What Covid is Confirming About Our (un)Wellness
By: Ed Lippie
Tags: Fitness, Health, Healthy Lifestyle, Wellness, Covid 19

I have spent much of my career working on interventions that improve the performance of elite athletes and general population clients. My new found purpose is to distill what I have learned over the last 23 years and apply it to a framework that improves people’s day-to-day wellness habits. The intention of this post is to highlight the big picture obstacles we face and set the table for an on-going conversation about what we can do collectively and individually to maximize our wellness potential.

Human nature has repeatedly shown a tendency to overreact in the short term while under-reacting in the long term. It’s a characteristic that has delayed and/or diminished sound policy in many areas. Healthcare, food production and urban planning may be the policy poster children for this claim. As a society we have:

Systematically degraded our food supply

De-coupled our daily activities from our natural, circadian rhythms

Organized our lives to move as little as possible

Worn chronic sleep deprivation as a badge of honor

Sought pharmaceutical cures as first courses of treatment instead of measures of last resort

Created a social media ecosystem that values “likes” over meaningful human connection.

And as we know, this is just a short list of lifestyle changes we have adopted in the name of progress. Pages could be filled with similarly destructive trends that have taken hold in 21st century living. And what is the price for decades of under-reacting to these “anti-wellness” trends? Among others:

Obesity rates over 39%

Diabetes rates over 10%

Hypertension rates over 40%

70+ million US adults with diagnosed sleep disorders

Compromised immunity for large demographic swaths of our under served populations

What do you recognize about these conditions? These are the serious health problems that have made us more vulnerable as a society to Covid 19 and worsened the severity of this pandemic. And many, if not most of these conditions are controllable with better education, more enlightened policies, and the necessary investment to make them stick. Medical advancement and healthy lifestyles that reduce the need for those medical innovations should never be an either or proposition, but that appears to be the trade off we have unconsciously made as a society.

To be sure, there are legitimate debates to be had about what could have been done differently over the last 10 months to mitigate the impact of Covid-19, debates for another article. What I am urging now is a step back to re-assess what has been happening for decades and what it is costing us. Would a better wellness infrastructure have made us more resilient to the impacts of Covid -19? Fewer people with co-morbidities would likely have done four important things:

Have made the relatively low mortality rate of Covid 19 even lower Decreased hospitalizations Have simplified the debate about who gets vaccines first Have left far less economic destruction in its wake

I believe it’s time to start redirecting the resources used to create our massive acute care system towards proactive wellness strategies that we know help people live healthier, more productive lives. Let us now learn the lessons of how decades of under-reaction have left us more vulnerable to this virus. Let us start thinking about our wellness like our lives depend on it, because they do.