Introduction
This is an expanding article. My name is Hartmut Michael Gunther, and I’m fortunate, grateful and lucky to still be on the planet after more than seven decades. Recently I’ve been wanting to write down and document those areas that significantly contribute to human happiness and health. Not just from my perspective, even though I’ve been a professional health practitioner for the last 25 years. You might say that the wisdom that is passed on here is based on my experience and, equally as important, the observation of the experience of my clients. As a self-confessed nerd, high-quality research and evidence have been part of my life since a teenager. And while this is a changing and evolving area, it reassuringly supports the wisdom gained through experience. We also witness wisdom coming and going and then coming back again. Often we find ourselves revisiting what our ancestors knew to be true and good for our health and happiness.
This article will be updated regularly as more depth filters in through each of the nine health investments. It’s important to realise that each of these nine areas interacts with each other through multiple mechanisms like neuroplasticity, biology, nutrients, medications, agency, behaviour, choice, and much, much more. The nine health investments form a complex interacting ecosystem that absolutely confirms the saying that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Through this acknowledgement and focus we are in effect supporting and nurturing the most complex organism in the universe, a human being. Of course it will evolve and deepen over time, but let’s make a start. Let’s have a crack at it, and that’s a good segway to introduce our first of the Nine Health Investments - Agency.
Agency
Agency is all about empowering yourself. It is responding to an impetus, a feeling, a thirst, a need that sometimes can almost palpably be felt in your gut. So at first, it’s as simple as getting off your butt, getting out of the chair, standing up, acknowledging where you’re at, and making a choice. And the choice you make leads into the action you take.
Act now. Thinking and planning about what needs to be done is not a substitute for doing what needs to be done. Don’t put off till tomorrow what can be done today. Willpower is overrated. Your environment will eventually overpower your willpower. Developing micro habits and sustainable systems is key and is facilitated by getting organised. You implement micro habits that stick leading to systems that run quietly in the background. Transformation, growth, learning and resilience are natural flowers that bloom from acting now.
When you find something good - Practice, Practice, Practice until you get good at it and even if you don’t get good at it, there’s enough flow of nourishment and goodness to keep you going with minimal resistance as you develop self-efficacy, a deep confidence in yourself that you will have more successes than failures. Perseverance furthers so get out there and get lucky.
Challenge yourself when life is easy, so you'll be ready when life is hard. James Clear
Movement & Strength
Getting the heart rate up as well as resisting muscle movement or put another way- physical work. Exercise and strength, which fuels agility and becomes more important and rewarding as we age. Movement is integral to existence — find what you love and build from there. Functional Health - the ability to stay independent, maintain strength and balance, and keep our wits about us - is key as we get older. Lots more coming shortly
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.
Albert Einstein
Sustenance - Nutrition, Hydration & Sunlight
We already have eight articles covering Nutrition, Hydration and soon the importance of morning sunlight, here on InnerFood
The three most important aspects of optimal Nutrition - The first one is getting assessed. This is subjective and personal and includes history and symptoms, current eating regime, and some blood tests and if needed utilising the gold standard protocol for discovering which foods we might be intolerant, sensitive or allergic to . Two, exposure to reliable information. This is objective evidence-based information, that can be personally assimilated and acted upon, often with assistance and guidance from a health practitioner or clinical nutritionist like myself. Three: Getting organised: micro habits and developing systems
Nutrition nourishes trillions of cells so they can do their work. Knowledge of food preparation and organisation is essential. Eating well is one of life’s genuine pleasures. Personalised nutritional assessments — not generic diets, but practical guidance specific to you is provided. Significant, trusted, reliable educational material is also readily available. Hydration - Lubricates, transports nutrients in and waste out. Facilitates cellular communication at every level. The quality of your water matters as much as the quantity. We go even further if needed and assess the quality of your drinking water through our lab at Toxtest that offers affordable water quality testing for your home, school, or workplace. See our thirst quenching, myth busting exploration of sweet clean drinking water and optimal hydration.
Morning sunlight and its benefits - Ancient knowledge yet having a focused research-based resurgence in the field of neuroscience and metabolism at the moment. More on this shortly.
Food, water, and sunlight are nature’s gift to us. How we grow, prepare, look after, and accept these wonders is a joyous gift to ourselves.
Hartmut
Rest, Deep Rest & Sleep
No longer rocket science. Prioritise at least 7- 8 hours, tune into your own needs and aim to go to bed and get up at the same time each day, seven days a week. Sleep deprivation cascades through every one of the other eight health investment area — it is the foundation everything else rests on. As a start see - Sleep. Rest is simply stopping and just being - sitting in a banana chair on a cool day with the sun shining on you with zero priorities in mind. Deep rest is like sleeping while you’re awake with other perks and benefits. See Self Knowledge below.
Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is relax. — Mark Black
Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health... — Matthew Walker
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. - John Steinbeck
Work, Meaning & Flow
A gift and a challenge. Work enables resources so we can create stuff, build stuff, and look after ourselves and those close to us. Of course, looking after ourselves is the work as we age gracefully. Work enables kindness and giving and often leads to meaning through the expression of our gifts, talents and passions. Meaning provides Joie de Vivre — the joy of life and a feeling of a life well lived.
Doing the right thing challenges us and facilitates growth so we don’t stagnate. Work through focused, directed effort while annexing all distractions, initiates a state of flow that many have described and research has shown to be truly exhilarating. We are completely alive, using our full cognitive resources in the moment. Often only possible for two to three hours at a time and requiring significant rest soon after to recover. Sometimes our work changes. It’s useful to talk to someone or be guided through this transition period.
In a state of flow, maintaining focused attention on a task makes the task itself the reward. — Daniel Kahneman
The best way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing. — Walt Disney
Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge. ― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Learning, Thinking, Behaviour
Invest in learning, not just what you’re told to learn, but what you want to learn. Learn how to recall what you learn. Memory and recall - practise recall, because that’s what consolidates memory, not reading the same thing over and over again or even taking notes. There’s an interconnection and overlap between thinking about something while you’re practising recall. Allow your thinking to go deep. It’s not rocket science. It’s simply effort and practice. And effort and practise is almost effortless and easier when we want to learn something.
When I went to school, yes, a long time ago, there was a subject at school called critical thinking. Basically, exercising curiosity, questioning, and going deeper. It seemed pretty natural and important back then, and it’s still necessary now.
We have been learning since our first breath. To survive, thrive and enjoy life, we need to keep learning. To adapt in a changing environment or indeed time in history, we have to learn. It’s important to learn things we are passionate about, enjoy or really need to know. It’s mostly effortless then.
Novel experiences — particularly in the form of travel — can rekindle the desire to discover something new. Travel can be as simple as going within, changing location in a wheelchair, getting off your chair, going outside, exploring the neighbourhood or travelling to another city or country, a concert or art gallery or simply into nature.
Action - experience - feedback - action again. All these build and flow into learning and self-efficacy.
Learning is intertwined with trying or wanting to change our behaviour. In order for learning to support behaviour change, we have to think. You cannot change your behaviour without changing your thinking.
Changing our behaviour requires first observing our behaviour, without judgement. Observing then flows naturally into thinking, a thinking that looks at both sides of the fence, unbiased, if you will. Our behaviour and others’ behaviour is a great teacher - especially the bad behaviour. Bad behaviour can come from unresolved issues, unconscious energies, often ignored or pushed under the carpet. Our Emotions play a huge part in learning.
Interestingly, and according to recent advances in neuroscience, our capacity to learn, no matter at what age, is far, far greater than we think.
Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.
Wayne W. Dyer
To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.
Pema Chödrön
We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses - Carl Jung
Build upon what you know. And it’s all so much easier and meaningful when what you know and practise provides a daily infusion of peace, joy and kindness.
Hartmut
Communication & Listening
Everything living on planet earth communicates. Bugs talk to each other. Immune cells communicate with other immune cells. Big trees growing near baby trees communicate. They communicate via a network of mycorrhizal fungi. They help each other, or they don’t, but they are communicating.
The world is a scary place, but a lot of the fear around interacting with other humans is alleviated when we communicate.
Communication opens up possibilities. So many possibilities. Stumbling through communication, being anxious, having been hurt in the past, making mistakes, worried about what people think. These are all hurdles that can be overcome simply by having a crack at it. And then keep having a crack at it.
For myself, I was forced into public speaking quite late in my life due to a certain job opportunity. I was terrified, anxious, for weeks. And of course, the first public presentation felt a little uncomfortable. At least by the second one, a lot of the fears that were surfaced because of the unknown from the first presentation had already subsided. And then the third and the fourth and what was extraordinary was that I had no idea that I could like this. In fact, after a little while, I realised I did like speaking in front of people.
Some of us struggle with one-on-one communication. The best way to get better at it and more comfortable with it is to make a bumbling start and keep going. So there’s definitely hurdles, but it’s worth it.
Of course, writing is communicating. Acting is communicating, and it helps to know when someone is acting. Painting, Sculpture, Architecture is communicating beauty.
Thanking someone for making you a really good latte, even though you don’t know them, sends neurochemicals through your body and their body that even for a brief time uplifts.
When you talk to someone, when you tell them about what you’re doing, what you’re up to, what projects you’re doing, what you’re interested in, what you’re struggling with, it opens up a plethora of possibilities and opportunities.
Kindness helps. Kindness is a superpower that genuinely changes lives for the better. Of course, kindness to yourself is first and foremost. Connection with family, friends, or other living beings is not optional — it is physiologically and psychologically essential. Often overlooked. Being open helps even if you don’t have the trait of Openness.
Integral to communication is listening. Most living creatures can hear things, often through vibration. We are bombarded with sounds and vibrations all day long, some pleasant, some unpleasant. Our awareness of these sounds, of people’s voices, of cars screeching, of children crying, passively comes and goes through our consciousness.
Yet, as humans, we have the ability to directly focus our attention and choose what to listen to. This is an extraordinary gift and relatively easy to do. What the challenge is, however, is to decide, discern what to listen to that, in turn, helps us, benefits us, enhances our relationships and fosters clarity and understanding. This, in itself, has profound flow-on effects to many of the other health investments spoken about here. Knowing what to listen to and when is integral to knowing yourself. Is non-negotiable for learning. Is a minimum requirement for work. And as music and the sound of waves on the foreshore, listening instils awe, feelings of beauty, and a calming that consistently re-invites us into our wondrous life.
And in our last section, entitled Functional Health, listening comes to the forefront as the body tries to communicate with us.
“I finally saved enough to pay for the Dale Carnegie Course. I barely remember the specific sequence of events that led me there. What I remember is what it felt like from the inside: the experience of watching ordinary people, people who were afraid to speak, afraid to claim space, afraid to say what they actually wanted, stand up week after week and become more of themselves. The course was about reprogramming the story you told yourself about who you were and what you were capable of doing.”
Thom Hartmann - from The Biology of Good Fortune: What ‘Lucky’ People Do Differently
Know Thy Self
Experience and knowledge of the world that we live in becomes invaluable as time goes on. Yet often undiscovered, or unacknowledged, or simply not heard of as yet, is the experience and Knowledge of the Self. While knowing thyself obviously includes those aspects of our good and bad behaviours, learnings, what drives us, how we fit in and survive in this world - there is more to know, to experience. And the more that we are talking about here is not a created more. It is, in fact, an experience that is available to us simply because we are alive and conscious.
It is facilitated by “going within”, which in turn is facilitated through utterly simple techniques, practised during a quiet, focused time in the day. The know-how of this practice has been available throughout millennia, through the kindness of those that know. See an article I wrote recently called Inner Space.
To Know thyself requires some aspect of allowing. Interestingly, allowing, when we practise “going within”, is similar to letting go. When we let go, combined with a gentle focus inward, like a gentle awareness of the coming and going of this breath we open ourselves to the experience that flows from being close to what already exists within us. And what already exists within us, not created by us via thought or belief, has been called God, the universe, the divine, the Self. Yet a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
And you get lucky in life and love.
This definitely instils an optimism grounded in self-awareness. And as we’ve mentioned before, you seem to attract good luck that doesn’t require exceptional talent or unusual privilege. It requires only the recognition that luck is not something that happens to you; it’s something you practice.
“Quietly, daily, with more neuroscience behind it than most people realise, and with a lot more ancient wisdom pointing toward it than the scientists yet know.” from neuroscientist named Nobuko Nakano and mentioned in The Biology of Good Fortune: What ‘Lucky’ People Do Differently
Peace is not a luxury. It’s not an option. It is fundamental to the existence and well-being of a human being to have peace in their life. Practise peace, change your world. - Prem Rawat
This life that has been given to us as a gift, as such a precious gift. To really try to understand it, really try to recognise it, is the greatest meditation. What you are looking for is within you. - Prem Rawat
Functional Health
When the body gets grumpy, angry or just plain nasty.
For those of us who have been on the planet for a while (there are a lot of us now) or those of us struggling with a handicap, or recovering from an injury, or those of us unwell or simply those of us who want to function as best as humanly possible.
Functional health is particularly important as we get older. Many of us don’t know that we’re losing the ability to function as we’re used to. Pushing through definitely has its place. Functional health is becoming aware of where our body needs some attention, some maintenance, some encouragement to stay flexible and strong. This often requires some help and some learning. Often a new learning. And of course, leading to putting into action what we have learnt.
Listening to our body becomes important and non-negotiable at different stages in our life and those times are unique to each individual
And while mostly we don’t want to listen to the body, because we’re busy doing our thing, occasionally or with growing frequency the body says: Hey Dumbo, listen up! Here are some aches and pains, discomfort, dis-ease, horrible thoughts, overwhelming emotions, or debilitating fatigue. This is not your body torturing you. It is simply your body asking you to pay attention. It’s simply a call to action.
As mentioned before, we learn from our bad behaviour, learn from being kind and generous, learn from addiction, learn from stress, learn from the pain, discomfort, and fatigue and emotional turmoil the body and mind present to us.
We then adjust and respond to the body and mind’s needs. Ignoring might work in the short term, rarely in the long term. Not an over-analysis or constant obsession, but simply a response and a moving on. Some response, even an awareness, an acknowledgement, is better than ignoring, which often leads to suffering eventually.
We are not saying be weak. Sometimes the appropriate response is to push through the pain, find your limits, let the body adjust. In effect, conduct the clinical trial of one, so to speak. Obviously, caution and heightened awareness are required with this approach. Supervision or mentoring or coaching is recommended.
Hartmut’s incredible new health tool, 25 years in the making called - SOPHIA - can really help turning this awareness, this listening, into learning and actions that really benefit us. SOPHIA is currently in beta testing and should be available to everyone in the next few weeks.
We think a wise person is someone who solves problems. Truth is, a wise person is someone who avoids problems. - Prem Rawat
Very motivational. Thanks for the inspiration.