Most weeks I write about something I have been reading, or something that happened in the clinic that made me think. Today I want to do something different.
I want to say plainly what we believe at Mindful Wellness, and how those beliefs shape the four pillars we build every program around.
Why is it so hard to change my health habits?
Wanting it is almost never the problem. Everyone who walks into my office wants to be healthy and wants more years with the people they love. What makes change hard is everything stacked on top of that desire: genetics, upbringing, the food environment, stress, sleep, work, and the people around us.
Here is the thing I notice more than anything else in this work. Nobody comes to see me not wanting to be well. Not one person.
So when someone tells me they have failed at this before, and many of them tell me exactly that, I already know it was not because they did not want it enough.
What sits on top of the wanting is everything else. Our genes and our epigenetics. How we were raised, and what food meant in the house we grew up in. The society we live in, and what it makes cheap, easy, and constant.
Our stress, our jobs, our sleep, the hours we do not have. The people in our lives, who make this easier or harder without meaning to do either. Any one of those is heavy on its own. Most of us are carrying several at the same time.
Where does real change actually begin?
Change begins with looking at your own life honestly and with compassion. It does not begin with a plan, and it does not begin with more discipline. When you can see clearly why things are the way they are, without contempt for yourself, the way forward tends to show itself.
From any other vantage point it stays hidden, and we keep trying harder at the wrong thing.
Which is why I have come to believe that change does not have to be hard, but it does have to begin in the right place. Understanding the causes and conditions of your own suffering is the work that makes everything after it possible.
How do you decide which new treatments are worth offering?
We try to stand between two kinds of certainty. Traditional medicine often moves too slowly to offer people treatments that already work. The wellness industry races ahead of the evidence and sells confidence it has not earned. We bring you what is genuinely new when the evidence supports it, and we say so plainly when it does not.
There are genuinely revolutionary things happening in health right now. The traditional medical system, which I love and which I have worked inside my entire career, is often too conservative to offer them to everyone who could benefit.
It moves slowly, and there are good reasons for that, and people still wait years for care that already exists.
On the other side is a wellness industry that races out ahead of the evidence, selling protocols and compounds with enormous confidence and very little understanding of whether they are safe, or whether they work at all.
That exuberance costs people money, and sometimes it costs them more than money. We try to live between those two.
Do sleep, stress, nutrition, and activity still matter if I am on medication?
Yes, and nothing changes that. Sleep, stress, nutrition, and physical activity are the foundation of whatever health any of us has, and no medication replaces them. When we use medication, and we do, it is a both/and, never an either/or.
The medication can open a door. The coaching is how you walk through it, and how you stay on the other side of it.
Underneath all of it, we hold to the things that have never stopped being true. That is the whole belief, really. Compassion first, evidence second, and the foundations always.
