Healthy v. Normal

Practice v. passivity

Being trained in the practice of psychology and having spend most of my career administering a national disability determination program, I have spend many years thinking about health, resilience and normalcy. There are many underlying challenges related to creating a universal humanity approach to politics and culture. One is to discriminate between what is healthy and that which is a reflection of what is statistically a mean, average or normal.

Normality is a moving and often trailing indicator. In culture, politics, morality and the reporting of such in journalism, the saying the new normal is a concession to a departure from what might have been a past standard. It may be good or bad. Death at an early age due to toxic exposure was a normal in 19th century industrial work environments. Once it was considered normal to own slaves if one had enough money. Once it was normal for women to be categorically disenfranchised from political and economic power circles. When we look at normalcy through eyes of history, sometimes we can discern the things that drive new norms, if history is allowed to show us.

What we often experience when considering new norms is a confusion between statistical averaging and health for our humanity and our planet. Consider the attempt to market a new model of masculinity by the Tate brothers. They have been accused of normalizing rape, pornography, prostitution, and hyper-aggressive masculinity. Their influence has extended into political culture, where over-the-top displays brutality increasingly appear in political symbolism - even influencing the president of the United States to throw a birthday party for himself on the lawn of the White House with UFC championship performances attended by buffed up military recruits. Normal?

Speaking of Trump … his prominence in popular culture and subsequently politics has created a demeaning new normal, with government administrative functions designed to avoid risk of narcissistic injury to him and other powerful figures within his predatory circle. The man is a weak, manipulated and deeply troubled person who is unstable in nearly every way except in his steadfast focus on preserving his own self-image against all reflection of reality. We have no idea who really is in charge at any moment in the Trump Oval Office. He can be swayed by the least of things. Do we want this picture of political and moral malaise to be the norm of all future national leadership?

If we indulge ourselves in the shallow conceptualization of new normalcy, we may neglect the issues of health, and spiral into a normalcy of unhealthy behaviors. And why might we not? We have done so with food, drugs, alcohol, tobacco and firearms. Our store shelves are so crowded with processed foods, sugary breakfast cereals and numerous forms of alcohol and nicotine products that the generations following the so-called baby boomers have shorter lifespan predictions than their parents.

On top of increased rates of obesity, diabetes and cancer, the drug industry promotes expensive GLP-1 inhibitors with dangerous side effects as an easy way to deal with weight problems normally dealt with by healthier eating and exercise. The new normal represents an imposition by the food and drug industries, all for profitability, setting us on fire and coming to the rescue to put it out; leaving our bodies and body politic damaged. They lobby Congress and market to us incessantly to prevent us from seeing ourselves as a species capable of healthy approaches that can save our planet and our humanity.

But let’s get some definitions straight.

In sociology and psychology, “Normalcy” refers to behavior that conforms to the statistical majorities or the informal social expectations and rules within a specific community. Conversely, “Health”—especially from a holistic biopsychosocial perspective—is defined not just by the absence of disease, but by a capacity to sustain genuine well-being within its environment. We cannot call ourselves healthy when we are merely striving to feel like we are in the middle of the herd of cliques, consumers, or citizens, but healthy parts of humanity.

Let’s review a short list of modern health versus norm conundrums we all face:

1. Digital Connectivity

Normal: Maintaining high levels of screen time and constant availability to content on messaging and social platforms.

Healthy: Cultivating cognitive focus to maintain digital usage patterns that establish communication boundaries and prioritize important human experiences, and time for reorienting cognitive recovery.

A study published in Computers in Human Behavior found that a “normal” high frequency of smartphone checking triggers an explicit psychological phenomenon known as “Fear of Missing Out” (FoMO). The researchers found that mental health involves breaking this cycle, as continuous connection directly causes lower life satisfaction and increased ambient anxiety.

2. Gigging and Hustling

Normal: Work patterns that create conditions of chronic sleep deprivation and severe burnout may be seen as badges of honor, alongside feeling guilty during periods of rest. It’s all on the individual to show what s/he can do themselves. Slaving becomes normalized. Respect for work does not.

Healthy: Viewing rest as a biological necessity and establishing a distinct separation between employment and personal identity.

Research from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health details the dangerous medicalization of overwork. The study reveals how workplace hustle culture functions as a form of behavioral addiction, severely altering sleep architecture and damaging mental and cardiovascular health.

3. Ultra-Processed Diets (revisited)

Normal: Relying on ultra-processed foods (UPFs) as a regular source of daily caloric intake due to convenience and market dominance.

Healthy: Prioritizing whole, nutrient-dense foods that physically sustain cellular health and metabolic function.

Reviews published in The BMJ (British Medical Journal) present robust clinical evidence regarding UPFs. The data reveals that eating a culturally “normal” modern diet is directly associated with a 50% increased risk of cardiovascular disease mortality and adverse mental health outcomes, demonstrating that widespread behavior is structurally hazardous.

4. Codependency & Poor Conflict Resolution

Normal: Using transactional and passive-aggressive behaviors, emotional withdrawal and avoidance, or codependent dynamics to navigate conflicts in family, community or broader political relationships.

Healthy: Learning and practicing emotional vulnerability, personal autonomy, and practicing active relational repair; being proactively compassionate and empathetic.

Research from the Journal of Marriage and Family tracks the long-term impact of standard communication coping mechanisms. The data proves that while avoiding issues or utilizing emotional stonewalling is common, it acts as a primary predictor of relationship dissolution and physical stress tracking.

5. Medicalizing Oppression and Distress

Normal: Using drugs and medications that suppress difficult emotions to remain pleasant.

Healthy: Expecting humans to feel and respond to negative events through organic and uninterrupted emotional processing cycles through reflection and constructive action.

An NIH public health paper outlines how modern society inappropriately blurs the line between distress and disease. Instead of treating the social and economic root causes of everyday anxiety, our current culture normalizes a permanent state of psychological distress and attempts to treat it purely on an individual, superficial basis.

The last point is worth thinking about a bit more. In our individualistic culture, we often attribute responsibility for problems created by organized groups onto individuals. Historically, political normalcy has frequently been structured around pathology, such as institutionalized prejudice, sexism, and racism. When a political culture normalizes oppression, the baseline of what is “normal” becomes deeply unhealthy for oppressed individuals and consequently for the human collective.

Shared beliefs, values, customs, and traditions shape operating political behavior and expectations within a society. If the shared beliefs are prejudicial - irrational, preconceived negative attitudes or judgments toward others based solely on their perceived social group membership, we have a source of distress that does not come from within the oppressed individual. So why treat it medically? Do we treat racism and sexism with medications? We sure do (among other noxious practices)!

6. Let’s look at Citizenship

We are in the midst of a national struggle about the right to vote and what that entails. The SAFE Act is the result of a Project 2025 concept of preventing those who are unlikely to support a Christian Right political and cultural agenda from voting. This includes women, newly naturalized citizens, and the poor. It is based entirely on the lie that a multitude of non-citizens hold sway over election results. The Project 2025 purpose is to summarily disenfranchise citizens. They have a historical precedent; a horrid one.

A historical analysis published via the Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy tracks how political rights were deliberately weaponized. The historical norm, for centuries in Western political culture, has been to restrict political power to those who have been “white” men holding real estate and human property. A healthy alternative has evolved over decades in a pluralistic political ecosystem where universal suffrage and democratic representation are guaranteed. Nineteenth-century American laws normalized treating African-American men and all women as “second-class citizens” who possessed only baseline rights that strictly restrained political self-determination. This is how a dominant political culture normalizes structural inequality.

In this, state policy and forced individuals into normalized compensatory actions, utilizing academic institutions, evolutionary theory, and medical statistics to claim that women and marginalized races were biologically inferior and required paternalistic control. A healthier alternative is honest scientific inquiry grounded in empirical genetic realities, recognizing human equality and actively dismantling biological mythologies of masculine and race supremacy. But today, we still have race on the census and we have no Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.

And the new norm of the Project 2025 philosophy is to rationalize oppression by developing mainstream ideologies—such as the “cult of domesticity” for women or the “civilizing mission” for colonized peoples—to argue that inequality was natural, moral, and beneficial for everyone involved. Purely majoritarian cultures maintain dominance by converting arbitrary differences (like skin color or gender) into a justification for oppression. Historically, ideological racism formed the foundation of normal everyday pathological and dehumanizing life, leaving our nation, in 2026, still struggling to recover. There is nothing healthy in dehumanizing traditions being forced upon unsuspecting and unwilling persons. Instead, fostering critical social consciousness that identifies supremacy propaganda, embraces intersectional perspectives, and supports systemic equity leads to freedom.

Practice Health

The distinction between health and normality applies not only to personal behavior but also to political institutions. Just as modern society normalizes chronic stress or ultra-processed diets as standard lifestyle choices, history proves that our political structures have frequently normalized severe human pathologies like racism and sexism for the benefit of the few over the many. When injustice becomes institutionalized, normalcy is not a metric of societal health—it is a mechanism of compliance. Normal is just a statistical measure. It is not a social goal. To do nothing to create health is to give into the passivity of accepting whatever new norm is presented and treating oneself - one’s community - our planet - as a statistic.

We must look for in every way, everyday, to practice health over being placed normally in a herd mentality. We must assure that corporate entities do not profit from herding us into unhealthy spaces by resisting unhealthy practices on the institutional scale. We must seek to replace unhealthy pressures to profit with community and national health.

If one removes ego, guilt and other defensive reactions from review of events and behaviors, we can build a culture of lessons learned - wisdom. If, for example, elected Trump supporters in Congress could embrace some clear-thinking hindsight today, on the economy, on civil rights and our nation’s status in the world, tomorrow might produce more wise choices about the role of representative governance and a reversal of the abandonment and destruction of democratic institutions in the last two years. Fact-based hindsight is important.

The most difficult phases in our lives involve any transition. These are not dictated by age range, historical era or cultural tendencies. Those who have forced unhealthy upon us in the name of normalcy will experience loss. Loss, adventure, windfall, illumination - can create crisis and opportunity at anytime. The real important issue is whether one has support, guidance and essential situational framing when facing a transition. Looking at what has been traditionally seen as normal may distract from the essential issue - healing and changes toward better health.