Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
In this episode of TEDMED Now, Kelly Thomas revisits A.J. Jacobs’ TEDMED Talk about his yearlong quest to become the healthiest person alive, exploring healthspan, burnout, resilience, joy, and the pressure to optimize every part of life.
Jacobs tracked, tested, and changed nearly every aspect of his health, from exercise and nutrition to sleep and daily habits. But his experiment led to an unexpected realization: living so healthily could become its own source of stress.
What if health is not only built through discipline, measurement, and self-improvement, but also through joy, pleasure, connection, and meaning?
This conversation reframes resilience not as the ability to keep optimizing, but as the ability to recover, reconnect, and fully inhabit the life we have.
Visit TEDMED.com for full show notes, references, and more from TEDMED Now.
In this episode of TEDMED Now, Kelly Thomas revisits A.J. Jacobs’ TEDMED Talk about his yearlong quest to become the healthiest person alive, exploring healthspan, burnout, resilience, joy, and the pressure to optimize every part of life.
Jacobs tracked, tested, and changed nearly every aspect of his health, from exercise and nutrition to sleep and daily habits. But his experiment led to an unexpected realization: living so healthily could become its own source of stress.
What if health is not only built through discipline, measurement, and self-improvement, but also through joy, pleasure, connection, and meaning?
This conversation reframes resilience not as the ability to keep optimizing, but as the ability to recover, reconnect, and fully inhabit the life we have.
Visit TEDMED.com for full show notes, references, and more from TEDMED Now.
