mostly think about when you’re making unhealthy choices. For example, if I felt fine and wasn’t making any unhealthy choices, then why would I be thinking about my health? This has also sometimes been my experience when seeing doctors as a kid, where if something wasn’t anything painful or bothering me, then come back later if it does.

In that sense, health is like plumbing. Feeling healthy is the same as feeling like your plumbing is working, but you’re rarely aware of bad plumbing until something goes wrong. This brings about the analogy of doctors being like glorified plumbers. They’re called in to fix things when they start to go wrong.

2. Health is like formula one racing.

How do you know when you’re pushing yourself too hard? How much is too much? Ideally, you can know these answers before your health starts breaking down.

Since I first wrote this article, another outlook on health that came to mind is that you can treat your health like formula one racing, where your body is tuned and optimized so that it is absolutely perfect for working harder and faster than ever. Opposite to the previous analogy, where you only think about your health when things go wrong, you would be thinking about your health constantly. You’re looking for optimizing your time, and how you can improve your health and energy so that you can work harder, become stronger or move faster. This is also often an underlying concept in biohacker, nootropic and smart drug movements: to try and give yourself chemical or physical enhancements that improve your energy and overall productivity. However, this obsession brings about a couple dangerous ways of thinking. One in which you push yourself so hard that you burn out, and another in which you feel tired, and therefore accomplished, without necessarily having achieved much.

Winning the race means either collecting the checkered flag at the end or feeling like you tried your hardest and couldn’t have done much better. But, if you haven’t won and you didn’t try your hardest, then you get to the finish line wondering what the point was of even trying. So if you obsess over pushing yourself, you’re either going to just keep running till you drop, even after crossing the finish line, or creating a false sense of achievement by exhausting yourself in the first few minutes. An example would be like staring at a single page of a book for twenty minutes and feeling like you’ve been reading for a long time.

If exhaustion is what you associate with accomplishment, then you become addicted to fatigue. You start to burn yourself out repeatedly in order to chase the feeling of success. And, when you’re not burning yourself out, you don’t feel like you’re trying hard enough. It’s a cycle that ultimately leads to burnout, regardless of whether you’ve actually achieved anything.

When and how do you think about your health?