Sweat the Small Stuff

Friends joined me for dinner to celebrate my Birthday, and we went to a special restaurant for the occasion. They noticed I wasn’t quite myself and I had to let on that a bad headache had set in. I struggled through the rest of the meal and went home to rest, refusing post-dinner drinks.

When asked what had caused the headache, I explained that I “just get them”. It was only then that a moment of Birthday wisdom took over: why should I continue to put up with this?

Perhaps there are health niggles that you “just get” and put up with, too. When you know your body well enough to predict when they arise, you see them coming and it can be tempting to suffer through them and watch them pass by without much attempt to solve them.

Athlete Molly Hurford explains this as the “ignore it til it stops” school of thought. Most of us subscribe to it in our twenties, when our bodies are at their peak and able to shrug off minor ailments. After all, we’re taught to seek medical attention when we’re ill, but not when we’re “not ill, but not well.”

The list of ailments occupying this liminal space of “not-ill-not-well” only lengthens as we leave our twenties: digestive discomfort, more frequent aches and pains, decreased ability to exercise intensely without proper training and preparation… They may be minor enough that we just ignore them, but they slowly begin to encroach on our wellbeing.

Feel better, do more

The 2000s and 2010s were fitness- and diet-crazed decades, accompanied by bootcamp mantras like “do more, do better” rather than “feel better”. The 2020s (perhaps in part due to covid’s compulsory “pause”) ushered in a new era of listening to the body’s signals as well as moving and eating more intuitively.

We’re now starting to recognise that in order to “do” better, we need to “feel” better, and it’s giving many of us the nudge we need to address those health niggles. After all, addressing the little things adds up to shift the big things and changes how we show up in the world. Headache-free, I certainly would have been happier company that evening.

The question is, where to start?

The necessary disclaimer when wondering how to start solving these health niggles is to always seek medical advice (the day after the dinner, I saw a doctor about my headaches). Yet in addition to medical attention, society offers us myriad other miracle cures for those “not-ill-not-well” niggles and it’s up to use to wade through and evaluate them as potential antidotes to our discomfort.

Whilst the consumer wellness market continues to grow at 5–10% per year, there’s an emerging “wellness fatigue” that leads us either to decision paralysis or to overbuying behaviour when we feel sub-par. I once heard a pharmaceutical lead explain that the average customer lifetime value of their vitamin products was less than 3 months — barely enough time for the product to take effect.

According to McKinsey’s Future of Wellness survey, effectiveness, quality and price are the most important consideration factors for wellness solutions. Yet how can we assess effectiveness before we buy? In many cases, it’s impossible, and we buy “hope in a jar” on the spur of the moment, and soon forget to take or use it consistently.

Buying hope in a jar is the flipside of Hurford’s “ignore it til it stops.” It veers towards “try everything until it stops” and it leaves us with cabinets full of half-used supplements and expired green juice.

However hard it is to crack the “not-ill-not-well” symptoms that are dulling our vitality, we can avoid this all-or-nothing trap by being less seduced by shiny solutions and becoming more systematic about how we approach our wellbeing.

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Try an assumptions-led approach

In innovation, we take assumptions-led approaches to problem solving. This means we solve problems by uncovering datapoints and systematically ruling out assumptions that are disproven by the datapoints; running a series of experiments and taking one variable at a time.

If we’re building a SaaS platform, we might assume customers are willing to pay a subscription for the product. After talking to 10 customers and learning they’d rather pay upfront, this assumption would be debunked.

What if we did the same with our wellbeing? FODMAP diets work on this principle: we assume our digestive discomfort comes from our diet, and we eliminate certain foods for a while to see if our symptoms improve, gradually reintroducing until we find the culprit.

Can we do the same for our other areas of our lives where our wellbeing is off-kilter?

Gather Data

When we innovate new solutions, the first thing we do is speak to a customer. In wellbeing world, we’re our own customers and we need to get better at interviewing ourselves. What doesn’t feel right? What else is going on in our lives right now?

One shadow side of decades spent subscribing to “ignore it til it stops” is the learned ability to ignore how our bodies are feeling. We don’t realise we have an ache brewing because we miss the tell-tale signs. We can un-learn by taking the time to ask ourselves questions, recording the answers in a way that allows us to recognise patterns and know ourselves better.

Test Assumptions

As we begin to know ourselves better, we will inevitably form hypotheses to explain why we behave a certain way.

When we innovate a new product or service, we notice the customer interacts with it in a different way than we initially expected and we often jump to our own conclusions, forgetting to test them. The same goes for our bodies: our hypotheses are not an end explanation, but a starting point for us to test.

New product and company development means seeking the advice of experienced professionals where the founders have knowledge gaps, and it goes without saying that professional medical advice should be our first port of call for gathering data points on our own bodies.

But what else can we do? If we’re stressed, can we make a concerted effort to reduce stress and see if our discomfort reduces? If we believe we’re lacking the right nutrients, can we supplement these for a while and record changes?

Whether wellbeing or innovation, it’s critical that we test one assumption at a time, to avoid multiple variables and track which changes make the biggest impact.

In the world of “not-ill-not-well” this equates to buying one supplement and tracking its effects for a month with no other major changes to our lives, rather than panic-buying five and trying them over a week’s holiday when our stress levels are markedly different to normal.

Systematically eliminating assumptions based on data is at the heart of successful innovation, so why not use it to boost our vitality? It’s time we got to know our bodies better. Wellbeing is a murky space with more contributing factors than we can count, but we owe it to ourselves to solve the mysteries and stop accepting the discomforts that dull our day-to-day.

Disclaimer: the above article does not endorse self-diagnosis of medical conditions in place of medical treatment. If in doubt, seek medical attention from a trained professional.

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