You should treat healthspan like a portfolio. Every choice carries risk and return, including the ones you avoid.
More sleep improves recovery and decision quality, yet it may compress working hours and threaten targets. More work can accelerate income and impact, yet it raises physiological load and erodes recovery.
The trade-off is the risk, and pretending it is not there does not make it disappear. That is one major problem that a lot of driven people overlook.
Another is the tendency to overweight visible, short-term gains and underweight slow risks that compound. We are also poor at estimating variance.
One week of minimal sleep may be tolerable. Six months becomes a drawdown that is hard to recover from. The task is not to eliminate risk in health but to optimise it: more expected value, less fragility.
A simple check helps before changing habits.
- Upside: what could you gain in the next week and the next year?
- Downside: what could break if you do this?
- Second-order effects: what else will this push or pull across work, family and training?
- Opportunity cost: what are you giving up, and is there a lighter way to get the same result?
Then, size the bet.
If the risk is reversible, run a small experiment for two to four weeks, watch leading indicators such as mood stability, deep work hours, perceived recovery and social connection, and adjust.
If the risk is hard to reverse, slow down, add a margin of safety, and seek another option.
While working with others, I keep in mind that constraints matter. Time, energy and cognitive load are real budgets and can be tighter than money. Good design respects them.
Build a strong core of reliable habits: sleep regularity, training that protects joints as well as VO₂ max, food you can execute, and social support that keeps the system steady. Then allow for calibrated variety. A portfolio made only of safe assets underperforms, and a life made only of healthy choices carries its own risks: rigidity, missed experiences, rising stress, and eventual non-adherence.
Allocate small, time-bound experiments around the core. Some weeks work intensity goes up and training trims, or a late dinner with friends replaces perfect macros, or a race block nudges recovery elsewhere. That is not failure. That is diversification.
You do not need to optimise every variable every week. Treat choices like positions, size them to your season, review and rebalance. The aim is not purity, it is durable progress: the right mix of behaviours, at the right size, for a long time.