When your calendar is your health problem

Why simple health advice sometimes feels impossible to follow

I was speaking to a group of business leaders at Vistage recently when I got a by-now very familiar question. I had just finished explaining the four pillars of health—sleep, mental resilience, nutrition, and movement—when a hand shot up:

“This all sounds great in theory,” he said. “But I'm in meetings until six or seven every night, and I have a family to get home to. When exactly am I supposed to find time for all this?"

I was about to suggest that perhaps he didn't need to be in meetings quite so late when another voice from the audience cut in. "You need to cut off the meetings at five." The audience of business owners had a nice laugh at that, but that’s because it’s such a familiar problem.

That moment reminded me of something I've learned after three years of practicing integrative medicine—something that’s common knowledge in emergency medicine (where I worked for more than two decades): our health problems are rarely just health problems. They're usually life problems wearing a medical disguise. I often say, you can pay me now or pay me later. One day all those choices will catch up with you in the form of a chronic disease, worsening mental health issues or more acute like a heart attack. 

The businessman's question wasn't really about time management. It was about priorities, boundaries, and how we decide what's truly essential. He had convinced himself that staying in meetings until seven was just how it is, that his business would suffer if he protected time for his own well-being.

But what I've observed more often is that the people who guard their health habits as fiercely as they guard their business meetings are often the most successful in both areas. They have more energy for difficult decisions, better focus during important conversations, and the stamina to maintain their performance over the long haul.

The advice to prioritize sleep, eat well, move regularly, and manage stress isn't complicated. The difficulty isn't intellectual—it's structural, emotional, and deeply tied to how we organize our lives and our identities.

Take sleep, for instance. The recommendation is straightforward: aim for seven to eight hours of quality sleep each night. Go to bed and wake up at consistent times. Create a wind-down routine. Keep your bedroom cool and dark.

Simple enough. Yet I regularly meet people who treat sleep like a luxury rather than a necessity, who badge themselves with how little rest they need, who check their phones until minutes before closing their eyes. They know what to do. The challenge isn't lack of knowledge.

Sometimes, what they need is permission. Permission to say no to meetings. To leave the dishes. To be unavailable after a certain hour. Permission to treat their own rest as valuable as everyone else's demands.

The same pattern goes for nutrition. Everyone knows that vegetables are good for you and that eating processed food all day will make you feel sluggish. But knowledge doesn't help when you're grabbing lunch between back-to-back calls, when the only nearby option is a drive-through, when meal planning feels like another item on an already overwhelming to-do list.

The real work

The real work of health usually isn't about perfecting your morning smoothie recipe, finding the optimal workout routine or buying that $1000 cold plunge you may or may not use. The real work is about examining the structures in your life that make unhealthy choices feel inevitable.

It's about asking yourself why you've scheduled meetings through lunch for the third day this week. Or noticing that your chronic fatigue might have less to do with your thyroid levels and more to do with the fact that you haven't said no to anything in months.

I've come to believe that integrative medicine is, at its core, about integration—not just between different healing modalities, but between our health and our lives. You can't treat someone's insomnia without understanding their relationship with work. You can't address their digestive issues without exploring their stress patterns.

The businessman at that Vistage meeting didn't need a time management course. He needed to value his own well-being as much as he valued his business obligations. He needed to realize that protecting his health wasn't selfish—it was strategic.

When we frame health recommendations as simple lifestyle changes, we miss this deeper truth. The challenge isn't figuring out what to do. The challenge is figuring out how to do it within the context of a life that may be fundamentally misaligned with well-being.

Starting where you are

If you're reading this while thinking about your own health goals, your own packed calendar, your own good intentions that somehow never translate into sustainable habits, let me offer this: start with one honest question.

Not "What should I be doing for my health?" but "What is my current life structure making inevitable?"

If you find yourself eating fast food three times a week, don't start with a lecture about nutrition. Start by asking why you haven't gone grocery shopping, why you don't have healthy options readily available, why you're so pressed for time that convenience trumps everything else.

If you're struggling to exercise regularly, don't begin with a complicated workout plan. Begin by examining what happens to your schedule when you try to prioritize movement, what voices in your head tell you that other things are more important, what beliefs you hold about productivity and rest.

The answers to these questions will tell you more about what needs to change than any health blog ever could.

I think there's something both humbling and liberating about recognizing that your health challenges might actually be life challenges. Humbling because it means you can't solve them with supplements or shortcuts. Liberating because it means you have more control than you think.

Your calendar is not fixed. Your boundaries are not unchangeable. Your definition of what's truly urgent and important is entirely within your power to examine and adjust. Prioritize now or pay later, the choice is yours.