Who We Are

When we look at a tree, we see its trunk, branches, and leaves. We see new growth each spring, the shade it provides in summer, and the leaves it lets go of in autumn. What we usually do not see lies beneath the ground. There, its roots spread through the soil, absorbing water and nutrients and finding new paths when conditions change. Without this hidden network, the tree could neither grow nor withstand a storm.

A tree never lives apart from its surroundings. Its growth depends on the soil in which it is rooted, on water and sunlight, and on the countless organisms it lives alongside. Through an underground network of fungal threads, trees exchange nutrients and signals with one another. What at first appears to be a collection of separate trees turns out to be a living network of connections.

We are no different. From the moment we are born, we develop through our relationships with others. We learn to speak because others speak to us. We learn to trust because someone comforts us when we are afraid. Step by step, this is how we discover who we are.

Even as we grow into adulthood and make our own choices, we remain dependent on the connections that support our lives. We live in families and communities, work in organizations, and ultimately depend on the Earth that makes life possible.

These connections form the familiar background of our daily lives. It is often only when one of them comes under pressure that we become aware of how much it matters. A conflict at work does not stay behind when we walk through our front door. Caring for an ill parent does not leave our minds when we enter a meeting. Changes at work affect not only our working lives but can also change the atmosphere at home.

Work and personal life are deeply connected, even though we often think of them as separate worlds.

Health

When someone asks us about our health, we usually think first of our body. Are we ill? Are we in pain? Did a medical examination reveal anything? Yet our sense of health is not determined by a well-functioning body alone.

Think back to a time when you felt truly well. It was probably not simply because your body was healthy. More likely, you remember a period when you enjoyed your work, felt at peace, were in love, or simply felt that things were falling into place. Such memories are about connection, meaning, energy, trust, or simply the feeling that life is as it should be.

Health, it turns out, is about much more than the body alone.

For a long time, health was understood mainly as the absence of disease. If there was nothing physically wrong with you, you were healthy; if you were ill, you needed treatment. This way of thinking has contributed to medicine. At the same time, it has proved insufficient to explain why people with the same condition can experience their health so differently.

Why does one person find direction again after a heart attack, while another, who has recovered just as well from a medical point of view, continues to feel low and exhausted? Why can someone living with a chronic condition experience life as meaningful, while someone with no obvious illness hardly feels healthy at all? And why can stress at work, loneliness, or loss sometimes affect our health just as much as a physical condition?

It became clear that health cannot be fully understood by looking at the body alone.

Health in a Broader Perspective

The idea that health is more than the absence of disease has been recognized for many years. Our understanding of health has developed step by step. Each new perspective has brought another aspect into view, while building on what came before.

An important turning point came in 1948, when the World Health Organization defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (WHO, 1948).

For the first time, health was defined more broadly than simply being free from disease. Our physical health still mattered, but our mental and social well-being became part of the picture as well.

The definition was groundbreaking, but it also raised a new question. Who is constantly in a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being? Defined in this way, almost all of us would have to consider ourselves unhealthy at some point.

Gradually, the focus shifted: away from health as an ideal state and toward the question of how people respond to the demands life places on them.

George Engel’s biopsychosocial model played an important role in this shift (Engel, 1977). He showed that health cannot be understood by looking at the body alone. Our bodies, thoughts, emotions, and social circumstances constantly influence one another. Health emerges from the interaction between them.

We can easily recognize this in everyday life. Long-term stress can take its toll on the body. Pain affects our mood and concentration. Support from a partner or caring colleagues can help us recover, while loneliness, financial worries, or an unsafe working environment can stand in the way of recovery.

Mandy experiences this after knee surgery. From a medical point of view, her recovery is going well. The wound is healing properly, and according to her orthopedic surgeon, everything is progressing as expected. Yet Mandy experiences her health very differently. She sleeps badly and worries about her mother, who increasingly depends on her help. At the same time, following changes at work, she is trying to keep her team together. By the end of the day, she has hardly any energy left for her partner or for the things she used to enjoy.

Her knee is recovering, but her life is out of balance.

What does it take to pick up your life again despite illness, loss, or setbacks? For Aaron Antonovsky, this question became the starting point of his research. His focus was not on disease, but on health; not on the causes that make people break down, but on the resources that help them keep going (Antonovsky, 1987).

Antonovsky did not describe health as a state that we either achieve or lose, but as a continuous movement between health and illness. No one remains permanently at one end or the other. Life continually places new demands on us, requiring us to find a new balance again and again. Where we find ourselves on this continuum depends not only on what happens to us, but also on the resources available to help us deal with our circumstances (Antonovsky, 1987).

Martin, a caretaker at a secondary school, experienced this first-hand. Two years ago, he had a heart attack. Since then, he has worked fewer hours and leaves the heavier physical tasks to his colleagues more often. Ask him how he is doing and his answer is usually the same: “Actually, pretty well.” Not because his health has returned to what it was before, but because he has found a new balance in his life. Every morning, he goes for a walk with his neighbor. He sees his grandchildren more often, and at work he feels able to take his limits seriously. His body has limitations that were not there before, but they do not define his whole life.

His story shows that health and recovery are not always the same as being cured. Sometimes the body recovers while life remains unsettled. Sometimes illness remains, while a person rediscovers direction and meaning. Health is not only about what happens in the body, but also about how we relate to the life we have been given.

Building on a similar idea, Machteld Huber introduced the concept of positive health. She describes health as the ability to adapt and to self-manage in the face of the physical, emotional, and social challenges of life (Huber et al., 2011).

Understanding health in this way also changes how we look at work. Work is not only a place where health can be harmed; it can also be an environment that supports health. The way we work together, lead others, and deal with mistakes, expectations, and uncertainty affects the same resources that help sustain our health.

This leads to another question: what allows work itself to contribute to health and recovery? Research shows that paid employment is generally associated with better physical and mental health than long-term unemployment, provided the work is of sufficient quality. Work offers more than an income. It provides structure, social contact, opportunities to develop skills, and the sense that we are making a meaningful contribution. Work is therefore more than an economic activity; it is also a social and psychological environment. At the same time, research shows that poorly organized or unhealthy work can have a negative effect on our health (Van der Noordt et al., 2014).

Research among people with common mental health conditions also supports the positive contribution work can make to health. On average, people in paid employment show better outcomes following short-term psychological treatment than those who are not working (Van Oosten et al., 2023). This does not mean that work automatically makes us healthy. It does show that, when the conditions are right, work can be an important source of structure, social connection, self-worth, and meaning. Work is therefore not only a possible source of psychological distress; it can also be part of recovery.

If work has such a significant influence on both health and recovery, then questions about health also become questions about the context in which people live and work. If we focus only on the individual, we miss the wider context. People do not develop in isolation from their surroundings. We are shaped by the relationships we are part of, by the culture in which we work, and by the space we are given to be ourselves.

Personal vulnerability plays a role, but so do workload, the way colleagues treat one another, the quality of leadership, and the extent to which people feel seen and supported. Health does not arise only within people, but also between people. To understand why people thrive or become stuck, we therefore need to look not only at the individual, but also at the world in which they work every day.

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Photo: AvO