Types / Five pillars / Health
One part of life
Health
Your body and mind, and how they’ve been doing lately
What Health covers
Health covers the condition of a person’s body and mind, along with how both have been doing lately. It belongs in this check-in because daily life is affected by sleep, physical comfort, energy, and emotional well-being. The five-part idea comes from Carl Jung’s view of a happy life, expressed in a 1960 newspaper interview. It’s one thinker’s view, not a proven recipe, so this page treats Health as a pillar to look at, not a rule for living.
The questions ask how someone rates their health over the last month, how many of the past 30 days physical or mental health was not good, and how many hours they usually sleep. They also ask how satisfied someone is with this part and how much it matters. The health questions draw on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Healthy Days questions and its sleep question. The satisfaction and importance questions were written for this site and haven’t been validated.
What it leaves out
This doesn’t measure fitness, sleep, or any condition. It captures how you rated your health over the last month—a broad personal judgment influenced by your body, circumstances, expectations, and what has demanded your attention.
Where the questions come from
For Health, each card below gives the credit for the questions that organization asks, printed word for word.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Healthy Days and social support questions from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC does not endorse Nomigram.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
The sleep question comes from a CDC health survey, as printed in MMWR 65(6), 2016, which is in the public domain. CDC does not endorse Nomigram.
Nomigram
Our own questions. They haven’t been validated yet.
None of the organizations named here endorses this site or its check-in.
The other four parts
See all five →-
Relationships
The people closest to you—family, friends, a partner, or chosen family
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Beauty
Art, music, and nature—and how much of them reaches your life
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Money and work
A reasonable standard of living, and work that satisfies you—paid or unpaid
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Outlook on life
A way of seeing life, religious or not, that helps you through hard times
Make room for a closer look
51 questions give each part its own place, including the distance between what matters and how life is going.
Questions
Is there one overall score?
No, on purpose. Each part is shown on its own, and how much something matters is never multiplied by or added to how it’s going. The Office for National Statistics says even its own four questions must not be added together.
Should someone take it more than once?
Yes, that’s what it is for. It reads a moment, so the same questions a few months later can show what moved. A retake within a year asks 41 questions instead of 51, because the 10 statements about art and beauty are asked once a year.
Which questions are ours?
Most questions come from a government survey or a published scale, and they’re used word for word. The satisfaction and importance questions are ours, as are the outlook questions, and they’re marked wherever their answers show because they haven’t been validated. That’s the difference between an established measure and an experiment.