Today we got our yearly email at work about taking the insurance companies health assessment questionnaire. These assessments are filled with questions about sleep, nutrition, exercise and alcohol, and are used to help target areas of your life where you need to make improvements. Apparently, they’ve worked well enough that they incentivize them with gift cards for completing the survey.

Thankfully, for the past six years or so I’ve lived a mostly healthy life. I exercise pretty often, and I manage to get enough sleep. Nutrition is still one of those areas that is a struggle though. We just really like eating out, and cooking at home often becomes a burden rather than something fun. Maybe once life is settled down more we’ll be able to pick up the habit.

What always strikes me about these assessments is that there are options on them that I can’t imagine anyone picking. You can rate yourself so extremely unhealthy that I doubt you’d even be able to function. Plus, there’s absolutely no incentive to be truthful in the questionnaire.

I know that one of the driving factors of the survey is to get you thinking about making healthy changes in your life, and I really hope that for some people it does just that. Making change isn’t easy, I’ve been there and I know how hard it can be. While a survey may help, for things to stick you have to really commit to wanting something different. It takes a hard look in the mirror, or another doctor appointment for a completely avoidable condition, to make you stop in your tracks and decide that something has to be different in your life.

As I completed my yearly task and answered all the questions, it brought me back to thinking of 2010, when I had to make a change for the better. I didn’t want to be the person I was becoming, and it took drastic steps to make a difference. In the end, it was all worth it.