{"id":80337,"date":"2018-07-03T08:02:23","date_gmt":"2018-07-03T15:02:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/too-healthy-for-your-own-good"},"modified":"2018-07-03T08:02:23","modified_gmt":"2018-07-03T15:02:23","slug":"too-healthy-for-your-own-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/too-healthy-for-your-own-good","title":{"rendered":"Too healthy for your own good?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/too-healthy-for-your-own-good2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Why on Earth would you ever want to be less than completely healthy?<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Recently, Reason of Fight Aging! <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fightaging.org\/archives\/2018\/06\/a-failure-of-the-imagination-when-it-comes-to-human-longevity\/\">pointed out<\/a> psychological research revealing a certain conservatism in terms of what people consider to be the \u201cideal\u201d levels of happiness, intelligence, longevity, and even health.<\/p>\n<p>It probably doesn\u2019t come as a surprise that significant numbers of people in the studies weren\u2019t too keen on the idea of living much longer than the average (around 90 years), and even under the assumption of eternal youth, their preference didn\u2019t go past 120 on average; after all, LEAF wouldn\u2019t be in business if the idea of healthy life extension wasn\u2019t so inexplicably frowned upon. What\u2019s really flabbergasting, though, is that even health\u2014health!\u2014is apparently something you can have too much of; on a scale from 0 (\u201ccompletely unhealthy\u201d) to 100 (\u201ccompletely healthy\u201d), the average preference gravitated somewhere between 80 and 90. These results provide us with an occasion for reflection.<\/p>\n<p><strong>(Il)logical conclusions<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s uncertain whether the respondents in these studies realized the bizarre yet inevitable implications of their statements. If 100 means \u201ccompletely healthy\u201d and your \u201cideal\u201d level of health is only, say, 85, does that mean that, should you ever perceive that you\u2019re about \u201c90\u201d healthy, you\u2019d deliberately start looking into ways of harming your own health to get back to your ideal level? How, exactly, would being \u201c90\u201d healthy be too much? What would you dislike about not being a little more sick? How would you benefit from being less than completely healthy? Has there ever been, at any point in your life, a moment when you thought, \u201cBlimey, I\u2019m far too healthy for my own good. Time to get sick\u201d? Do you think a point will ever come when, while sick, you\u2019ll think, \u201cPerfect timing\u2014I was just concerned that I was healthier than my ideal level\u201d?<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.leafscience.org\/too-healthy-for-your-own-good\/\">https:\/\/www.leafscience.org\/too-healthy-for-your-own-good\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why on Earth would you ever want to be less than completely healthy? Recently, Reason of Fight Aging! pointed out psychological research revealing a certain conservatism in terms of what people consider to be the \u201cideal\u201d levels of happiness, intelligence, longevity, and even health. It probably doesn\u2019t come as a surprise that significant numbers of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":418,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,269],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-life-extension"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/418"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}