Your North Star

The #1 Way to Know You're Healthy

I define “health” like this:

But how do you know you are healthy?

What are more specific things you look out for to verify you are on the right track?

Many of us can get lost in tactical details and proxy markers, looking at our weight, waist circumference, sleep metrics, HRV, testosterone, estrogen, ApoB, VO2max, microbiome testing, and so on.

While proxy markers are necessary in some respects and tactical details matter greatly when we are in the weeds of optimizing something, we need a North Star to govern the constellation of markers we are tracking, or to check in on when we aren’t tracking anything.

This is your North Star:

You are meeting the demands of your physical and cognitive pursuits with abundant energy and clarity, high libido, low anxiety, and pain-free ease of movement.

We can derive some guiding rules from this.

You Should Rarely get Sick

For example, you should rarely get sick. You can regard each sickness as docking a chunk off your energy score:

• You were likely missing energy and resources to defend against the illness.

• Your body may have purposefully become inflamed to calm you down because it didn’t have the energy to do what you were trying to make it do.

• Regardless of why you got sick, recovering from the illness will take a considerable chunk out of your energy budget.

The downtime associated with the illness has to be counted against your healthfulness through taking points out of the energy score.

The Energy-to-Anxiety Ratio

Another rule you can derive from this is that you want a high energy-to-anxiety ratio. A state that is abundant in energy is one in which the top layer of that energy is used to direct the bulk of the energy into the right places and toward the right uses. As you start to lose energy, often the first thing you may notice is that what energy is left goes into the wrong places because you lost the energy that you needed to control the rest.

If your energy is spent on worrying about things you cannot control, this is a lower energy state than if it is spent on taking charge of the things you can control.

It may feel like the same amount of energy is buzzing through your body in each case, but that is because the additional energy it takes to direct the flow of the bulk of your energy doesn’t feel like a buzz. It silently flows through you, increasing the gracefulness of the bulk energy. You may not feel more energy. You may instead feel that your energy burns more cleanly, flows more calmly, and is more available to your purpose.

Libido and Life Force Energy

You can take a broad view of “libido” to think of it as life force energy. If you are purposefully directing your life into pursuits that do not involve sex, I am not arguing that you have to be tortured with sexual desire to be healthy. But you should feel that this underlying life force is abundant and under your purposeful direction.

This life force will take different forms in different stages of life and will operate according to other natural rhythms, including for a woman the menstrual cycle.

During the bulk of life, reproduction dominates as an imperative and viewing libido literally and classically makes sense as the default.

When evaluating the health of a child you are expecting it to be amorphous and manifest in a plethora of ways but they should appear full of life.

An older person may be redirecting this energy entirely into a consolidated singular purpose or diffusing it across relationships or nostalgic connections.

You should see this vital force in abundance in anyone, and whether the light is dimming or shining brightly is an index of health.

Pain-Free Ease of Movement

You should feel comfortable in your own body, and appear to others that you are comfortable in your own body. It shouldn’t hurt to sit still or to move, and your movement should reflect your intention.

Expectation Management

Properly interpreting the North Star requires some skill in expectation management.

If you feel overwhelmed and totally unable to meet your goals, is it possible that you are just trying to do too much?

There is always an easy way to find out if you are doing too much: do a little less and see if everything gets better.

For example, suppose you are lifting weights. Your numbers keep going down. It is certainly possible that you have a new health problem and that’s to blame, but the rational thing to do in response is to vary your total effort expended in weight lifting by varying your volume, frequency, intensity, duration, or exercise selection. If increasing total effort leads to better results, you weren’t getting enough stimulus. If decreasing total effort leads to better results, you were doing too much.

Suppose you determine you were in fact doing too much, but you believe in your heart of hearts that you should be able to do more. You might be right, in which case you should make being able to do more a goal of your health and enter an optimization cycle to achieve that goal.

But you should hone your expectation management skill by discussing this with experts and peers and by doing a little research to see if you are framing the issue the right way.

For example, you might start out thinking you should be able to do more volume in the gym, but through dialogue you might arrive at the conclusion that you really want to be stronger, or faster, or be able to hike with your friends and not get tired, and that doing more volume is not the best way to achieve your true goal.

Having clarity about your problems, challenges, and goals can help improve your interpretation of your North Star.

Vet Everything Against Your North Star

All your other markers should be vetted against the North Star.

Sleeping more? That is often excellent. The way you know it is excellent is you start feeling more energetic during the day, more clear-headed, and less anxious. If you start feeling progressively more tired during the day as you sleep more, however, you’re probably sleeping more because you need more sleep, and the underlying reason could be a drop in your health.

Did a strategy increase your energy? Great — but did it lower your anxiety? If the energy-to-anxiety ratio didn’t improve, the North Star isn’t necessarily looking better.

Did a strategy lower your ApoB? Great — but what happened to the North Star? Perhaps you notice nothing and you improved a proxy marker covering one aspect of your longevity. But if it hurts more to move, something is going wrong that takes precedence. If your North Star is shining brighter in every respect, you may be genuinely on to something fantastic.

Never Forget the North Star

Carry on in your journey as far as you yearn to go.

But never forget to look up at the sky to let the North Star guide you.

Moving Forward From Here

How do you achieve the North Star?

Start with the Five Laws of Mitochondrial Health: