The Four Kinds of Health: Physical, Emotional, Spiritual, and Cognitive

emotional-health , how igor ticks

Health isn’t one-dimensional. You can be physically fit but emotionally exhausted. You can be cognitively sharp but spiritually adrift. True well-being requires attending to all four dimensions of health: physical, emotional, spiritual, and cognitive. Each dimension serves a different purpose, requires different practices, and neglecting any one creates vulnerabilities that ripple across your entire life.

I know currently lots of AI slop - but I'm working on it, also using this post as an experiment in AI augmented book reading/learning!

This framework draws heavily from two foundational books on energy and happiness:

The Four Dimensions
Why All Four Matter
Rituals for Each Dimension
The Compound Effect
Common Failure Patterns
Building Your Health System
Ideas I’m grinding through

The Four Dimensions

Physical Health: Your Energy Foundation

Physical health is your body’s capacity to generate and sustain energy. Without it, everything else becomes harder.

What it enables:

Sustained focus and productivity
Stress tolerance and recovery
Sleep quality and emotional regulation
Presence and engagement with others

Core components:

Strength and stability
Cardiovascular fitness (aerobic and anaerobic)
Sleep and recovery
Nutrition and metabolic health

What happens when you neglect it:

Chronic fatigue and brain fog
Poor stress management
Emotional volatility
Accelerated aging and disease risk

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For the long game, think about your Centenarian Olympics - what physical capabilities do you want to maintain at 80 or 90?

Emotional Health: Your Resilience System

Emotional health is your ability to navigate feelings, maintain positive relationships, and stay resilient under stress. It’s not about always being happy - it’s about having the tools to process whatever you’re experiencing.

What it enables:

Handling setbacks without collapse
Maintaining relationships through conflict
Staying grounded during uncertainty
Processing grief, fear, and disappointment

Core components:

Self-awareness and emotional regulation
Empathy and compassion
Mindfulness and presence
Healthy relationship patterns

What happens when you neglect it:

Mood swings and reactivity
Damaged relationships
Burnout and emotional exhaustion
Inability to process difficult experiences

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See also: Search Inside Yourself for emotional intelligence training, and Sublime States for Buddhist practices on emotional well-being.

Spiritual Health: Your Purpose, Perspective, and Acceptance

Spiritual health means having a north star (purpose/direction), knowing you’re NOT the center of the universe (transcendence/perspective), and accepting you have influence, not control (coherence/acceptance). It’s what prevents you from feeling aimless, burning out from lack of perspective, or exhausting yourself trying to control what’s beyond your reach. Some people find this through religion, but even if you’re not religious, these dimensions of spiritual health remain essential.

What it enables:

Persisting through difficulty when results are far away (purpose)
Maintaining perspective on what actually matters (transcendence)
Focusing energy on what you can actually influence (coherence)
Making decisions aligned with your values

Core components:

Clear sense of purpose and values (your north star)
Practices that provide cosmic perspective and awe (getting small)
Distinguishing your circle of influence from circle of concern
Rituals that mark transitions and create meaning

What happens when you neglect it:

Feeling aimless despite achievement (missing purpose)
Burning out from treating every setback as catastrophic (missing transcendence)
Exhausting yourself trying to control outcomes beyond your reach (missing coherence)
Disengagement and going through motions

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Even if you’re not religious, spiritual rituals matter. They anchor you to your deeper “why,” provide perspective on your place in the universe, and help you focus on what you can actually affect.

Cognitive Health: Your Growth Engine

Cognitive health is your ability to think clearly, learn effectively, and grow continuously. It’s your capacity to engage with ideas, solve problems, and expand your understanding.

What it enables:

Clear thinking and good judgment
Learning new skills and adapting
Creative problem-solving
Intellectual engagement and curiosity

Core components:

Reading and learning habits
Writing and reflection
Exposure to new ideas
Deliberate practice

What happens when you neglect it:

Mental stagnation and rigidity
Poor decision-making
Inability to adapt to change
Loss of curiosity and engagement

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Also see my approach to learning new skills.

Why All Four Matter

The four dimensions are interconnected. Neglecting one weakens the others:

Without physical health, you lack the energy for emotional regulation, spiritual reflection, or cognitive work
Without emotional health, you can’t handle the stress of physical training, maintain meaningful relationships (spiritual), or think clearly (cognitive)
Without spiritual health, you lack the motivation to maintain physical practices, the resilience for emotional challenges, or the direction for cognitive growth
Without cognitive health, you can’t learn better physical practices, develop emotional skills, or deepen spiritual understanding

They form a system, not a checklist.

Rituals for Each Dimension

Rituals are how you maintain health in each dimension. They transform abstract intentions into concrete practices.

Physical Rituals

Morning workout before decision fatigue sets in
Scheduled training sessions (not “when I feel like it”)
Consistent sleep schedule
Meal planning and preparation

See my physical health practices and morning routine.

Emotional Rituals

Emotional rituals keep you resilient by creating space to process feelings and maintain perspective:

Daily meditation practice
Gratitude journaling
Box breathing during stress
Regular connection with loved ones

These aren’t optional when you “have time” - they’re what prevent emotional collapse when life gets hard.

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Spiritual Rituals

Spiritual rituals anchor you to your purpose and values:

Weekly reflection on what matters most
Annual review and goal-setting aligned with values
Rituals marking life transitions (secular or religious)
Regular engagement with your eulogy - who you want to be

These practices prevent the drift into aimlessness that comes from just optimizing for productivity.

Cognitive Rituals

Cognitive rituals ensure continuous growth:

Daily reading time (scheduled, not hoped-for)
Weekly writing and reflection
Learning projects with deliberate practice
Exposure to challenging ideas

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The Compound Effect

Small consistent practices in each dimension compound over time:

Physical: Training 4x/week for years builds strength reserves for aging
Emotional: Daily meditation for years builds resilience that carries you through crisis
Spiritual: Weekly reflection for years keeps you aligned with what matters
Cognitive: Daily reading for years expands your mental models and capabilities

The opposite also compounds: neglect in any dimension creates debt that accumulates with interest.

Common Failure Patterns

The One-Dimensional Optimizer: Focuses exclusively on one dimension (usually physical or cognitive) while others atrophy. Classic example: the executive who’s crushing it at work but burning out emotionally and spiritually.

The Intentions-Without-Systems Person: Knows what they “should” do in each dimension but hasn’t built rituals and habits. Relies on willpower and motivation, which inevitably fail.

The Busy Procrastinator: Always too busy for health practices. “I’ll focus on this when things calm down.” Things never calm down. Health continues declining.

The All-or-Nothing Perfectionist: Tries to optimize all four dimensions simultaneously, gets overwhelmed, abandons everything. Then restarts from zero. Repeat.

Building Your Health System

You don’t rise to the level of your goals - you fall to the level of your systems.

Start with rituals, not aspirations:

Audit current state: Which dimensions are you neglecting? What’s the cost?
Pick one dimension to focus on first (usually physical - it provides energy for the others)
Design minimal rituals that you can sustain even on bad days
Build in anchors and clips (see rituals as anchors) so when you slip, you don’t fall all the way down
Gradually add practices in other dimensions once first rituals are solid

Remember: practice makes permanent. Whether you design your rituals consciously or let them form by default, you will have rituals. The question is whether they serve you or sabotage you.

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Ideas I’m grinding through

Spiritual Health: Purpose vs. Transcendence

Spiritual health is particularly complex because different frameworks define it differently. After deep analysis, I’ve discovered that “spiritual health” actually encompasses two distinct problems that different thought leaders address:

Purpose (Not Knowing Your Mountain): The problem of feeling directionless, not knowing your values or what you’re working toward
Transcendence (Being Too Big): The problem of taking yourself too seriously, lacking cosmic perspective on your place in the universe

These are orthogonal - you can have one without the other. A driven founder might have crystal-clear purpose but burn out from lack of perspective (purpose without transcendence). A meditation practitioner might feel deeply connected to something greater but still feel aimless about their own path (transcendence without purpose).

Different frameworks emphasize different aspects:

Arthur Brooks focuses on transcendence through “getting small”
My framework emphasizes purpose as your “anchor” to meaning
The Power of Full Engagement bridges both, suggesting they’re developmental stages
Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy shows that purpose IS found through self-transcendence

For a comprehensive analysis of these frameworks and whether purpose and transcendence are separate dimensions or complementary aspects of spiritual health, see: Spiritual Health: Purpose vs. Transcendence

Spiritual vs Emotional Health Differences

These two dimensions are often confused, but they address completely different problems. You need both, independently.

I think of emotional health as being able to get you through short term difficulties - triggers/anger/insults, while spiritual health can get you through the long slog. Using a physical analogy emotional health is your strength - the anaerobic system, while spiritual health is endurance, the aerobic system.

Spiritual Health: Connection to Meaning

Spiritual rituals anchor you to a deeper “why” - they create and maintain your connection to purpose, values, and what matters beyond immediate circumstances. When your spiritual health is strong, you know what you’re working toward and why it matters.

What breaks without it: You feel aimless - going through the motions, checking boxes, wondering “what’s the point?” even when succeeding by external measures. The work gets done, but it feels hollow. You might be emotionally stable but spiritually adrift.

Emotional Health: Processing and Resilience

Emotional rituals maintain your ability to process feelings, regulate your responses, and stay present with whatever you’re experiencing. When your emotional health is strong, you can navigate setbacks, process difficult feelings, and maintain relationships even under stress.

What breaks without it: You experience mood swings, reactivity, relationship damage, or emotional burnout. You might know exactly what matters (spiritual health intact) but can’t execute consistently because your emotional state keeps derailing you. Or you maintain your routines but can’t actually feel or connect with anyone, including yourself.

Spiritual Health vs Identity

Spiritual health and identity are closely related but distinct concepts that often get conflated.

Identity: Who You Are

Your identity is your answer to “who am I?” It’s the roles you occupy, the values you hold, the characteristics that define you. Identity is largely descriptive - it names what’s true about you.

Examples from my eulogy:

Father, husband, friend
Disciple of the 7 habits
Emotionally healthy human
Magic practitioner

These are identity statements - they describe who I am and aspire to be.

Spiritual Health: Why It Matters

Spiritual health is the connection and meaning you derive from your identity and actions. It’s not just knowing who you are - it’s feeling anchored to why that matters, feeling connected to something beyond immediate circumstances.

You can have a clear identity (“I’m a parent, I’m a software engineer”) but poor spiritual health (feeling empty, going through motions, wondering “what’s the point of any of this?”). The identity is intact, but the spiritual connection to meaning is broken.

The Relationship

Identity without spiritual health: You know your roles and values but feel disconnected from their meaning. You’re doing all the “right” identity things but feeling hollow.
Spiritual health anchored in identity: Your eulogy values aren’t just descriptions - they’re sources of meaning. Being a father isn’t just a role, it’s a profound connection to purpose. Practicing magic isn’t just a hobby, it’s a spiritual practice that grounds you.

Why This Distinction Matters

When you feel spiritually adrift, the problem isn’t always that you lack identity clarity. Sometimes you know exactly who you are - you just can’t feel why it matters. That’s a spiritual health problem, not an identity problem.

The solution isn’t to redesign your identity - it’s to rebuild the spiritual practices that connect you to the meaning inherent in your existing identity. That’s what spiritual rituals do: they maintain your felt connection to purpose, not just your intellectual knowledge of who you are.

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Mapping to Igor’s Affirmations

My daily affirmations map naturally to these four health dimensions. Looking at the mapping reveals both coverage and gaps:

Affirmation	Physical	Emotional	Spiritual	Cognitive
1. Do It Anyways Deliberate. Disciplined. Daily	5am gym, kettlebells, trainer sessions, morning routine	20 min morning meditation, box breathing, gratefulness journal	Discipline as identity - living eulogy values	—
2. An Essentialist Know Essential. Provide Context. Prioritize Ruthlessly	—	—	Begin with end in mind - your spiritual compass (knowing your mountain, living eulogy values)	Same approach at tactical level: what's essential for this work problem? Writing to provide context
3. A Class Act First Understand. Appreciate. Isn't that Curious	—	Seek first to understand, appreciation practice, emotional intelligence	—	"Isn't that curious" - cognitive reframing to override triggers
4. Calm Like Water Be Present. This too shall pass. Work the problem	—	"This too shall pass", being present, emotional regulation	Being present for joy, meaning in moments	"Work the problem" - stay analytical under stress

The Cognitive “Gap” That Isn’t

Notice: three affirmations emphasize emotional/spiritual health, one covers physical, and none directly address cognitive health as a primary focus.

But this isn’t actually a gap - it’s a feature, not a bug.

I’m naturally incredibly curious and love digging into tech, ideas, and understanding how things work. The cognitive dimension doesn’t need affirmation-level reinforcement because it’s already my default mode. I don’t need to remind myself to be curious or learn - I need to remind myself to stop learning long enough to actually execute (Do It Anyways), to focus on what matters (Essentialist), and to connect with people (Class Act).

The real insight: Affirmations should reinforce what you struggle with, not what comes naturally. My cognitive health doesn’t need daily affirmations - it needs systems and structures, which I’ve built through this blog and my writing practice.