For lifelong wellbeing, skills are the key

Decades ago, to understand any topic on health and wellbeing you had to seek out a professional or a library, to discover the materials you needed. Sometimes, you would not be able to locate the specific information you were looking for, at all.

Contrast that with the situation now. On social media, if you show any interest in health and wellbeing, the algorithm will soon provide you with a stream of posts on related topics from numerous influencers. You will be inundated with information about diet, exercise, supplements, mindfulness, yoga, and wide variations and combinations of these topics. The information will range from clear to confused, practical to irrelevant, confidently incorrect to carefully sound.

A new development in the last couple of years are the LLMs (the “AI” based chatbots) from various companies. You can ask any question about health and wellbeing in natural language and expect a tailored reply. (Though, the accuracy of that reply can vary, depending on the topic and question.)

The challenge now is not finding information, but how to separate what you truly need from what you do not, the sound from unsound, and know what is genuinely workable for you in your situation. Any of us can waste years chasing wellbeing ideas and methodologies that are only partially effective, and perhaps not well suited to us.

Having information at our fingertips now, discovery is not the problem any longer. The requirement is to know what exactly to look for, and how to use it. For that, we need a clear wellbeing system that is broad-based, stable, and effective. That foundation will allow us to utilize the landscape of information available to us.

The best, logical way of organizing a wellbeing system is on the basis of skills—what you do with your body, breath, mind, diet, and lifestyle. For instance, how can you exercise more, safely and effectively? By learning the skills of movement. How can you breathe better? By learning the skills of good breathing.

Someone else cannot move, breathe, think, speak, or eat for you. You must do each of these well, and make a habit of doing them well. That is the key to lifestyle as medicine: making a habit of the skills of wellbeing.

For that, you need a map of those areas or domains of wellbeing that are most important, and the relevant skills under each of them. This is the heart of the Svastha approach to wellbeing.