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Physical Wealth
Physical wealth is the body's capacity to support everything you want to do in life. It's not about aesthetics or athletic performance. It's about energy, endurance, structural health, and longevity. A physically wealthy person can work, play, engage, and recover without being limited by their body. Physical health is also one of the most cross-cutting dimensions: it directly influences mental health, social engagement, productivity, and long-term financial health through reduced medical costs.
What the Assessment Measures
The Physical Wealth assessment scores four domains. Each has three multiple-choice questions and a self-rating slider. Fitness counts for 30%, nutrition and sleep for 25% each, and health habits for 20%:
- Fitness & Movement: How many days a week you exercise, how varied your activity is (cardio, strength, flexibility), and how long a typical session lasts.
- Nutrition & Diet: How much of your diet is whole, unprocessed food, how regular your meals are, and what you mostly drink.
- Sleep & Recovery: Whether you consistently sleep 7–9 hours, keep a regular schedule, and sleep somewhere dark, cool, and quiet.
- Health Habits: Non-work screen time, preventive checkups, and tobacco and alcohol use.
The Exercise Baseline
The World Health Organization recommends adults get at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity per week (or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity), plus muscle-strengthening activities on 2 or more days per week. This isn't an elite standard. It's the minimum associated with substantial health benefits compared to inactivity.
If you're not currently meeting this baseline, starting is the priority. Even 20–30 minutes of walking daily has documented benefits for cardiovascular health, mood, cognitive function, and longevity. Perfectionism about the "right" workout is a common obstacle: consistency at a manageable level beats intensity that you can't sustain.
Sleep: The Most Underrated Health Lever
Sleep is when your body repairs tissue, consolidates memories, clears metabolic waste from the brain, and regulates hormones. Chronic sleep deprivation is associated with increased risk of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression, and reduced immune function, and impairs cognitive performance in ways that feel like aging.
Most adults need 7–9 hours per night. The key practices that improve sleep quality: consistent sleep and wake times (even on weekends), a cool and dark sleeping environment, limiting screens in the hour before bed, and avoiding caffeine after early afternoon.
Nutrition: Principles Over Rules
Nutrition science is complex and often contradictory at the detail level. But a few principles hold up consistently: eat mostly whole foods, include plenty of vegetables and fiber, limit ultra-processed foods and added sugar, stay adequately hydrated, and eat in a way that maintains a body weight that doesn't put strain on your cardiovascular system or joints.
You don't need to follow a specific diet to have good nutritional habits. The highest-value change for most people is simply increasing vegetable and fiber intake and reducing ultra-processed food consumption.
How to Improve Your Score
- Start with the exercise baseline: commit to 30 minutes of movement you enjoy, 5 days per week.
- Audit your sleep: are you consistently getting 7+ hours? If not, what's preventing it?
- Add one serving of vegetables to one meal per day as a starting intervention for nutrition.
- Track your daily step count for a week as a baseline. Many people are surprised by how low it is.
- Identify the one physical health habit that would have the greatest impact if you improved it, and focus there first.
Related guides
Sources
- WHO guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour: at a glance, World Health Organization, 2020
- About Sleep, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
This guide is for informational purposes only. Consult a qualified healthcare provider before beginning a new exercise or nutrition program.