What Is Health?

As executive director of the Colorado Association of Naturopathic Doctors, I spend time reading about health. Research studies. Medical journals. Healthcare policy. New discoveries. Conversations about medicine. Some of that comes with the job. The rest is because I’ve always been curious. I enjoy pulling on a thread just to see where it leads.

A few days ago, one of those threads led me to a surprisingly simple question.

What is health?

It’s a word we all use as though we understand it. We talk about healthy foods, healthy habits, healthcare, health insurance, and public health. We wish one another good health. We spend a great deal of time trying to improve it.

Yet when I stopped long enough to think about it, I realized I didn’t really have a definition. I had examples.

If you had asked me to define health, I would point to things: Good blood pressure. Healthy cholesterol. Normal blood sugar. A healthy weight. The ability to walk a  mile without getting winded. Enough strength to get through the day. I would have gathered together a collection of measurements and abilities and said, “There. That’s health.”

It seemed like a perfectly reasonable answer. And then I thought, well, what IS the definition of health? The World Health Organization seemed like a credible place to begin. If anyone had spent time wrestling with the question, surely they had.

Their definition surprised me.

Health, they wrote, is “a resource for everyday life” that allows us to adapt, cope, and reach our personal potential.

That was not what I expected.  The definition wasn’t describing health by what we could measure.

It was describing health by what it made possible.

That was a mind expander for me.

Without realizing it, I had allowed measurements to become my definition of health. Blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, and laboratory values are all important. They tell us things about our bodies that we couldn’t possibly know on our own, and they help physicians make better decisions every day.

But they tell us about our health. They are definitely a part of the larger conversation about health, but the markers and ranges and numbers are not the whole story. They are not “health” in and of themselves

If health is a resource that allows us to adapt, cope, and reach our personal potential, then health is something much richer than a collection of numbers. It is the capacity to meet life well. It is the strength to recover after disappointment instead of remaining discouraged. It is the resilience to adapt when circumstances change. It is the ability to continue learning, contributing, loving, and growing throughout the different seasons of our lives.

I don’t know about you, but I find that incredibly hopeful. The WHO definition reminds me that health is more than something we measure. It is something we. participate in.  Health is not something we give away to be managed. We have a lot of influence in our own health.

That doesn’t mean we control everything. We don’t. Illness is real. Aging is real. Loss is real. Life has a way of reminding us that some things are beyond our control.

What we do have is influence.

Every nourishing meal, every walk, every good night’s sleep, every meaningful relationship, and every decision to care for our bodies and minds strengthens the very resource that helps us adapt, cope, and continue growing. Those choices aren’t simply tasks on an ever-changing health checklist. They are opportunities to strengthen our capacity to live well.

Perhaps that’s what I found so beautiful about the World Health Organization’s definition. It shifted my attention away from asking only, “What do my numbers say?” and invited me to ask a different question.

What am I doing today to strengthen the resource that helps me meet life well?

I’ll continue paying attention to my blood pressure, my lab work, and all the other measurements that help me understand my body. Those things matter, and they always will. But I’m excited to embrace the idea that health is about much more than numbers and that I have a role to play in strengthening the very resource that helps me adapt, cope, and reach my own personal potential.