How Well Are You?

What you measure, Grows.

I was doing very well until November 2022.

Then the months of November and December 2022 were brutal.

My seven-month-old caught a respiratory bug, and as a nursing mother, I lost seven pounds in a week. Then my older one felt sick, and as a primary caregiver who was also working, the following weeks seemed like a whirlwind.

Then came the ‘festive’ month of December.

Consolidate the year, plan the next, orchestrate and execute travel and Christmasy ‘fun’ without school and childcare support.

After running on empty for a few weeks of November, I went into a negative spiral.

I became afraid of change.

I wanted every day of my life to look predictable, like Monday through Friday.

I wanted my older kid in school and reliable nanny support for my second child for a few hours to work and energize myself.

However, the social and professional calendar of 2023 had many variable events lined up.

My desperate need for predictability was unrealistic.

Every day could not be the same, because that’s just not how Life is designed.

So I became afraid of Life.

Life’s demands seemed like impossible mountains to climb.

I was lost, confused, and scared.

Being a Vaidya, I wanted to get to the root of the problem.

I sought advice and found diverse possibilities. Anxiety and depression were on the table.

Now, I am a Vaidya-Scientist, which is essentially an Ayurvedic clinical scientist.

So I started assessing myself with clinical definitions and validated scales.

How bad was my anxiety? How bad was my depression? How poor was the quality of my life?

The medical world relies on these scales to give a diagnosis, plan treatment, monitor progress, create health systems, and make policy decisions.

The more I measured these, the more confused and upset I became.

I just wanted to be well.

So I reverted back to Ayurveda’s wisdom and its definition of health and well-being.

I wanted to be well, regardless of any external circumstances.

I wanted to be unconditionally well.

Could I use my Vaidya-Scientist training to merge these two for my personal well-being?

So I dug deep into the Science of Well-being and the Spiritual foundations I was originally built with.

I read research papers on science, and read and listened to the spiritual masters.

Could I measure how well I was?

I researched scales with clinometric validity* to measure well-being.

After a while, I found an absolute gem.

It had five questions to figure out how well I was doing.

A lower score on this scale is correlated with depression. A higher score is associated with everything we human beings aspire for.

On a scale of 1-100, my score was 36. Gosh!

Could I improve this score without trying to identify ‘disease’ in me.

Clearly, just two months ago, my score would have been different. Should I invest my time and resources in seeking ‘professional’ help at this stage? Or did I have an option?

Ayurveda’s premise for healing is that solutions are internal, existing within our systems. I thought of giving that a chance.

I dug deep within, spoke to people who knew me and cherished me, and re-aligned with my spiritual foundations. I applied cognitive-spiritual aspects of Ayurveda, surgically in my life.

In two weeks, my score went from 36 to 92!

Nothing outside had changed.

But my internal environment looked pristine.

For the next six months, my score would stay above 88.

I couldn’t keep this to myself.

So I changed the way I counseled, created my first program for clients - Unconditional Well-being, started this Substack Publication for health seekers, and did a series of talks to the healthcare fraternity to evolve this domain of Self-driven Well-being and Health.

Without much ado, here is where you can calculate your score.

It is recommended to seek professional help below 51.

Try to live above 88. It’s awesome!

For my paid subscribers below, there are two golden gems.

1. My score-specific recommendation of what kind of support to activate. (Below 80, Below 72, Below 60)

2. My recommended sequence on which of the five statements to focus on to increase your score.