Pillar 1 Life Philosophy

The next 6 posts, starting with this one, are going to be focused on exploring my 'six pillars of health'. 

What in the world are your six pillars of health Mike? ... I'm so glad you asked. Coming at longevity medicine without a mental model leads me to fall down a dizzying rabbit hole of options which are overwhelming and exhausting. Thus, I created a six pillar model of health that allows me to sort, triage, and critically assess all the information I obtain in my never ending journey to optimize health. 

My six pillars are Life Philosophy, Sleep, Exercise, Nutrition, Social, and Sex. Is there something sacred about these 6 pillars? No, these pillars were not divine revelation delivered to me on tablets of stone. However, I have found that designing specific and actionable interventions to improve health works well in the 6 pillar paradigm. It’s broad enough to cover the most important bases but not so broad as to be directionless and unhelpful; they are useful guide-rails that are not overly ridged. 

With that being said, let's take a look at our first pillar, 'Life Philosophy'.

Let’s start by defining 'Life Philosophy' and its importance to your health. Perhaps the most abstract AND most important of your health pillars, I define “Life Philosophy” as your ‘WHY’ that drives you to endure the ubiquitous suffering of life. Another way to think about it is defining how you view yourself in relationship WITH the rest of the universe.

Your life philosophy can take an almost unlimited number of forms. Which specific form it takes I am agnostic to. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about it. It means that the specifics and the nuances don’t matter to me. What does matter to me is that your ‘Life Philosophy’ is providing key structural components that I feel are vital to your health. 

As I said, I’m agnostic about your own philosophical school of choice. Be it Stoicism, Capitalism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Darwinism, Nihilism, Hinduism, or your own personally constructed '-ism', the list to choose from is endless and the variety and nuance of every person's individual path within each '-ism' is unique.

Thus, I am less concerned about what you believe, then what your beliefs are doing for your health. How is your philosophical system helping you endure the grind and suffering inherent in life? How is it helping you make sense of the ‘bad things’ that happen? Is it building you a strong supportive social community? Is it giving you your “why” so that you can “bear almost any how”? And perhaps most importantly, what are you going to do with the extra life and health you are going to get? To what purpose are you going to apply it?

As I am working with patients, I feel it is essential to define one's 'Life Philosophy' from the outset. I constantly refer back to the patient's specific life philosophy throughout the focused program, both to refine their 'WHY', and to really question whether a health intervention we are considering doing is consistent with this 'WHY'. If the health intervention is in line with the "WHY', it is almost always well adopted; if it is incongruent with the 'WHY' it is a pure willpower battle that inevitably results in failure. Thus the 'Life Philosophy Pillar' is foundational to my approach to good medicine.