A few weeks ago I got the flu. I felt pretty bad and in the midst of feeling sick I began to think about average levels of health. It struck me as really unfair that when we get sick we feel really bad, but we never catch anything that makes us feel exceptionally good. It is as if the only adjustment to our average health level is for the worse (See diagram 1).
Diagram 1: Average health drops towards minimum health in times of sickness.
And of course I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if at times our health shot up and we felt great (See diagram 2)!
Diagram 2: Average health sometimes drops towards a minimum and sometimes shoots up towards a maximum.
And after all this thinking what the charts would look like, I realized that maybe it is all set up right in the first place and that I just had the labels wrong on my charts. After all, if we are normally at the maximum of “feeling healthy,” any sickness would necessarily bring us down, but in the end this setup increases the percentage of time we spend close to the maximum of our health range (See diagram 3).
Of course, this all could just have been the fever getting the best of my thinking.
Maybe our maximum is when we are in good shape and taking care of ourselves. As such, for many people, their average is not really their maximum. Also, wouldn’t our minimum health be death? The graph seems to show a recovery from minimum health.
@ Maire
Indeed, one has to assume that probably most people are NOT in peak physical form for most of their life, but the scale of the charts was meant to be relative, not lifelong. Thus, the charts aren’t meant to be showing a person from birth to death, just more of a the variations around a time-localized standard of health.
I was torn about the idea of death being minimum health. On one hand I agree, that health does get worse and worse until death, but on the other hand the concept of health doesn’t really apply once death occurs. At the instant you die, physical health has no relevance, so to say that is on the scale didn’t make sense to me.