The 7 Pillars of Optimal Health: Why Better Health Starts With Sleep

So I thought the best place to restart is something that has really become a foundation of how I think about health.

I started thinking about this because there's so many people looking for quick fix and of course things like peptides are really popular and supplements and you know all these things but I feel like that so many people are missing the foundational things and so I I start thinking about what my foundational, what I'm calling the pillars of health are.

So I came up with my seven pillars of optimal health.

Now, there are different variations of this.

I certainly didn't make up this concept.

but I kind of customized it for me.

So these are the ones I feel that are most important.

And I have began using this in my clinic.

And so I've been asking people to score themselves on these different pillars so that we can focus in on some of the weaker points in order to hopefully get all of these strong, which in my mind makes up the foundation for optimal health.

So the seven pillars that I came up with are sleep, nutrition, movement and strength, hormonal health, emotional health, relational health, and spiritual health.

Optimal health isn't created by fixing just one of these.

These pillars interact with each other.

So, for instance, poor sleep makes nutrition harder because you're tired, hungry, and more likely to make poor food choices.

Poor sleep interferes with exercise, performance, and recovery.

Hormonal problems can interfere with sleep.

Emotional stress can do the same thing.

Relationship problems can interfere with sleep.

Spiritual health...

And not having a sense of peace, meaning, and purpose can affect emotional health, which affects everything else.

And so these all kind of tie together.

And so over the course of the next several months, I'm going to be kind of doing a deep dive into each one of these.

But today I'm going to start with sleep.

I feel like sleep is kind of the foundation because if you're not sleeping well, you can be doing all of these other things correctly and you are still not going to obtain optimal health.

So what I've found since I have began doing this questionnaire in my office is that this is the weakest link for the vast majority of people.

So I feel like as a culture, we're not sleeping well.