What Does Holistic Health Really Mean?

We use the word “holistic” so readily today that it is easy to forget how significant the idea behind it actually is. Holistic health isn’t simply conventional healthcare with a few complementary therapies added to it. At its most interesting, it asks us to reconsider what a human being is, what we mean by health, and how our wellbeing emerges from the relationships between body, mind, other people and the living world around us.

When Whole Life Times began in 1982, the word holistic still sounded rather unfamiliar to many people. It was associated with an emerging interest in ways of thinking about health that extended beyond symptoms, diagnoses and the treatment of disease, and although some of what travelled under the holistic-health banner was undoubtedly more credible than other parts of it, the underlying question seemed to me an important one.

What happens when we stop looking at the different parts of a human being as though they exist independently of one another?

More than forty years later, that question has become considerably more interesting because so much of contemporary science is revealing relationships that were much less well understood when the early holistic-health movement emerged. We now know vastly more about the relationships between the brain and immune system, the microbiome and human physiology, chronic stress and physical health, sleep and metabolic function, social connection and wellbeing, environmental exposures and disease, and many other interactions that make it increasingly difficult to draw a neat boundary around any single part of ourselves and call that the whole story.

This doesn’t mean that everything once described as holistic has subsequently been validated by science, nor should it. Holistic thinking shouldn’t require us to abandon critical thinking or to accept a health claim simply because it sounds natural, integrative or spiritually appealing. What it does invite us to do is resist the temptation to mistake one part of a person for the whole person.

That distinction seems just as important today as it did when Whole Life Times began.

What do we mean when we say we are healthy?

If someone asks whether we are healthy, most of us probably begin by thinking about whether anything is wrong with us. We may think about an illness we have or haven’t got, our blood pressure, cholesterol, weight, fitness or perhaps the results of a recent medical examination.

These are all useful ways of thinking about health, but few of us would really want to define a healthy life entirely in those terms. We can imagine somebody whose laboratory results are excellent but who is chronically lonely, exhausted, anxious, without a sense of purpose and living in an environment that leaves little opportunity for contact with nature or community. Most of us would instinctively recognise that something important is missing from the picture.

The reverse is also true. Psychological wellbeing cannot simply be separated from the body in which it occurs. Anyone who has gone for several nights without adequate sleep knows how quickly the distinction between physical and psychological wellbeing begins to blur, just as prolonged stress can affect appetite, digestion, muscular tension, energy, concentration and sleep while physical illness can profoundly influence mood and our experience of ourselves.

The more closely we look, the harder it becomes to decide precisely where the body ends and the mind begins, which is one reason I have always found the division between physical and mental health somewhat artificial. It may be useful professionally and administratively, but it doesn’t necessarily describe how people actually experience themselves.

A more holistic understanding begins by recognising that these dimensions continually interact.

Looking inside the body reveals relationships too

Interestingly, even when we turn our attention entirely towards the physical body, we encounter much the same problem of interconnectedness.

We tend to speak about the cardiovascular system, nervous system, endocrine system, digestive system and immune system as though they were separate departments within a large organisation. This is enormously useful when we are learning anatomy and physiology, but of course the body itself doesn’t experience those boundaries.

The immune system communicates with the nervous system. Hormones influence numerous tissues and organs. The microorganisms living within and upon us interact with digestion, metabolism and immune function. What happens in one part of this extraordinarily complex biological community can influence processes occurring elsewhere.

I find this particularly fascinating because it brings the holistic conversation all the way down to the cellular level. A human body is not simply a collection of organs sitting beside one another, any more than an ecosystem is simply a collection of species occupying the same piece of land. What matters enormously in both cases is the communication and relationships between the parts.

As our understanding of cellular signalling, immune communication, the microbiome, epigenetics and other areas continues to develop, the old language of holistic health can sometimes acquire surprisingly contemporary meanings. We need to be careful not to use emerging science to justify claims that the evidence does not support, but neither should we overlook what the science itself is showing us about the extraordinary interconnectedness of living systems.

The world outside the body belongs in the picture

There is another boundary that becomes increasingly difficult to maintain when we think seriously about health, and that is the boundary between the person and the environment.

We sometimes talk about health as though it were something generated entirely within the individual, with lifestyle advice consequently focusing on what each of us should eat, how much we should exercise, whether we smoke, how much alcohol we consume and how well we manage stress. These things can certainly matter, but they occur within circumstances that can make healthy choices easier for some people and considerably more difficult for others.

The quality of the air we breathe and water we drink matters. So does the food available to us, the safety and design of our neighbourhoods, the nature of our work, our exposure to pollutants, the quality of our housing and our opportunities for movement, recreation and contact with the natural world.

Our relationships matter too, as do loneliness, belonging, social support and the experience of being part of a community. Once these things enter the picture, health becomes not merely a personal matter but a social and ecological one.

This is where I think the idea of holistic health becomes much larger than the world of healthcare.

If the environments in which people live contribute to their health, then designing healthier communities is health work. Protecting clean water is health work. Reducing air pollution is health work. Creating opportunities for people to walk, meet, play and spend time in nature can be understood partly through the same lens.

It also becomes difficult to talk seriously about human health while treating the health of the planet as a separate concern. We depend upon functioning ecosystems for clean air, freshwater, food, climate regulation and countless biological processes that make human life possible, so the relationship between personal wellbeing and planetary wellbeing is much more than a pleasing metaphor.

We are biological beings living within biological systems, and our health has never really been independent of theirs.

Where does psychological wellbeing fit?

My own professional life in psychology has naturally made me particularly interested in another part of the holistic picture: the relationship between how people live and how they experience themselves.

Psychological wellbeing is sometimes discussed as though it consists mainly of reducing anxiety, depression or other forms of distress. Helping someone who is suffering is obviously important, but there is a broader conversation to be had about what allows a human life to feel meaningful, connected and worth living.

Relationships are part of that conversation, as are work, creativity, belonging, curiosity, values and the opportunity to contribute to something beyond ourselves. For some people spirituality or a sense of connection with something larger than the individual is important, while for others meaning may be found through family, community, nature, creative expression, service, learning or many different combinations of these.

A genuinely holistic approach needs room for these differences because there isn’t a single prescription for a meaningful human life. What matters to one person may leave another relatively unmoved, and health becomes a much richer idea when we allow it to include the question of how people actually want to live rather than reducing it entirely to how successfully we prevent illness.

This doesn’t mean that medicine or psychology should prescribe a philosophy of life. It means recognising that the person seeking help brings a life with them, and that their symptoms occur within that life rather than in isolation from it.

Holistic doesn’t mean choosing sides

One unfortunate development over the years has been the tendency for discussions about health to become divided into camps. Conventional medicine is sometimes portrayed as though it cares only about drugs and disease, while complementary or natural approaches are presented as though they possess a more humane understanding of the whole person. From the other direction, anything described as alternative or holistic can sometimes be dismissed without much curiosity about whether there might be something worth investigating.

Neither response seems particularly helpful to me.

Modern medicine has achieved extraordinary things, from antibiotics and vaccination to imaging, surgery, emergency medicine and the treatment of diseases that once routinely killed people. At the same time, there is a legitimate and growing interest in prevention, lifestyle, nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, social connection and the environmental determinants of health.

There is no obvious reason these need to be opposing worlds.

A person undergoing sophisticated medical treatment can also benefit from good nutrition, appropriate physical activity, restorative sleep, supportive relationships and help in managing stress. Someone interested in a complementary therapy should still be entitled to ask whether there is credible evidence that it is safe and effective. A clinician can be scientifically rigorous while remaining interested in the patient’s life beyond the diagnosis.

For me, the word integrative becomes useful here, provided integration does not mean simply combining everything with everything else. It means being willing to draw upon different sources of knowledge while remaining thoughtful about the quality of evidence, the individual circumstances of the person and the possibility that different approaches may sometimes complement one another.

Holistic thinking, understood in this way, is less about which camp we belong to than about how much of the picture we are willing to see.

Health across a lifetime

Thinking holistically also changes the way we approach ageing.

We live in a culture that often talks about ageing principally in terms of decline and the prevention of disease, while an enormous commercial industry promises various ways of remaining young. Yet longevity becomes a rather limited aspiration if we consider only the number of years lived and not the quality, vitality and meaning of those years.

The more interesting question for me is what helps people remain engaged with life as they grow older.

Physical health obviously matters enormously, but so do curiosity, relationships, purpose, learning, movement, participation and the sense that one’s life continues to have possibilities. These things are not magical protections against illness or the realities of ageing, but they belong within any serious conversation about what we mean by healthy longevity.

This is another area in which biological and psychological perspectives begin to meet. Research into cellular ageing, metabolism, inflammation and other biological processes is developing rapidly, while at the same time we are learning more about the importance of movement, sleep, diet, stress and social relationships across the lifespan.

Rather than looking for a single secret to longevity, it may be more useful to understand healthy ageing as something emerging from many interacting influences over time.

That sounds, to me, rather holistic.

Returning to the original question

So when I ask what holistic health really means, I don’t think there is a tidy definition that settles the matter once and for all, and perhaps that is appropriate because the whole idea asks us to resist reducing complex living beings to simple formulas.

What seems useful is the invitation contained within the word itself: to keep widening the frame.

We can begin with a symptom and consider the person experiencing it. We can consider the body and the relationships among its cells, organs and regulatory systems. We can include psychological wellbeing, relationships, lifestyle and meaning, and then widen the frame again to include community, society and the environments upon which our lives depend.

None of these perspectives makes the others unnecessary. They add context to one another.

That is also why holistic health will remain an important part of Whole Life Times. It gives us room to explore medicine and psychology alongside nutrition, exercise and healthy ageing, while also making room for emerging science, complementary approaches, environmental health, personal development and the larger question of what helps human beings flourish.

I don’t expect every idea we encounter in that exploration to prove equally valuable, and I think maintaining curiosity alongside healthy scepticism will become increasingly important as health information proliferates online. What I hope Whole Life Times can contribute is a place where we can explore these questions without having to choose between openness and critical thinking.

Perhaps, after all, that is one of the most useful things the word holistic can remind us of. Whenever we think we have understood health by looking closely at one part of the picture, it may be worth widening the frame once more and asking what relationships we have yet to notice.