Sick and Tired: how modern life is failing our physical health
It’s no secret that the world is messing with our minds. We spend most of our days using tools that our brains didn’t evolve for like social media, which has created epidemics of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Pair that with societal factors like rising inequality or climate change and it makes sense why we’ve seen an explosion of mental health content. Everywhere you look there’s a new app or service promoting wellbeing. It’s encouraging to see this type of response to something we all struggle with, but we’re not just our minds. Mental health should be a top priority but not at the expense of other aspects of our health. Our physical health is also suffering and we need to address it. That’s not to say that we aren’t exposed to advertising and messaging about our health; there are always new fad workout classes, diet trends, and problematic body standards for us to achieve. Those don’t get to the root of the problem though. None of them address why we need to move and just how important the mind-body connection is. What’s also being ignored is that fundamentally our bodies aren’t designed for the types of lives we’re living. We may not talk about it, but all of us feel it. How we’re living is detrimental to our health, and we’re seeing that with the stark increase in chronic disease. All of this affects how we live in the world because the worse we feel physically, the worse we feel mentally. Our minds and bodies are inextricably linked. We can’t live meaningful lives if we’re not doing our best to take care of our whole being. (Just a note that this statement does not intend to discriminate against those with different levels of ability. This piece looks at larger trends in society, and I fully believe we need to create a world where everyone can live a meaningful life no matter their ability.)
The best example of how out of place we are in our own lives is how we’re treating some of the most important parts. Our necks and our backs. (Insert your own joke here about the 2000s club anthem “My neck, My back”.) For most of human history, we spent our time with our backs straight and our heads looking up. It’s how we evolved not only to do the things our lives required but also to be on the lookout for predators. Posture was extremely important for our overall well-being. As society changed, how we used our bodies also changed. All sorts of unnatural positions became common as we moved further away from those days on the savannah. Yet, we remained active beings who had functioning necks and backs. Over the past two decades, that rapidly deteriorated. We’ve become tethered to devices that require us to be constantly looking down in unnatural positions. It started with computers and was made worse by our phones. Now we all have to deal with “text neck” and chronic back issues. I spent way too much time on these devices growing up, and every day I have to deal with the consequences. Hunching over and having that forward head posture is disastrous for our backs. The longer this goes on, it will become harder to have a functional back, and we’ll be saying “my neck, my back” for a completely different reason than we were 20 years ago.
It’s not just how we move, but also what we’re not moving that’s creating lasting damage. Our lives used to take us places and that required movement. Now those lives have migrated onto our devices. The only movement required there is from our fingers and thumbs. Our workdays are spent in the same location for hours on end. Recreation is eerily similar. We sit in the same location using the same devices for entertainment as we do for work. Occasionally this repetition is punctuated by brief exercise or an outing, but it’s hard to say how much any of that helps. We’re nomadic creatures, meant to be out traversing and interacting with our environment. There’s a reason that working out releases endorphins and dopamine. We need natural motion to feel good. It feels terrible to do nothing. We all know that but choose to ignore it. If you’re like me then you know the feeling of being nauseous after spending the day trapped at your computer or in your house. There are also long-term risks to living sedentary lives. Weight gain and a slower metabolism are the obvious ones, but it goes much further than that. Lack of movement can cause cardiovascular issues, diabetes, reduced lung function, bone issues, and an overall shortened lifespan. Aside from the health effects, being sedentary robs us of our ability to live interesting and fulfilling lives. By sitting in one place you miss out on experiencing all of the richness that life has to offer. Not everyone’s life is spent still, many of us consciously try to be active and move. Also, not everyone can move freely. Society though is taking that movement for granted and is trending towards a life of inactivity. That inactivity will waste the potential of our lives and shorten them in the process.
Underlying all of this is one of the worst-kept secrets in the world, which is how bad our diets are for us. Diets, at least in the US, are heavy in sugars, refined carbs, and empty calories. Things that aren’t meant to be consumed, especially in large quantities. These and other processed foods all contribute to chronic illness, physical decline, and mental health problems. We can’t move and live properly if we don’t have the right nutrition to do so. Here though, I don’t want to shame anyone for their dietary choices. Corporations and our economic system shifted our diets, not us. Profits take precedence over our well-being in this country. Infinite growth requires constantly reducing costs, which in food means reducing the quality. People need to eat, and they’ll buy what they can afford, which for many is unfortunately not real. Making things worse is that proper education about nutrition, other than what people see on Instagram and TikTok, is largely absent. Misinformation runs rampant on social media, and most health influencers aren’t exactly appealing or empathetic to the general public. Without proper education or the resources to eat well, people are bound to feel terrible all of the time, with most not knowing why. This impacts all of us because when you don’t feel well, it becomes harder to do things you care about. When your body is in disrepair, so is your mind. People overlook this when trying to figure out what’s going wrong with culture today. It’s not just that our systems are broken, but our minds and bodies are too. At least many of ours are. With that, we don’t have the energy or cognitive function to connect and lead meaningful lives. It also makes it harder to try and solve the issues we face on a more macro scale. If everyone gets sicker, every day will become more and more of a struggle, creating a vicious feedback loop. With that, it will become easier to spend all day on a phone or computer because that’s all we’re able to do. Our physiology will morph to adapt to these devices, and with that, we’ll lose pieces of our lives.
All of this probably makes it sound like I’m another granola dude sitting on a high horse and lecturing people on their bodies. You’re totally within your right to assume that the reason I’m like this is because I was lucky with my genes and upbringing. What you wouldn’t guess though is that I’m intimately familiar with what means to struggle with these issues. For most of my adolescence, I was overweight, tired, and sick. Nothing I ate was real and most days were spent sitting. Sitting in an environment that was pretty rough and traumatizing, which my health only made harder to deal with. Living life, let alone enjoying life, was a constant struggle. I didn’t just resent how I looked, but how I felt. No 16-year-old should feel that way. The worse I felt, the less I wanted to do. So I spent more and more time doing nothing, which only made me feel worse. How I felt back then is something I don’t wish on anyone. This is why I care so much about health, not just mine, but all of ours. Working out and eating right changed my life. While the physical difference was immense, words cannot describe the mental one. During those dark years it felt like I was only running on 60%, if that, but after getting my body right the fog lifted. That fog lifting gave me the energy and clarity I needed to work on the other parts of my life and mental health. It’s been almost a decade since then and I’m thankful every day that I decided to switch my life up. That’s why I’m so concerned about the world running in the opposite direction. I fear a world where everyone feels like I did during my teenage years.
Movement and diet are truly some of the best medicines we have for combatting so many of the problems we face. There’s a misconception that it’s only for cosmetic purposes, and that’s why a lot of the workout classes and diets are marketed the way they are. They all act like it’s about the outside, and working out can help you there, but the real benefits are inside. I already mentioned how working out releases endorphins and dopamine, but both working out and a healthy diet also go beyond this to have a profound effect on your mental health. They’re proven to be some of the strongest ways to combat anxiety and depression. There’s also a whole range of other benefits to your general well-being like strengthening your immune system, improving your heart health, making you sleep better, and preventing all types of chronic illness.
More than that, all exercise connects you with your body, which is what we need right now. We spend so much time in our heads and on our phones that we forget that we have a body. It’s easy to forget when we’re constantly doomscrolling or hunched over our laptops. That’s why I love Yoga. There’s a bad reputation around it being a yuppy pastime, but there’s a reason it’s been around so long. It centers you and grounds you in your physical experience. With yoga, you’re not just trying to hit a certain number of reps or a time limit. It’s all about the movement itself and how you feel during that movement. It’s the type of embodied experience that’s so rare nowadays. After a yoga session, you can immediately tell the difference in how you feel. Spending time with your body away from the distractions of the modern world helps you feel free and calm in the face of so much chaos. Movement and eating well truly can change the way we experience the world and ourselves.
People are tired of others telling them how to live their lives. They’re fed up with constantly hearing about what they should or shouldn’t be doing with their bodies. I get it. It can be exhausting, and at times expensive to try to live a healthier life. Many of us don’t have the resources to be in perfect health. That’s not what we should be aiming for though. Perfect is what’s wrong with the current culture around health. Chasing perfection has led to billionaires getting blood transfusions from their children and people spending thousands, if not millions, on other risky anti-aging treatments. What they fail to realize is that perfect doesn’t exist. No workout routine or treatment will get you there. That doesn’t take away from the fact that our society’s health is still failing though. We’re chronically ill and tired because of how we’re living. We may not be able to be perfect, but we can be healthier. We can go for walks, cut out certain things from our diets, get outside, pick up a sport, or any other small thing that helps us get into our bodies. If I could do it, I know you can. If we want to create better lives for ourselves and others, we can’t just focus on the mind. Our bodies need attention, life isn’t meant to be lived in an office chair, it’s meant to be embodied.