We talk a lot about what we put into our bodies, but not enough about the kind of life we’re asking our bodies to carry.
I spent most of my late twenties and early thirties believing that healthy living was a willpower problem.
If I could just wake up at five, train hard enough, eat clean enough, hit the meditation cushion every morning, cut out the wine on weeknights, track the right metrics, then I'd arrive at some version of myself who was healthy. It wasn't a bad theory. A lot of it worked. I got fitter, I slept better, I read more.
But there was something off about it I couldn't quite see at the time.
Every system I built was a system for overpowering myself. I was the obstacle. My body wanted things my better self had decided were bad for me, so I was always managing the gap between the version of me who wanted to scroll on the couch at 9pm and the version who had a plan for tomorrow morning.
It was exhausting in a particular way, and I called the exhaustion "discipline" and felt good about it.
The thing I missed
What I didn't see was that I was disciplined about the inputs but had built a life I needed regular relief from.
The drink after work. The scroll before bed. The way I'd zone out on a Friday night and feel like I'd earned it. None of these were serious problems. They were small, ordinary exits. But there were a lot of them, and they all pointed in the same direction.
Some part of me wanted out of the day I'd just had.
I thought the fix was more discipline. Cut the wine. Stop the scrolling. Add another habit. But that just left the underlying thing unaddressed, which was that the day itself was a thing I kept wanting a break from.
You can't out-discipline that. You can suppress the symptom for a while. The need will come back through a different door.
What most people are actually escaping
When I started paying attention, I noticed that the people I knew who relied most heavily on small daily escapes weren't undisciplined.
They were people whose lives, on closer look, contained things that were quietly grinding them down. A job they'd outgrown. A marriage they were lonely inside. A schedule with no real rest in it. A friend group they no longer felt like themselves around. A home they didn't enjoy being in.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing you'd name as a crisis.
Just a slow accumulation of small mismatches that made the evening feel like something to survive rather than something to enjoy. So at 6pm the wine made sense. At 10pm the phone made sense. On Saturday afternoon the collapse onto the couch made sense.
These weren't failures of character. They were a reasonable response to a life that wasn't quite working.
The healthiest people I knew weren't more disciplined. They had less they needed to escape from.
What changed for me
Around my mid-thirties, almost by accident, things in my life started to shift.
We moved. My wife and I had our daughter. I started working more closely with my brothers, and the work itself became something I actually wanted to do rather than something I was extracting performance out of myself for. We spend time in Saigon, where her family is, where I've come to feel oddly at home. We have a quiet routine.
None of this was strategy. A lot of it was luck, or timing, or just getting older and wanting different things.
But what I noticed was that the urge for the small daily escape started to fade. I still drink sometimes. I still scroll sometimes. I'm not claiming I crossed over into some serene version of myself. The pull just isn't what it was. The day doesn't have the same edge to it. I don't get to 6pm with a tight feeling in my chest that wants to be loosened.
The healthy habits, the ones I used to white-knuckle, got much easier. I run because I like running, not because I'm trying to discipline a version of myself I'm unhappy with. I eat reasonably because the rest of my life isn't sending me to the fridge looking for relief.
I'd assumed the habits would build the life. It turned out, for me, the life had to build the habits.
What healthy might actually mean
I've started to think of health less as a set of behaviors and more as a kind of quiet test.
How much of your life, on a normal week, are you actually trying to get a break from? The answer to that tells you more than your step count does.
A friend of mine drinks a glass of wine in the evening, runs occasionally, eats whatever he wants, sleeps fine, and is happy. He has built a life he isn't trying to leave. Another friend tracks every macro, trains six days a week, has done three plant medicine retreats, and is still reaching for something every day to take the edge off. From the outside, the second guy looks healthier. I'm not sure he is.
I don't think discipline is useless. You still need to do hard things. You still need habits. There are stretches of life where willpower is the only thing keeping you upright, and that matters.
But I no longer think of it as the centre of the picture.
The slower work
The harder, slower work is figuring out what in your life you keep needing to escape from, and being honest about whether you can change it.
Sometimes you can. The job, the city, the friend group, the way you spend your evenings. These are more changeable than they feel. Sometimes you can't, at least not yet, and the question is what small adjustments make the day a little more bearable rather than something to numb.
I'm 37, and I don't think I have this fully worked out. I still have days where I notice myself reaching for an exit at 9pm and feel mildly disappointed in myself for it.
But I've stopped treating those moments as discipline failures.
I treat them now as information. Something in this day, this week, this stretch of my life, isn't quite right. The reach for the exit is telling me where to look. The work is to look there honestly, instead of just trying harder to not reach.
That, it turns out, is most of what I now mean by healthy living. It has less to do with the regime than with whether you actually want to be in the day you're already in.
