Don’t wait for a diagnosis to learn what health is worth

Your heart beat tens of thousands of times last night. You didn’t have to do a thing. You didn’t thank it, encourage it, or even notice. Your lungs kept breathing while you slept. Your liver detoxified, your kidneys filtered, your immune system stood guard on dozens of fronts, all in complete silence, without applause, without a bill.

And that is exactly where something wondrous hides. And something dangerous.

Because health feels self-evident as long as the body stays silent. We only notice it when it protests. A pain that won’t go away. A test result we didn’t expect. A phone call that splits an ordinary Tuesday in two. Only then do we understand, often with a jolt, how much that silence was worth.

This piece is about that silence. About what truly happens inside us while we are “just” living. And about the question I want to ask you straight away, even though I’ll only return to it at the very end: why do we so often wait until our body has to scream, before we listen to what it has been whispering for years?

The body that whispers before it screams

Picture a loyal employee. Someone who works for you for years without complaining. Too little sleep? They absorb it. A week full of stress, poor food, too much coffee, too little rest? They compensate. At night they repair what you spent during the day, they adapt, they carry you further than you really deserve.

That is how your body works. It doesn’t scream at the first overload. It handles it. If your heart rate rises, it lowers the pressure somewhere else. If you get too little sleep, it switches to reserve systems. That adaptation is no accident, it is one of the most beautiful things evolution ever devised.

Scientists call this allostasis: the body’s ability to stay stable by changing. Not by rigidly staying the same, but by constantly adjusting.¹ Your blood pressure, your hormones, your immune system, they fluctuate all day to keep you in balance, whatever life throws at you.

But that loyalty is not endless. And that is the heart of it.

The loyal employee has limits

Here it becomes scientific and human at the same time.

The American neuroscientist Bruce McEwen showed that the very substances that protect your body in the short term, the stress hormones that make your heart beat faster, sharpen you, pull you through a hard day, cause damage in the long term when they simply keep coming. He called that accumulated cost allostatic load: the wear and tear that builds up when the body has to adjust too long, too often.^1,2

What always moves me about this: it is usually not the great dramas that break us. It is the small, daily things that pile up. Not so much the dramatic events, but the many ordinary moments that keep our systems persistently switched on, that bring sleep loss, overeating, and the quiet habits that slowly undermine us.² The sum of a thousand ordinary Tuesdays.

And notice the fine nuance, because it matters: it is not stress alone that wears us down. It is the lack of recovery. A body that works hard and is then allowed to recover is resilient. A body that works hard and is never truly allowed to land slowly runs out. Stress is not the enemy. Stress without rest is.³

The body is loyal, but not unlimited. It often carries us far longer than we look after it.

I work in a hospital, and nothing has taught me that more deeply than the faces of people at the moment their body’s loyalty suddenly stopped being self-evident. It makes you quiet. And it makes you grateful for every ordinary day on which everything still works, “boringly” well.

The waiting room as the most honest place in life

A waiting room is perhaps one of the most honest places there are.

There, people sit without their usual masks. Diplomas, job titles, possessions, full diaries and big plans suddenly become smaller. Not because they are worthless, but because something larger comes to the foreground: the body, the result, time, the question of what is still possible.

In the waiting room, life becomes simpler. Not because it grows less complex, but because only the essential remains.

Then you don’t wonder how many emails are still open. You wonder whether you’ll be allowed to go home with good news. Whether you’ll sleep tonight without fear. Whether your body still cooperates. Whether you’ve given enough time to the people you love.

And maybe that is precisely the reason not to wait until the waiting room wakes us up. Because everything that suddenly seems important there was already important yesterday. We just didn’t see it, because the body was still silent.

Prevention feels boring, until it doesn’t

Let’s be honest: living healthily doesn’t sound exciting. Sleeping on time. Walking. Vegetables. Less alcohol. Not smoking. Going to your check-ups. It is the opposite of adventure. It feels boring, as long as everything is fine.

But the moment someone receives a diagnosis, health suddenly becomes the most important project of their whole life.

And here the science comes to reassure you, because the boring turns out to be surprisingly powerful. A large study of more than a hundred thousand people, followed over decades, mapped five simple lifestyle factors: never smoking, a healthy weight, half an hour of moderate movement a day, moderate alcohol, and a healthy diet.⁴ Nothing extreme. No marathons, no strict diets.

The result was striking. At the age of fifty, those five ordinary habits were associated with roughly seven to ten extra years free of cancer, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.⁴ Not just living longer, living healthily longer. More years in which your body still joins in.

Two honest caveats belong here, because I will never promise you a prettier story than is true. First: this is an association, not an iron guarantee. It is not a contract in which good behaviour is always rewarded. Second, and perhaps most important: it is not about perfection.

Because your health is not shaped by one perfect day. Not by that one salad, that one walk, that one good night. It is shaped by the direction you keep returning to. You’re allowed to stumble. You’re allowed a week of doing nothing. What matters is where you keep moving back towards. That is a far gentler, far more human message than “do everything right”, and it also happens to be true.

Living consciously is not living afraid

Now I must set something straight, because I want to wake you, not frighten you.

There is a cruel misconception: that whoever falls ill must have done something wrong. That isn’t true. People can live exemplary lives and still become ill. Illness can also come from genes, from bad luck, from the environment, from infections, from trauma, from age, from chance. Health is not a reward for good behaviour.

Health is not a contract in which good behaviour is always paid out. It is a partnership with a body that offers no guarantees, but does deserve attention.

That distinction makes everything lighter. It takes out the blame and leaves only the care. You don’t have to live afraid, as if every bite, every night, every moment were a test you could fail. You’re allowed to live awake. With open eyes.

Living consciously is not the same as living afraid. It is living with open eyes.

And there is one more layer underneath, one we easily forget. When one body falls ill, a whole family often changes with it. A diagnosis never touches just one person, it touches children, partners, parents, friends. Taking good care of yourself is therefore never selfishness. It is a form of care for everyone who loves you.

Gratitude as a first form of care

It may sound airy to end a science blog with gratitude. Yet it is anything but.

A meta-analysis that brought together 64 carefully designed studies found that gratitude exercises are associated with better mental health: less anxiety, less low mood, more positive feelings.⁵ It is one of the simplest, cheapest and kindest things you can do for your mind.

And, again, the honest nuance: gratitude does not cure illness. It holds back no diagnosis. Anyone who promises otherwise is selling you a fairy tale. But gratitude does do something else, something quiet and important, it teaches you to appreciate before the loss, instead of after it.

And therein lies perhaps the most beautiful thought of this whole piece: gratitude is a first form of care. Not because it prevents illness, but because it teaches us to care sooner for what is still whole. Whoever pauses in the morning over a body that simply works will, almost by itself, treat it more gently and more carefully.

For regret is a hard teacher. Awareness is gentler, but we must learn to listen to it sooner.

A short, honest note: this article is not medical advice and is not intended to replace a diagnosis or treatment. Do you have symptoms, worries or questions about your health? Discuss them with your GP or a treating specialist, they know your situation, and this story does not.

And then, finally, the question I began with. Not to frighten you, but to keep you awake:

What would you do differently today, if your body spoke to you honestly tonight about how you’ve treated it all these years and how much it still has left to give you?

Don’t wait until your body has to scream to hear what it has long been whispering.

Related reading

• The body is not a calculator
• The liver: quiet workhorse
• Diets: what really works?

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Sources

The numbers in the text refer to this list.

1. McEwen, B. S., & Stellar, E. (1993). Stress and the individual: Mechanisms leading to disease. Archives of Internal Medicine, 153(18), 2093–2101. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8379800/
2. McEwen, B. S. (2006). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators: Central role of the brain. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 8(4), 367–381. https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2006.8.4/bmcewen
3. Juster, R.-P., McEwen, B. S., & Lupien, S. J. (2010). Allostatic load biomarkers of chronic stress and impact on health and cognition. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 35(1), 2–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2009.10.002
4. Li, Y., Schoufour, J., Wang, D. D., Dhana, K., Pan, A., Liu, X., Song, M., Liu, G., Shin, H. J., Sun, Q., Al-Shaar, L., Wang, M., Rimm, E. B., Hertzmark, E., Stampfer, M. J., Willett, W. C., Franco, O. H., & Hu, F. B. (2020). Healthy lifestyle and life expectancy free of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes: Prospective cohort study. BMJ, 368, Article l6669. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l6669
5. Diniz, G., Korkes, L., Tristão, L. S., Pelegrini, R., Bellodi, P. L., & Bernardo, W. M. (2023). The effects of gratitude interventions: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Einstein (São Paulo), 21, Article eRW0371. https://doi.org/10.31744/einstein_journal/2023RW0371

Sources on this site are cited in APA style, with a DOI wherever one exists. Why I made that choice →