“Take care of yourself. When you don’t sleep, eat crap, don’t exercise and are living off adrenaline for too long, your performance suffers. Your decisions suffer. Your company suffers.”
- Evan Williams, Co-founder of Medium and Twitter
We know that healthy living and active lifestyles are good for us, which is why the most common New Year’s resolutions are about working out (38%), eating healthy (32%), and taking a more active approach to health (15%). And yet, 88% of all New Year’s resolutions don’t end up working out in the end. We fail to hit the gym, don’t stick to our diet plans, and don’t turn our lives around.
But why? At Welltory, we spend a lot of time exploring the links between people’s lifestyles, stress, productivity, and overall wellness. What we’ve found is that people have a ton of misconceptions that keep them from reaching their goals and living life to the fullest.
We’ve put together a list of the top 5 most common myths about health & lifestyle that it’s time to let go of once and for all.
Top 5 health & lifestyle myths to ditch right now
Myth # 1: Our health is mostly determined by genetics
Truth: Good health is about lifestyle choices more than genetics
If you’re convinced that taking care of your health is a worthless pursuit because health outcomes are predetermined by your genetic composition, you couldn’t be more wrong. Research shows that poor lifestyle choices are the root cause of chronic diseases.
According to Dr. Tim Armstrong, Coordinator of the World Health Organization Secretariat, noncommunicable diseases like cancer and diabetes account for 35 million deaths each year, or 60% of all deaths. These diseases have common risk factors: tobacco use, inappropriate diet and physical inactivity.
“We can prevent diseases by small changes in people’s behaviour,” Dr. Armstrong says, “For example, 30 minutes of moderate physical activity each day, that is the equivalent of a brisk walk, can reduce your risk of a heart attack by up to 50%. Increasing your fruit and vegetable consumption can reduce your risk of colon cancer by up to 50%. So these changes are real, they are achievable.”
The best way to avoid getting sick is to make lifestyle changes that reduce your chances of ending up with a chronic illness.
Myth # 2: Getting a gym membership will help you get healthy
Truth: Long-term health goals and programs don’t work
Even if we know that healthy lifestyles lead to longer, healthier lives, we have a hard time following through with plans that don’t yield immediate results.
A study from the University of Chicago found that the presence of immediate rewards is a much stronger predictor of persistence in goal-related activities than the presence of delayed rewards. Specifically, immediate rewards like enjoyment predicted current persistence at New Year’s resolutions whereas delayed rewards did not.
Simply getting a gym membership will most likely not be a good enough motivator to actually get you to the gym after the first couple of weeks.
Why? Over 100 brain-imaging studies have shown that we think about our future selves as strangers, which is why we struggle with saving money for our future selves or hitting the gym every day to make sure we don’t get sick 30 years from now.
The reality is that people think about how to get through today and tomorrow. That’s about it.
If you want to accomplish a long-term health goal, you need to think about changing your habits in a ways that let you see results immediately, not 25 years down the line.
Myth # 3: Willpower + good time management = productivity
Truth: Productivity is about balanced lifestyles, not willpower
People often make the mistake of thinking that productivity is simply about willpower and good time management. How many times have you thought it would only take you a few hours to finish a report that ended up taking the whole day?
You may kick yourself for procrastinating, but the reasons for low productivity may have nothing at all to do with willpower.
For example, you may just be stressed. Studies show that workplace stress leads to less productive employees, and that high stress levels are associated with procrastination. If you’re powering through at work and not giving yourself enough time to recover, your productivity will eventually plummet.
Just take a look at how our support staff’s response time correlates with their stress levels:
You can see how much longer they take to respond when they’re stressed. That’s no coincidence.
And stress isn’t the only thing that can make you procrastinate. Factors like high CO2 levels in the room, inconsistent sleep schedules, and even working out at a time that doesn’t work well for you can all make your productivity plummet.
So if you’re beating yourself up over not getting enough done, stop piling on the self-blame and look at your lifestyle choices.
Myth # 4: You can will yourself into a positive mindset
Truth: Your body and health impact your outlook on life
There are a ton of articles linking positive thinking to good health and prosperity.
Research from the University of California, Riverside shows that happy people are more satisfied with their jobs, perform better than people who are less happy, and even receive more support from their coworkers. Moreover, positive people are also more likely to be healthier and live longer.
But positive thinking isn’t as easy as fliping a positivity light switch on inside your mind.
The truth is that our moods are not random. They are impacted by different levels of “happiness hormones” (endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin), along with the overall state of our health. Daily exercise, for example, directly impacts the production of endorphins and foods high in tryptophan (turkey, fish, eggs)
Depends on diet, stress, how much exercise
Myth # 5: Success is all about long hours and hard work
Truth: It’s true, but body awareness is also key
Success is a marathon, not a sprint. This means the key to success is not working against your body, but learning how to work with it.
“We live in a world that celebrates work and activity, ignores renewal and recovery, and fails to recognize that both are necessary for sustained high performance.”
- Jim Loehr, The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal
So what now? 3 tips to get you back on track
Getting in touch with your body and knowing what it responds to is one of the most important things you can do for your productivity, relationships, and overall wellness. Everybody’s body is different, which means there is no cookie-cutter healthy living solutions what will work well for everybody.
Here are 3 steps you can take to make it happen.
1. Get regular, objective feedback about your body
This is actually what the new trend called biohacking is all about. People are starting to explore their own bodies and figure out what they respond to with the help of data & metrics. This is a good thing! Biohackers track all sorts of things — their sleep cycles, productivity, blood pressure and oxygen levels, nutrition, and more. Then, they analyze the data in order to figure out what changes they need to make to feel better, sleep more effectively, or cut down on procrastination.
You don’t have to be an expert in data analysis to get insights. For example, a free app like Sleep Cycle or Sleep as Android will provide you with an objective picture of your sleep patterns that can help you see how alcohol affects your sleep or spot adjustments you need to make to your sleep schedule.
This concept of getting regular, objective feedback is the driving principle behind our app as well. Welltory tracks your heartbeat through a smartphone camera, then runs the numbers through science-backed, personalized heart rate variability algorithms to give users their daily Stress, Energy, and Performance scores. Objective feedback helps our users spot trends & patterns, figure out which habits work best for them, and adjust their schedules to optimize their scores.
2. Go for short-term solutions with immediate rewards
Don’t take up a sport that you don’t enjoy playing or torture yourself with a diet that you won’t be able to sustain in the long-term.
They key is to understand that your lifestyle choices don’t just impact your abstract future self — they affect how you’re going to feel tomorrow, along with your ability to make rational decisions and stay productive today.
This is why Welltory opts out of giving our users long-term health advice. Instead, we give users recommendations for the next 24–48 hours that are based on their measurement results. For example, if the results show that a user’s stress levels are high, we generate data-driven recommendations that will help them recover properly and feel better by tomorrow. If we see that their energy levels are low, we can advise them to cut their workday short or just avoid hitting up a bar after work.
Avoiding long-term commitments and focusing on the present makes it easier for our users to follow through with health advice that ends up being good for them in the long-term.
3. Remember: stress must be followed by recovery
If you want to stay energetic and productive over the long-term, you need to keep a balance between stress and recovery.
Otherwise, you risk burning out or ending up with health problems induced by chronic stress.
And no, sitting on your couch and watching Netflix doesn’t count unless you’re exhausted past the point of no return.
For most people, stress relief entails switching to a different type of activity. So if you do a lot of intellectual labor at work, stress relief should look like a long walk home, a workout at the gym, or a yoga session — something that focuses on physical sensations. If you do a ton of physical labor, switch to something like reading or a puzzle to relax. These kinds of cycles are key.
Curious to find out which recovery techniques work best for you? Taking daily measurements with Welltory can help. If you try running and see that it doesn’t improve your health parameters, you can ditch it and try yoga instead or powering through with a habit that’s not a good fit.
About Welltory
Welltory is a data-driven wellness app that lets people measure their body’s Performance, Stress, and Energy levels. The app tracks heartbeat by monitoring changes in the blood vessels of a user’s index finger with a phone camera, then runs the data through heart rate variability algorithms in order to calculate the results.
Welltory features the world’s first self-learning heart rate variability algorithm, along with thousands of recommendations that help users plan their day and recover so they can feel even better tomorrow.
If you haven’t tried Welltory yet, it’s simple — just download the app and take a measurement.
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