Health is Not a Knowledge Problem
From Director of Health Alex Maples
After years of coaching, educating, and writing in the health and fitness space, I can confidently say: health is not primarily a knowledge problem.
The things that actually matter aren’t a mystery. People generally know they should be physically active, eat mostly whole foods, get enough sleep, and manage their stress. The mystery is why it’s so damn hard to pull off.
Health, at least the part of it we can meaningfully influence, is largely an impulse architecture problem. We all know, at least in broad strokes, what we should be doing. The hard part is actually doing it. The human experience is a pinball machine of urges, cues, emotions, habits, cravings, fatigue, convenience, reward, and identity. So the real work isn’t finding the perfect diet or exercise plan. It’s learning how to notice, steer, and gradually redesign your impulses.
What I Mean By Impulse
By impulse, I don’t just mean craving or lack of discipline. I mean the full set of internal pulls that shape behavior: hunger, stress, fatigue, convenience, boredom, reward, habit, identity, relief. Some impulses are clearly destructive, some are clearly useful, and many are somewhere in between. The point isn’t that impulse is inherently bad. Instead, it’s that human behavior is constantly being influenced by it.
There are really two games being played in shaping impulse: inhibition and cultivation.
The Short Game: Inhibition
Here, we’re talking about noticing an impulse as it arises, creating enough pause to avoid immediately obeying it, and reducing its power in the future by adding friction, changing the environment, or interrupting the pattern before it completes itself. And early progress against an impulse (overeating, for example) doesn’t mean that the urge disappears. If you struggle with overeating, you may still feel compelled to eat beyond what you need. That doesn’t mean you’re not making headway. What you’re looking for is that the follow-through on the urge becomes less automatic. You see it sooner. You create space between feeling and acting. You stop giving every impulse immediate authority.
The Long Game: Cultivation
But inhibition is not the end game, because white knuckling through every impulse for the rest of your life is not sustainable.
The long-term game is cultivation. It’s the repeated practice of behaviors that lead to good outcomes until they begin to feel more natural. Eating regular meals. Learning satiety. Building forms of relief that are not just food, alcohol, scrolling, or avoidance. Walking after dinner. Lifting weights a few times a week. Going to bed a little earlier. Structuring a life where healthier choices require less negotiation. At first these behaviors are effortful. They’re hard because they’re not yet impulses. But with enough repetition, they begin to move in that direction. The healthy path becomes more familiar, more rehearsed, and more automatic.
Enter the Impulse Landscape
That’s where the work begins to shift. When the unhealthy urges stop being the only thing that feels natural, the old impulses lose some of their power. New patterns have been repeated enough times to become part of you. Which raises a deeper question: what shapes the kinds of impulses that are most likely to show up and win?
Not every impulse arrives with the same force, frequency, or authority. Some show up consistently. Some only show up under certain conditions. Some feel loud because they have been repeated for years. Others feel weak because they are new, fragile, or unsupported.
Enter the impulse landscape. It’s the overall environment, both internal and external, that determines which impulses are most likely to arise and which ones are most likely to win.
Most people think behavior change is about winning isolated battles. Resist the cookie. Go to the gym. Put the phone down. Go to bed earlier. But those moments are not random. They are produced by a larger landscape.
A person who is underslept, overstressed, underfed, lonely, surrounded by hyperpalatable food, and used to soothing themselves with eating is living in a very different impulse landscape than someone who is rested, eating regularly, has structure in their day, has built a few reliable coping mechanisms, and has repeated healthier patterns enough times that they feel somewhat familiar.
Same person, different landscape, different impulses.
The Five Forces
So, what actually shapes a person’s impulse landscape? In my experience there are five major forces: physiological state, emotional state, environment, repetition, and identity.
Physiological State
By physiological state, I mean the condition of the body you are living in at a given moment. Sleep deprivation, pain, illness, under-eating, hormonal disruption, blood sugar swings, nervous system dysregulation, and poor recovery all change what feels appealing, what feels effortful, and what kind of impulses are most likely to show up.
Emotional State
Emotional state is the inner weather. Stress, boredom, loneliness, anxiety, resentment, sadness, excitement, and the desire for relief all change what we want and what feels easiest to reach for. A lot of impulses are not really about pleasure; they’re about regulation.
Environment
Environment is the set of external conditions shaping what behaviors are easiest to perform. What food is in the house, what cues are visible, what friction exists between you and destructive behaviors, and what support exists for healthier ones all influence which impulses get acted on.
Repetition
Repetition is the process by which behaviors become more familiar, more available, and more automatic. What we repeatedly do, especially under similar conditions, starts to feel like the natural thing to do next.
Identity
Identity is what a person believes about themselves. We all tell ourselves stories about who we are, and those stories shape our behavior. When I was 350 pounds, I identified as someone who did not care. A big part of becoming healthy for me was becoming someone who cared deeply about my body and was willing to do what was necessary to take care of it.
Now that we see the landscape, the next step is to figure out how to shape it.
The Wedge Between Impulse and Action
When you find yourself struggling with an impulse, start by pausing to check in and ask why. Are you underslept? Has work been stressing you out? Have you already had four cups of coffee and now your nervous system is redlining?
Tuning into your internal state can give you a lot of information. It can’t undo a bad night of sleep or that extra espresso, but it can give you a moment of pause to make the next choice a better one instead of cascading down compounding error mountain. That pause, what I like to call the wedge between impulse and action, is fundamental to the early stage of building a healthy lifestyle, the inhibition stage we talked about earlier.
Design the Friction
If you want to make it easier to do the things you genuinely want and harder to do the things you don’t, you’ve got to engineer friction in the right places. It starts with reshaping your environment. If you want to exercise more, that might mean getting a membership to a gym that is between your house and work so you drive by it everyday (less friction on getting to a workout).Or you might hire a personal trainer so you have some external accountability and a scheduled time to lift weights (more friction on flaking out of a session).
When it comes to food, I have a rule about keeping tempting foods in the house.
Early on, there were nights when I would leave my house, drive to the Walgreens near my apartment, and sit in the parking lot debating whether to go in and get a snack. Sometimes the impulse won. Sometimes I walked away. But even on the nights I lost, the rule held: do not keep it in the house. That was what mattered. Over time, the trips got rarer. The friction of having to leave the house gradually started doing more work than my willpower ever could.
It’s a lot easier to exercise discipline in the grocery store once a week than every time I walk past the pantry. Again, increasing friction between me and the foods I’m most likely to eat impulsively.
I know what comes next: “But my kids need snacks.” Or, “I can’t subject my spouse to that.” And you are right. There are situations where you have to keep things around that are not perfectly aligned with your goals. That is part of being in a family, having friendships, and living in the real world.
My wife, for example, likes to keep chocolate bars in the house. I am exactly the kind of person who will eat an entire chocolate bar in an evening, piece by piece, every time I walk past the cabinet. So I made a rule for myself: it is my wife’s chocolate. I can have a piece, but I have to ask her for it first. Obviously, she will say yes. That is not the point. The point is that the friction of having to ask is often enough to make me reconsider, especially if I have already had a piece.
The Story You Tell Yourself
The final part here is identity. The stories you tell yourself about who you are have a profound effect on how you respond to impulses. Identity matters because it shapes how you interpret moments of struggle. If an impulse comes up and your story becomes, “F**k it, I don’t care,” you’re dead in the water. But think about if the story is, “I do care, this is just hard.” Then, even if you don’t respond perfectly, you haven’t abandoned yourself.
The point of noticing is not just to become more aware. It is to start making choices that leave the version of you an hour from now, tomorrow, and next week better off.
Say you notice that scrolling on your phone until midnight leaves you wrecked the next day. Awareness is step one. Step two is intervention: an alarm clock so the phone doesn’t have to sleep in the bedroom, some light fiction to fill the pre-sleep window, or a Brick that blocks the tempting apps after a certain time. Different tools for the same goal: putting friction between you and the impulse.
The more you learn to care for your future self’s physiological and emotional state, through environment, identity, and repetition, the more regulated and healthy you become. And the more regulated and healthy you become, the less effort it takes to make the next good decision, because you are already operating from a better baseline.
The Real Work
At the end of the day, I think this is the real work of health. Not memorizing more information. Not waiting for perfect motivation. Not trying to become some perfectly disciplined robot. It is learning how to work with the actual conditions of your life so that over time the healthy choice becomes easier to see, easier to access, and easier to repeat.