I am not here to lead a fucking health revolution. I am here to help you be the healthiest version of yourself, because the more fulfilled we are, the more agency we have, the less we succumb to the unnatural forces of dis-ease that we have built into modern society.
Imagine that I could give you a pill -once- and you would be able to stick to your healthy habits without much effort for the rest of your life. Would that be too hard to swallow?
Today I am going to share a tool with you that has helped me change the trajectory of my own health, as a doctor suffering mentally and physically.
It will help you assess your self-compassion and readiness for lifestyle improvements, using evidence-based psychology and behavioral health scales.I call it the State of Gumption Report, and I include a link for you to try it out below. It is available today to all Paid supporters and will be made available to the free newsletter as well next month!
Here’s what you need to know first
Before you embark on this rewarding path of self discovery, let me orient you to where we are in society when it comes to our health and state of collective gumption.
The word gumption is an old Scottish word that means to “have a shrewd or spirited initiative…it is the psychic gasoline that keeps us going”. Some people refer to it as “street-smart”, and others say gumption means “common sense”.
For some reason, that word has disappeared since the Scots blessed us with it back in the 1800s. That is, until it made a come back in popularity around 2010, the year of my deepest, darkest depression as a medical intern at Tufts. I read that word for the first time during that year.
Words create worlds.
Gumption: If you have gumption, you have guts or grit. People with gumption are determined and full of courage and strength and tenacity.
So…what is draining us of our gumption?
We’re pretty sick right now
In a world where we have a pill for everything, where we eat TV dinners instead of hunting, where our biggest problem with food is how much of it we eat, where we have billboards, social media and Netflix shows that remind us of what we lack, we have disavowed our collective gumption to work, governments and industries.
We have exchanged our resourcefulness and spirited existence, for digital fantasies and arbitrary averages, standards and mindsets. It has its benefits, but it is hurting us a lot.
We have outsourced humanity’s calculus of life to a handful of people in suits. The more of our gumption we gave into our night shifts, healing patients, defending innocent people, constructing cities, farming food and expanding factories, the less resourceful we became.
We grew richer, but more anxious. Our problem became abundance.
As a result, we are experiencing the highest levels of dissatisfaction, turnover and burnout with jobs; our children are committing suicide; and our bodies are being ravaged by chronic metabolic diseases and cancer.
Our bodies are exhausted.
We live longer thanks to healthcare, but we are spending our extra years and money in hospitals.
Our global body of existence on Earth is suffering in new ways to us. Most of us suffer alongside with it, if not for economical, geographical and political reasons, then for health ones.
So, how do we find gumption in our sick modern world?
There are two kinds of gumption traps that make things like healthy behaviours tricky to stick to for a long time: Setbacks (external factors) and Hangups (internal factors).
Setbacks are external events that could be diseases, breakups, loss of a loved one, environmental disasters, foreclosures, accidents of all sorts, bankruptcy, burglary, corruption, war, racism, violence, family issues, etc. These are wrenches thrown in our faces on the path of life.
They do not define us, but how we react to them does.
Hangups are how we respond to said setbacks, and how they change us. We refer to them as traumas which is one of the hottest topics of research on the mental health frontier these days.
Dr. Gabor Mate describes the Greek word origin:
Trauma not as the blunt instrument that delivers the blow, but the wound and bruising that result in the tissues.
The more I work with tech engineers and doctors on health transformations post depression and burnout, the more I realize that there are two common hangups robbing many working professionals of their gumption and health.
The Shame Hangup and The Laziness Hangup
Shame and laziness are two particular features of modern society that I believe drive a lot of the emotional burden that gets translated to automatic behaviors and ultimately health outcomes.
Shame is believing that something is wrong with us. It isolates us from ‘normal’. It keeps us in a loop of self-judgement. The Antidote for Shame is Self Compassion, as studied by Kristen Neff, and an excellent meta-analysis was done in the book Compassionomics.
Self-compassion is about getting up again and again, with full accountability. When it comes to habits, this is the single most important thing for the long term game of health.
You don’t need self compassion to quit smoking, but you need it when you do smoke and feel like you have failed.
The evidence shows that self-compassion is the super-tool we need to dream big and still achieve better health.
The reason why people do not keep themselves accountable, is the resistance to facing feelings of shame.
Neff’s research shows how shame is so heavily intertwined with addiction and bad eating patterns that we can’t really separate them from each other.
Laziness is when you use our shame goggles to judge ourselves for not doing much, having initiative, or not wanting to do something we “should” be doing. The Rx for Laziness is understanding your Readiness for Change, which is studied by Prochaska et al.
Laziness is a way that we judge our state of readiness.
Readiness needs to be measured on all six lifestyle factors of Exercise, Nutrition, Sleep, Stress, Relationships and Addiction.
Readiness comes in a cycle. It starts with Pre-contemplation (“I don’t see the need to quit smoking” and ends with Termination “I am no longer a smoker and I have quit for many years now”.
We all relapse after stabilizing a habit, and we miss days. What we do next defines who we are. Shame plays a role here in keeping us stuck in “laziness” mode.
Both shame and our judgement of ourselves as lazy are synonymous with the evolution of the modern day workplace.
“The western idea of self-empowerment requires you to become better, discover your inner billionaire, get beach-bodied, work, upgrade. It says the present is not enough. It's self-loathing masquerading as salvation.
We need self-acceptance. Self-compassion. Our present bodies and minds and lives are not things we have to escape. We need to remember the messy miracle of being here.”
Matt Haig,The Comfort Book
Introducing The Gumption Report!
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