YOU ARE A
HEALTHY HEDONIST
ON A MISSION TO EXPLORE YOURSELF TO THE CORE.
You’re on a constant journey to understand your body and how you can serve each other better. In seeking balance, you understand that you don’t need to do all of the wellness things, all at the time. Rather, your goal is build a self-care toolkit so you can match the right practice with each circumstance that comes your way.
You are someone who values common sense logic and well-established research. The healthy hedonist likes to know the “why” behind what they’re doing. But there is no more compelling argument for making a health change than experiencing the positive benefits yourself. You genuinely understand that every body is different, and that science is a long way from discovering back pocket solutions to all our intricacies.
When it comes to your daily choices, you prefer knowing your boundaries over setting strict rules. And you also know that those guidelines may change over time as your body ages and evolves.
That’s not to say that this life of moderation is always easy. Some days involve less kale than others, but your advantage as a healthy hedonist is knowing that the worst thing you can do is stress about them. You fall off the wagon just as much as some of the other wellness personality types. The difference is that you don’t consider it a fall. Instead of feeling guilty, you find other ways to nourish yourself and offset the scales.
The healthy hedonist’s biggest strengths:
- Discerning which trends and practices to try on for size
- Committing to balancing mental health along with physical health
- Introspection, analysis and finding the proof in the pudding (which sometimes means poop)
Biggest growth edges for healthy hedonists:
Feelings of deprivation when faced with an extreme lifestyle change
Making sure that short periods of indulgence don’t lead to more indulgence
Delayed action due to information overloa
How do you use your personality to your advantage?
The biggest challenge for healthy hedonists is in the execution.
Moderation is easier said than done, especially when indulgences involve addictive substances like sugar that can fuel cravings. But the bigger struggle is when your body actually requires a hard reset or more strict approach. Hardline rules may feel arbitrary, and you struggle with experts telling you to take on strict protocols that don’t seem rooted in your own personal experience, or are too big of a damper on your hedonism.
The biggest way to overcome this hurdle is to remind yourself that strict protocols are part of the larger experiment. Nothing is a life sentence. It’s one prong of the long process of getting to know yourself and checking back in. I know you’re game for the ride.
You may also feel better once you’ve put in enough of your own research to understand the medical president. Just be careful that your process of uncovering the “why” doesn’t drag on. Sometimes healthy hedonists can get bogged down with analysis, forgetting their primary mission, which is to jump in and gather experiences.
Three things to try this week:
1. Get organized.
In the spirit of action, and designing your own wellness project, make a list of things you want to experiment with this year. It can be in a dedicated journal or notebook so you can record your findings in one place. These are your growth areas that you have yet to explore. Now, create a schedule for actually tackling them.
2. Choose one baby step.
Since healthy hedonists are intimidated by big changes, your best path forward is breaking down new health experiments into baby steps. For instance, if this month you want to take better care of your teeth, a baby step might be to floss every night for a week. Another might be to invest in a new natural toothpaste. Come up with four and add to your calendar.
3. Take your baseline temperature.
The risk in allowing yourself indulgences is that they can easily get out of control without your fully realizing. It’s important for you to build in small resets and temperature checks into your month. This week keep a food, activity and symptom journal. You may think you’re eating less sugar or walking more than you actually are. Recording for a short period of time will help you hold a mirror up to your actions and tweak the balance going forward. I have a fabulous worksheet for this as part of the 4 Weeks to Wellness Program.
