Healthspan
When your life is going well in body, mind, and spirit, you have signs of vitality. You can check yourself right now to see if you are expressing vitality with three simple questions to check your body, mind, and spirit:
Do you have energy for what interests you?
Is your sense of humor “on tap” and available to you right now?
Do you have a sense of looking forward to something (anything, no matter how small) in the near future?
Life is complex, and it is a hard fact that there is pain in the world and also in ordinary life. Taking care of your health and vitality can feel like one more thing on top of the 10,000 things you are already dealing with. But if you're not going to make time for this, what are you making time for?
Your answer to this question could change your future.
Healthspan
A couple of years ago I came across a term healthspan in the scientific literature. How long do you have health throughout your lifespan? In our society, aging is not easy, and not a lot of people do it skillfully. A lot of people simply become overwhelmed by the aging process and get a wakeup call to start taking care of their health only when something goes terribly wrong. Both my parents became sick and frail in the last years of their lives before they died, and this is a common pattern in America.
The ideal is to have your healthspan match your lifespan. Imagine being of sound health and mind up until the end of life. What is required?
Take Care of Your Vitality
You can create health at any given moment even if you deal with a chronic health condition. The skill of noticing where your attention goes, which is what you do when you practice mind-body arts, is very useful for creating health. Building your health and vitality can begin with you noticing little things in your life that make your body feel strong or noticing things that give your mind a sense of peace and space. Recognizing healthy feelings and behaviors is a valuable skill you can strengthen with practice. Then, to build up (or build back) your vitality and health, you do your best to get these things into your life regularly as best you can. The scientific literature shows that you actively increase your healthspan by getting good sleep, nutrition, and exercise, and also taking care of social relationships regularly. This takes practice. There will be times when it will be a challenge or nearly impossible to get to all these things (because: life can be like that), but your willingness to try counts for a lot especially when it is hard. Your ability to create health and wellbeing is your super power. I encourage you to use it often.