People often ask me how I ended up a speaker on lifestyle and health from a career in Emergency Medicine. It’s a fair question. Emergency physicians are the most clinical of clinicians, trained to stabilize sick patients, treat acute issues, and get people where they need to be (e.g; home or admitted to the hospital.) In many cases, we lack the time and bandwidth to talk to patients about how their lifestyles can improve their medical problems or where they are headed if they don’t make changes. However it is what I have seen in the ER that compels me to talk about it. I have taken care of the elderly with dementia who don’t recognize their own children, for patients with advanced diabetes who face amputations, and for persons with severe depression who are considering harming themselves. My heart has been broken by the countless people suffering from diseases that might have been avoided or could be improved by small changes in lifestyle. These are things like eating better, moving more, sleeping enough, and improving our thought content and the quality of our relationships. I find that most people want to do better but struggle to make change. In my mission to empower them, my greatest tool is to help them live intentionally. Since this concept is more popular in yoga studios than health articles, I will explain what I mean and how to make it actionable.
When I say to live with intention, I mean to get clear on your purpose in life and who you want to be, then ensure your choices align with that. The easiest way to start is to see if you can write the purpose of your life in one sentence. Consider it a mission statement of your own little company. How can a business be successful if it doesn’t know its goal? The same is true for us. We need to define what is important to us so we can say “yes” to more things that support our mission and “no” to the things that don’t. Once you’ve got your sentence down, I challenge you to start putting words to who you want to be in every aspect of your life. Whether it’s as a parent, spouse, friend, or professional — describe the best version of yourself and start letting this vision inform your decisions. The research tells us that people who know the purpose of their lives tend to live longer and to be healthier. Wouldn’t it make sense that we should develop our sense of purpose just as we work to improve the other facets of our health?
No matter where you are in the process of hashing out these big questions, I have an exercise that will help set your course. I start my workshops with it and return to it myself when my habits have gone completely sideways. Get a pen and paper and describe your ideal life at eighty-years-old. In other words, depict the life you want — not the one you think you must have. Visualize in detail how you want to feel physically and emotionally and how you hope to function mentally. Who are the people you will spend time with and what will you do?
My vision is to be a strong wife, mother, and grandmother, and my days are to be spent moving, laughing and loving those around me. I keep this image up front every single day; often it’s the last part of my morning reflection. Without this North Star, I struggle to prioritize things like leafy greens, going to bed on time, and sticking with a daily meditation. When I look back to receiving my diagnosis of breast cancer at age forty, I first remember feeling deeply sad, a glimpse of what I had seen in the eyes of many of my ER patients over the years. Then I recall a gnawing regret that I hadn’t done as well as I could have in terms of my nutrition, sleep, and stress management. As in any illness, I will never know how big a part these factors had and how much was driven by my genetic profile and other unknowns. However, this clarity of intention helps me to move forward to the best of my abilities, reducing the risk of future disease and putting me in a better place to undergo treatment if it does strike.
None of us is exempt from a bad diagnosis. I know that with even the healthiest of lifestyles, there are factors outside our control. However, my point is that we can still optimize the things we can control, making our chance of disease less and making us more resilient if we do face one. By getting clear on our purpose and the vision of our later years, we gain the motivation to make those simple but often difficult changes. By doing so, we just might find ourselves becoming who we were meant to be all along!