My Wellness Routine is Killing Me

I’ve been on a wellness kick the last few years, both for my physical and mental health.

I’ve been on a wellness kick the last few years, both for my physical and mental health. 

On the mental health side, apart from continuing talk therapy – which I’ve done weekly for as long as I can remember – I underwent ketamine therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, learned how to meditate and now do so daily. I take fluoxetine for my OCD. I’ve made massive changes in my personal life, transformed how I see the world and my role in it, and have formed new relationships – one especially – that have been exponentially positive. I practice gratitude daily. I pray daily. I’ve learned to calm my anxieties by writing about them. I am the calmest, the most peaceful and content I’ve ever been. By a lot. Even though I still feel plenty of anxiety. 

On the physical side, I’ve undergone a battery of tests – all at my own initiation – to see exactly where my health stands. In the past twelve months, I’ve had a full body MRI, a DEXA scan, a carotid artery scan, a V02 Max test, a Galleri Multi-Cancer test, a Cleerly heart scan, an APOE gene test, a colonoscopy, an endoscopy, a full body dermatology scan, measured my glucose and insulin levels, my PSA levels, my vision, my teeth, had every conceivable blood test imaginable and a lot more. I work with a functional medicine doctor on top of my regular GP and an array of specialists. 

I exercise 5-6 times a week. I quit drinking during the early days of covid and quit smoking weed seven months ago. I try to eat healthy. I try to get enough sleep (this one is still a challenge). I take a wide array of supplements ranging from Vitamin D to Iron to NAC to Methylation to several more I can’t remember. I’ve worked on my sleep hygiene – installed blackout shades, now sleep with the bedroom at 67 degrees, and some other stuff I only do sporadically like shower before bed. I take a statin daily, monitor my body measurements regularly through a complicated scale,  measure my steps and my heart rate (I tried wearing an Oura ring but the sleep data was stressing me out to the point where I was sleeping worse because of it). I’m doing a lot.

And yet, to listen to the experts, it’s not enough. I got the results of my V02 Max test yesterday. The good news is, I’m in the 95th percentile. The bad news is, it should be higher. What does that mean? Increasing cardio to 5 days a week on top of lifting three days a week. That’s exercising eight times a week. There aren’t even eight days in a week.

I’ve met with a nutritionist. I firmly believe that we need a lot more protein than what current dietary guidelines recommend. But to get 1.7 grams per kilogram of my weight every day seems impossible. Your body can only absorb so much protein at any given time. So even with a protein shake, getting 135 grams of protein every day seems impossible, especially since I’m not supposed to eat red meat more than once every two weeks (the best I ever do is once a week and it’s usually worse). How much salmon can I possibly eat? Is it really reasonable to eat three meals with protein daily and two high protein snacks? I have other stuff to do. 

I meditate for 20 minutes daily but am told that it should really happen twice a day. I feel like I eat fruit and vegetables all day long and yet it’s apparently not enough fiber. Peter Attia spends hours a week on his grip strength. Grip strength? Seriously? I just looked at the instructions for the supplements I take and some of them are supposed to be taken between meals. I don’t have the time or mental energy to remember to do that. Once a day is enough. If this was cancer medication, that’s one thing. But supplements? The list goes on and on.

This all seems crazy. I am a pretty high functioning person with a large personal team of people who help me every day with everything from scheduling to IT to paying bills to walking the dog to grocery shopping to errands, laundry, cooking and cleaning to exercise, meditation, therapy and anything else you can imagine. I don’t know how much more optimized my life could possibly be. And yet I still feel like the requirements of being healthy are just too much. 

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe everyone else breezes through all of this. And maybe the point is that when you talk to experts in a field, they’re going to prioritize what they believe and care about and the culmination of all of it is simply too much for any one person to adhere to (I also still have my actual job of running a venture fund on top of teaching, hosting a podcast, writing books, writing columns, owning a bookstore, running and funding national campaigns out of my foundation on mobile voting and universal school meals, the Gotham Book prize, owning a political consulting firm, etc…). 

Right now, I feel like I can still get everything done, but I think if I dedicated any more time to wellness, it’d have to come at the expense of my work or relationships or anything else I enjoy doing. In other words, my life expectancy may go up but is it driving the overall value down? It seems easy right now to argue that time for my hobbies or the people in my life or my work matters a lot more than grip strength. Will I still feel that way when (if) I’m 83?

I have a ton of information and data. I have a ton of expert advice. What I’m lacking is the wisdom and judgment to know how much to prioritize your physical and mental health routines at the expense of the other parts of your life or at the expense of feeling too much stress to try to get it all done. Despite all of the work I’ve done, all the money I’ve spent, all the time I’ve invested, that part remains unclear.