Worst health informing best health
Invert, always invert!
When I worked as a direct care RN on a critical care pediatric unit, what gave me the most peace of mind was not planning for best outcomes, but for worst ones and then thinking how to prevent them.
This way of inverted thinking has broad application including the leveraging of personal health. Instead of considering how to optimize health, consider how to destroy it and then avoid those things. For me, using this tactic is not only commonsensical, it’s more knowable and thus, more doable.
Merely asking how to optimize, especially if going off the internet’s latest health hack du jour, may be missing necessities and nuances. Without covering-the-bases of avoiding bad outcomes, optimizing may not even be possible or be, at best, short-lived. Taking steps to avoid a health disaster is actually a means to both ends as defining the problem informs the solution with avoidance leveraging optimization.
“You don’t think about what you want, you think what you want to avoid.”*
“[…] it is in the nature of things that many hard problems are best solved when they are addressed backward,”**
Charles Thomas Munger (iconic American business man and philanthropist) was a meteorologist during World War II and used inverted thinking to solve how best to guide pilots to safety. He credits the origins to German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi who used it to solve difficult equations proclaiming the German translation of, “invert, always invert.”**
Turn it around by turning it upside down
How to destroy health:
Eat ultra-processed food deficient in essential nutrients, over expose yourself to artificial (lighting, food additives, chemicals) and toxic (pesticide, hormone disruptors, pollution) inputs, shun natural exposures to circadian and seasonal cycles, be sedentary.
Avoiding these pitfalls bolsters health in a sustainable way lending resiliency!
How to avoid destroying health:
Get the junk out of your diet and lifestyle, eat real food that is nutrient dense and raised or grown the way nature intended, move more, take time-outs (time outside) throughout the day .
Cellemental Complete leverages against health destruction with bioactive, nutrient dense, whole food delivered in the convenience of a capsule.
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me, 5th grade
*How Charlie Munger use Inversion Thinking Process in life. Daily Journal2020 [C:C.M Ep.16]
**Inversion and The Power of Avoiding Stupidity