When Did Looking After Your Health Become a Full-Time Job?

Somewhere along the way, looking after yourself became a very long list of things you should be doing.

✅ Get enough protein.

✅ Hit your fibre target.

✅ Take your supplements.

✅ Walk after meals.

✅ Strength train.

✅ Do cardio.

✅ Get morning sunlight.

✅ Don’t drink coffee too early. Or too late.

✅ Track your cycle.

✅ Improve your sleep.

✅ Support your gut.

✅ Manage your cortisol.

✅ Look after your hormones.

✅ Watch your blood sugar.

And preferably do all of this while working, raising a family, maintaining relationships, running a household and somehow finding time to relax.

Individually, many of these recommendations are perfectly reasonable. The problem is what happens when every useful piece of health advice becomes another task you feel responsible for fitting into your day. At that point, looking after yourself can start to feel like another full-time job. And I don’t think that is the goal.

More health information doesn’t always create more clarity

We have access to an extraordinary amount of health information now, which can be incredibly useful. But it can also leave you second-guessing things that once felt fairly straightforward.

🤷🏻‍♀️ Should you eat breakfast or fast?

🤷🏻‍♀️ Should you eat more carbohydrates or less?

🤷🏻‍♀️ Should you do high-intensity exercise or prioritise recovery?

🤷🏻‍♀️ Do you need magnesium? Creatine? A probiotic?

🤷🏻‍♀️ Should you track your glucose?

Then there's your symptoms. Is your tiredness due to cortisol? Perimenopause? Your gut health? Not enough protein? Too much coffee?

Spend enough time listening to podcasts or scrolling through health content and it can start to feel as though every ordinary choice has significant consequences. There is always something else you could monitor, improve or optimise.

But more information is only helpful if it improves your decisions.

If it simply gives you more things to worry about, then I'd argue that it's not actually helpful.

Not every useful health recommendation needs to become part of your life

This distinction is important. Something can be good for health without being something you need to prioritise right now. Strength training is useful. Fibre matters. Sleep matters. Adequate protein matters.Regular movement matters. But that doesn’t mean the person who is currently exhausted, barely eating lunch and waking three times a night needs a perfect strength program, a fibre spreadsheet and a twelve-step morning routine all at once.

Health advice should always exist in context. The better question is not: “Is this healthy?”

It is: “Is this one of the most useful things for me to focus on right now?”

Those are very different questions.

Start with the problem you’re actually trying to solve

One of the easiest ways to simplify health advice is to come back to what is actually bothering you.

Maybe you are exhausted.

Maybe you’re waking during the night.

Maybe your periods have become heavier or more irregular.

Maybe you are constantly hungry in the afternoon.

Maybe your digestion has changed.

Maybe you simply feel like you don’t have the resilience you used to.

Start there. Then ask what is most likely to influence that problem.

If you are exhausted and eating very little through the day, I am far more interested in what your meals look like than whether you are taking the latest supplement recommended for women over 40.

If you are waking through the night, it makes sense to look at your sleep, your schedule, alcohol, caffeine, and anything else relevant before turning bedtime into an elaborate wellness project.

If exercise is leaving you depleted for the rest of the day, the answer may not be to add another training session because you have heard that women need to exercise more as they age. Start with what is actually happening in front of you. Use the information your body is giving you.

Do the obvious things well before you optimise the details

The fundamentals of health are rarely exciting enough to go viral.

Eat well enough, often enough.

Move your body.

Sleep.

Maintain relationships.

Spend some time outside.

Address health problems if they arise.

None of that sounds particularly revolutionary. But when those foundations are inconsistent, adding increasingly specialised interventions can sometimes distract from the things that would make the biggest difference.

That does not mean the foundations solve everything. They don’t. But they do give us somewhere sensible to start. And importantly, they give us information.

If you improve your meals, protect your sleep and change an exercise load you weren’t recovering from and you feel dramatically better, we have learned something. If you do those things and you still feel terrible, we have also learned something, and we're more likely to know what to do next.

Tracking should answer a question

We can track almost everything now.

Sleep.

Heart rate.

Steps.

Menstrual cycles.

Food.

Calories.

Protein.

Blood glucose.

Exercise.

Recovery scores.

Some tracking can be extremely useful. But I think it should have a purpose. Ask:

What am I hoping to learn from this? And: Will the information change what I do?

Tracking your cycle because you are trying to understand changes in bleeding, symptoms or fertility can provide useful information. Tracking your protein intake briefly because you have no idea whether you are eating enough may help you learn what an adequate meal looks like.

But collecting data simply because it is available does not automatically improve your health.

Sometimes it just gives you more numbers to manage. If the data is not helping you make a useful decision, you are allowed to stop collecting it. Especially if you own a wearable device.

Supplements need a job too

The same applies to supplements. A supplement should ideally have a reason for being there.

What are you taking it for?

Why this particular supplement?

Is there a reason to think you need it?

How will you know whether it has helped?

Instead, it is very easy to accumulate supplements simply because each one has been described as beneficial.

Magnesium for sleep.

Creatine for ageing.

Probiotics for the gut.

Adaptogens for stress.

Something for hormones.

Something for energy.

Something for inflammation.

Before long, you have a kitchen bench full of bottles and no real idea which ones are doing anything. The fact that a nutrient, herb or supplement can be helpful does not mean everybody needs to take it. Good care should involve selecting what is relevant, not collecting everything that sounds healthy.

Not every symptom needs a wellness explanation

Another consequence of health information overload is that ordinary experiences can quickly become problems we feel compelled to explain.

You have one bad night’s sleep and wonder whether your cortisol is dysregulated.

You crave something sweet and assume your blood sugar is unstable.

You feel tired for two days and start looking for a hormone imbalance.

Your body changes in your 40's and suddenly everything gets attributed to perimenopause.

Sometimes there is something worth investigating. But sometimes you slept badly because you went to bed late. Sometimes you are hungry because lunch wasn’t big enough. Sometimes you are exhausted because you have had a demanding week.

Context matters. I would much rather understand the pattern than attach an explanation to every individual symptom.

Simplifying doesn’t mean ignoring your health

There is an important difference between simplifying your health care and dismissing symptoms.

If you have been eating well, sleeping as well as you realistically can, moving appropriately and generally taking care of yourself but you still feel significantly unwell, that deserves attention. It may be time to get proper individual assessment. The foundations are a starting point, not an explanation for everything. Knowing when something needs further investigation is part of looking after yourself well.

A useful health plan should reduce your mental load, not add to it

This is probably the part I care about most. If your health plan requires you to spend half your day thinking about your health, I don’t think we have completely solved the problem.

I want you to understand why you are doing something. I want you to know what matters. I want you to recognise patterns in your own body.

But eventually, I also want you to be able to stop thinking about it.

You should be able to eat lunch without calculating six different health metrics. Go for a walk because you enjoy it, not because your watch says your steps are low. Miss a workout without feeling as though you have damaged your health. Eat something that wasn’t perfectly balanced and simply move on.

Understanding your health should give you more confidence and freedom, not another hundred things to monitor.

How do you decide what actually deserves your attention?

When health advice starts becoming overwhelming, I find a few questions useful.

What am I actually trying to improve?

Be specific. “Being healthier” is too broad. Better sleep? More energy? Fewer digestive symptoms? Better fitness?

What are the obvious foundations looking like?

Before moving into optimisation, are you eating properly, sleeping enough, moving regularly and giving yourself some opportunity to recover?

What is most likely to make a meaningful difference?

Not everything has equal value.

Can I realistically sustain this?

The perfect plan that you can follow for ten days is less useful than a good plan that fits into your actual life.

How will I know whether it helped?

If you cannot answer this, it is worth questioning why you are doing it.

And finally:

What can I stop worrying about for now?

That last question deserves more attention than it gets.

You don’t need to do everything to take your health seriously

Caring about your health does not require you to follow every recommendation.

You do not need the perfect diet.

You do not need to track everything.

You do not need every supplement that sounds good.

You do not need to turn every symptom into a research project.

And you do not need to spend your life trying to become the most optimised version of yourself.

You need enough understanding to make sensible decisions.

You need a few foundations that work in your real life.

And you need to know when something deserves more attention.

The goal is not to become better at performing health. The goal is to feel well enough to get on with everything else you want your life to contain. Your health should expand your life, not become your life.

If you’re not sure what actually matters for you

Sometimes the difficult part is not knowing more. It is working out which parts of everything you have read actually apply to you.

If you are tired, not sleeping properly, experiencing hormonal or digestive changes, or simply feel like you have accumulated an overwhelming list of things you think you should be doing, I’d love to support you.

In a consultation, we look at what you are experiencing in the context of your health history and the demands of your current life.

The aim is not to give you another twenty things to manage. It's to work out what actually deserves your attention and build a practical plan around that.

Book Your Personalised Consultation

Frequently asked questions

Why do I feel overwhelmed by health advice?

There is now an enormous amount of health information available, and recommendations are often presented without much context. When every potentially useful strategy starts to feel essential, it becomes difficult to know what actually deserves your attention. Starting with your specific symptoms and the basic foundations of health can make the information easier to filter.

Do I need to track my food, sleep or exercise to be healthy?

Not necessarily. Tracking can be useful when you are trying to answer a particular question or understand a pattern. If the information is not changing your decisions or is creating more anxiety and mental load, ongoing tracking may not be useful.

Do women over 40 need lots of supplements?

There is no universal supplement list that every woman over 40 needs. Nutritional requirements and health concerns vary. Supplements are most useful when there is a clear reason for taking them rather than simply adding everything that is marketed as beneficial for women in midlife.

Should I focus on lifestyle before investigating symptoms?

Lifestyle foundations are an important place to start, but they are not an alternative to appropriate medical assessment. Persistent, significant, new or concerning symptoms may require further investigation even if your diet and lifestyle are already very good.

How can I simplify my health routine?

Start by identifying what you are actually trying to improve. Focus on the few behaviours most likely to influence that goal, make sure the basic foundations are reasonably well supported, and be willing to leave lower-priority optimisation strategies alone. A useful health routine should fit into your life rather than requiring you to organise your life around it.