Behavior #3: Create inviolable boundaries
Without your health, your ambitions will be unobtainable and your hopes will be dust.
Imagine trying to fulfill your life goals while severely ill, while bedridden, while juggling medications and doctor appointments and endless diagnostic tests. Imagine the drag on your productivity created by chronic stress, headaches, and the attendant psychosomatic conditions. Imagine the ravages of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke, or dementia on your desired Impact on the world.
It follows that you must prioritize your personal health above all else, and to do so, you must actively disallow encroachment on your health-sustaining behaviors. You can never be “too busy” to exercise, you can never prioritize a Corporate project over sleep, and you must draw hard lines at the consumption of sugar and alcohol — no matter what the social situation.
You must create inviolable boundaries around your health behaviors.
These are limits that may not be transgressed, appointments with yourself that supersede all other obligations. While this stance is staggeringly harsh, it stems from the twin realizations that your health is easier to preserve than to reclaim, and that saying “no” to interlopers is easier if it is non-negotiable than if it must be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Creating inviolable boundaries will not guarantee your future health, but it will stack the odds decisively in your favor.
Create inviolable boundaries.
READ ALL THE BEHAVIORS OF THE HEALTHSPAN ENLIGHTENED
