Most conversations about health eventually become conversations about the body.

What’s your blood pressure? Your weight? Your testosterone?

Are you exercising? Sleeping enough? When was your last colonoscopy?

I contribute plenty to that conversation. It’s part of my job, and most weeks it’s part of this newsletter.

But I’ve been wondering whether we sometimes use too narrow a definition of health.

Our physical health obviously matters.

So does what is happening in our minds—not simply whether we can remember where we left the keys, but what we think and what we’ve decided to believe.

A man may decide he’s too old to have sex anymore. That retirement means he’s no longer useful.

That his wife isn’t interested because she no longer finds him attractive.

That asking for help is a weakness. That because his father died at 70, he’s probably headed in the same direction.

Some of those things might be true.

Some might just be stories we’ve repeated long enough that they feel true.

That’s health too.

Then there’s our emotional life.

Men aren’t always particularly good at giving that part a name. I’ve written here about rejection, shame, intimacy, loneliness and the things couples stop saying to each other.

None of those will show up on a metabolic panel, but they certainly affect how we live.

And then there is the spiritual part.

For some people that’s faith.

For others it’s purpose, meaning, service, nature, family or simply a sense that their life belongs to something larger than the day’s list of obligations.

I don’t think I need to tell anyone what that should be.

But I do think it matters whether it’s there.

None of this means your LDL suddenly doesn’t matter because you’ve found inner peace. Your arteries remain stubbornly unimpressed by enlightenment.

It just means health is bigger than the things we can measure.

The physical part asks what is happening to my body and what I can do about it. The intellectual part asks what I believe to be true.

The emotional part asks what I’m feeling and whether I can acknowledge it. The spiritual part asks what gives all of this meaning.

And maybe these are all muscles of a sort. They need exercise too.

We get better at examining what we believe by doing it. Better at talking about difficult things by having those conversations.

Better at finding meaning by paying attention to what actually gives our lives meaning.

Reps matter.

I’m not proposing a program, a course, meditation practice or yoga routine. Maybe the first rep is simply noticing that these parts of our health exist.

They overlap, of course.

A diagnosis changes how we think. A relationship affects how we feel.

Losing physical ability can change identity. Finding purpose can change what we choose to do with our bodies.

Maybe that’s the broader lens I’ve been trying to use in this newsletter without quite naming it.

Medicine gives us increasingly sophisticated ways to measure the body. That’s valuable.

But a healthier life may also require occasionally exercising the parts of ourselves for which nobody ordered a blood test.