Healthspan: The Shape of Wellness

Everyone’s familiar with the concept of life expectancy, the average number of years someone will live under ideal conditions. We’re also quite familiar with the idea of lifespan, or the maximum number of years humans can live. A related yet less well-known metric, healthspan, has become a greater focus of medical and wellness communities, and it’s a pretty straightforward concept: it’s the number of years you live healthy and free of serious, disabling disease. In the US, the average lifespan is 79.3 years of age. The average healthspan is 63.1 years of age meaning we spend, on average, 16.2 years of our lives living with serious disabling (chronic) disease. That’s a long time.

For decades, the medical establishment has been chiefly concerned with improving life expectancy. Rightfully so, since as recently as 1950 the average life expectancy was only 65.6 years for men and 71.1 years for women. It now stands at 78.6 for men and 81.1 for women, an impressive increase.

There has also been a lot of time and money spent trying to push the current human lifespan past 125 years. However, scientists, doctors, and health and wellness professionals are beginning to focus more intently on healthspan, because who wants to live past 125 years of age and spend even more years living with one or more chronic diseases and/or disabilities? That wouldn’t just diminish the quality of life it would also be incredibly expensive.

In fact, a person who is overweight or obese will spend an average of 42% more on healthcare than someone at a healthy weight. An incredible 75 percent of the $2.1 trillion in annual healthcare expenditures in the US are for people with chronic diseases, and someone who has a chronic disease (about 133 million people in the US) will, on average, have healthcare expenditures of over $11,000 a year to treat their chronic disease(s).

Having a chronic disease isn’t an abstract possibility; 60 percent of adults in the US have a chronic disease. Even more alarming, 40 percent of adults have two or more chronic diseases, and more than two-thirds of all deaths are caused by one or more of the top five chronic lifestyle diseases: heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic lower respiratory disease, and diabetes.

We know how to largely prevent these chronic lifestyle diseases (note: while many cancers are lifestyle-driven, some are not.); the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) identifies five healthy lifestyle behaviors that help stave them off:

1. Avoiding tobacco products

2. Getting regular physical activity

3. Consuming a moderate amount or no alcohol

4. Maintaining a healthy body weight

5. Obtaining sufficient daily sleep

Not complicated stuff. However, only 6.3% of US adults engage in all 5 of these behaviors. Investing in taking care of your health and wellness now can pay handsome dividends later, giving you more disease and disability-free years, helping you extend your own healthspan. Scientists call this idea the rectangularization of the survival curve, and it can be visually represented like this:

Adapted from uOttawa Rectangularization of Mortality

The dotted lines represent the hypothetical limits of human health and longevity. Rectangularizing or pushing out the typical survival curve (the long, slow decline represented by the curved line) gets you more years of disability-free survival, with a short, fast decline at the end of life. We’re all going to die; there’s nothing we can do about that (yet). What we can do is better manage the factors within our control so the years we have are as healthy and disability-free as possible.

In real life that’s not always an easy task. If it were, we’d already be living our best lives, but lots of factors make living an optimally healthy life hard: work and child-rearing demands, family obligations, our sub-optimal food system, etc. But it’s not impossible. Notice that the key descriptor between “chronic” and “disease” is the word “lifestyle.” These conditions mainly arise because of the decisions we make in how we live our lives.

One of the important things I have my coaching clients do is take time to visualize what they want their overall health and wellness to look like, now and in the future, and reflect on why that’s meaningful to them. Only by envisioning and understanding the what and the why, can we get to the how or the plan for making their vision a reality. Better health and wellness don’t just happen by accident—not with all the external forces working against us. It requires an honest evaluation of your current state of health and your health behaviors, as well as deep insights, thoughtful planning and creativity in forming better health and wellness habits.

Creating long-term health and wellness is never as simple as a 30-day detox, nor as one-dimensional as just losing a few pounds. Health and wellness coaching is an effective way to understand and better manage all of the variables that will help you live the healthiest possible version of your life. Good coaching can help you create and stick to a healthier lifestyle long-term, rectangularizing your own personal survival curve.

If you’d like to discuss your health and wellness goals and find out how working with a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach (NBC-HWC) can help you change the shape of your future, contact me to schedule a free 30-minute no-pressure consultation.