When it comes to health, the question is NOT: Are you healthy or not?
But more so: HOW Healthy are you? The former question is a binary one, which can only be answered by a “yes” or a “no”. It misses many nuances and doesn’t represent well how health and our biology works. The latter is a question that makes us realize that health takes place on a spectrum, and that while you can be free of any disease, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re actually “healthy.” That said…
I’m writing this because I have been sick and locked in bed since Wednesday afternoon, and yesterday was the first day I had some energy. Nothing major happened. Just a virus that managed to evade my immune system long enough to make me feel shitty. Almost all is back to normal now.
As much as I hate those situations because they are really unpleasant, I find that they are good occasions to reflect on what I could've done better or differently.
What could I have done to stay further away from the “disease line”?
For me, the reason why I fell sick lately was because my behaviours made me spend too much time closer to the line than away from it. More specifically, there are two things that I believe contributed to lowering my body's defences and resilience:
- Over-eating.
- Couldn’t conquer my boredom.
Over-Eating
It had been 1-2 weeks that I felt like my body didn't need the amount of food I was eating.
I wasn’t listening to those signals and kept eating. Now, when reading the word “over-eating”, some of you might visualize this:
But when you think about it, you don’t have to push things to such an extreme to be “over-eating”, because over-eating can’t be defined by a fixed amount/number;
Instead, over-eating is described as the imbalance between what your body “needs” and what you’re ingesting.
That said, you ARE over-eating when you’re eating three eggs while your body actually needs one… even if your biased brain tells you that three eggs aren’t THAT much.
Over-eating once isn’t the end of the world. However, maintaining an imbalanced ratio for too long is what creates internal “noise.”
And what the body needs is “signals.”
Not “noise”.
Couldn’t conquer my boredom.
For the past few days, I had a hard time sitting down and doing nothing. It’s as if 2 minutes after sitting down, my mind would start getting active, and then I’d feel compelled to do something. Read something, watch my cellphone, write something… anything except simply chilling.
I hate to write this because it reminds me that “I’m not there yet” with managing my stress response and having control over my physiology. I don’t know if we ever are “there yet” at some point in life, but I’m surely farther from it than closer. Being stuck in that kind of loop for too long isn’t good. Yes, it’s good to accomplish things in life, and it’s good to be stimulated, but it’s bad to never be able to switch off.
I was stuck in the latter state for too long lately, and that prevented me from being aware of subtle signals my body was sending me. So I pushed it a bit too far; my system got weaker, and I couldn’t fight the virus I was subjected to.
This is just a small virus and there won’t be any long term consequences, so I’m glad I went through it now to help me reset my “reality meter” and get back on track.