Is Wellness Expert Andrew Huberman Unwell?

On Connecting Physical, Mental, and Spiritual Health

Ok, here’s a disclaimer. Cyd and I are not on the extremes of biohacking and health optimizing, but we do try and live in a healthy way concerning what we eat, exercise, sleep. We use essential oils and eat organic foods. As I confessed in the last “Baggage Claim”, I even built a DIY cold plung and I love hot saunas. In fact, the only reason I’ve been going to the gym is because of the sauna, it is like my workout desert. So we definitely have an interest in physical health. 

What does it mean to be healthy? How do Physical, Mental, and Spiritual Health connect, and which direction do they flow and influence each other?

Which brings me to Andrew Huberman. 

From NYMag Cover Article (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/andrew-huberman-podcast-stanford-joe-rogan.html)

Andrew Huberman is, we could say, a "religious" self-optimizer who offers wellness protocals to listeners, while offering people research reports on dopamine detoxing, sleep patterns, sun exposer, and ice swimming and sauna usage (exactly how long and how often (it was a very interesting episode).

Huberman is a superstar in the wellness world. 

But it seems the wellness expert is unwell. 

A long expose by New York Magazine chronicles how Huberman had multiple romantic and sexual relationships with women at the same time (up to possibly 5 scattered around the US simultaneously). There are also reports of being a flaky and/or controlling friend and colleague. See the article for details.

But like, so what?

Why hold Huberman to some outdated Christian sexual ethic of monogamy?

Many think these revelations are totally irrelevant to Hubermans work as a wellness expert and scientist. 

Being a terrible boyfriend is not a crime nor does it automatically warrant a 5,000-word, cover-page piece in a magazine. Does Huberman’s personal life really matter if people find his podcast useful? (from opinion article in The Gaurdian)

Title should read: “Successful, alpha male behaves like successful alpha male.” (from comment section on NYMag article) 

WHAT DOES HEALTH INCLUDE? 

But is wellness, is health, reducible to physical health? Huberman clearly doesn't think so because he reports on many mental health issues, or rather, he has mental health researchers on the podcast.  

But when you listen to enough episodes, which I have, you start to see that these experts often point to different, even contradictory views, about how the brain works, and how to improve mental health when there is a disorder. 

In fact, especially the episodes with experts on the brain or emotion, you learn just how little we know and much is still really contested about the brain, emotions, and mental health. 

A new Attaching to God Learning Cohort is forming, focused on Quieting an Anxious and Avoidant Faith. Get the details here.

HOLISTIC HEALTH: Physical, Mental, Spiritual

But it seems clear that while Huberman lives what he preaches in his physical health, he might have been neglecting his mental, emotional, and relational health protocols.  

Which brings us to spiritual health.  

Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his brilliant reflections on theology inspire by St. Ignatius, reminds us that we are multilayered creates that can be looked at from a biological level, a psycho-social level, and the spiritual level (see his Explorations in Theology, vol. 5, essay, “Health Between Science and Wisdom”).

And each level has its own definition of health. 

• Biological: Protection and procreation. 

• Psycho-social: Connection and creativity

• Spiritual: Deep meaning and union with God

Interestingly, von Balthasar quotes Nietzche about the difficulty in defining health:

There is no health as such, and all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched failure. Even the determination of what is healthy for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your energies, your impulses.

Examples could be:

• College or professional athletes pushing their bodies (“No Pain no gain”). They have long-term optimal physical health through short-term mental anguish.

• Or, for the sake of your mental health—self-care—you skip the gym and have that desert with friends (dark chocolate of course). 

Bottom-Up or Top-Down Health?

The dominant thought is that we have a hierarchy of needs that we climb up to, from the bottom to the top.

In this view, physical health would lead to psychological health, and then allow for spiritual health (or more recently, self-actualization—so it doesn't sound so religious). And in a sense this is true.  It is hard to be psychologically regulated when you are tired and hungry—just hang out with toddlers.

I often tell people that the best spiritual thing you can do is get a good night's sleep.

But what if there is also a top-down aspect, that seeking our spiritual health as loving God and loving others shifts and changes what we consider to be mental and physical health? (See “Getting “As You Love Yourself” Wrong”)

Salvation—the healing of the soul—might not always make sense according to the dictates of physical or even psychological health. Just note Jesus’ emotional anguish and physical death.  The early church suffered many deprivations in order to follow Jesus. And Paul from prison, reminded the Philippians to "always rejoice" and "don't be anxious about anything" (Philippians 4:4-7).

It seems that in Christ, Paul had discovered a deeper health that transformed his view of physical or psychological wellness.

The temptations of Jesus make the same point, that physical provision, material success, or psychological safety are not the highest health.  Rather, wellness—or fullness of life—come through connection to God, being attached to the Father. After all, "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord." 

So when Jesus said that he has come to bring us the fullness of life, let us not reduce this to merely psychological or physical health.

Otherwise, we might end up being a certain kind of wellness expert who is still pretty unwell.