Assessment Results - What should you do next?

You have built a very rich picture of where you stand and the terraing surrounding you. Now what?

Your map is complete. Where do you go from here?

You have now mapped five different layers of your adaptive health.

You have looked at how your organism is functioning, what imbalances it is dealing with, how well it is being maintained, what demands your environment is placing upon it, and its baseline tendencies. Now what?

The purpose of a map is not to admire it. It is to help you decide where to go next.

Some recommendations have already been provided in the results you received so far, but you can use the pathway below to clearly identify the next most useful direction you can take.

Where should you navigate next?

Your results may highlight several things that could be improved. That doesn’t mean you should work on all of them at once.

The most useful question is: What needs to change first for everything else to become easier?

Follow the pathway below. When you reach a clear priority, start there before moving further.

↓ Understanding the guidance for your path

You don’t need to act on everything you discovered.

Think of this section as a navigation aid, not a prescription. Your results can help you decide where your attention is likely to have the greatest impact.

Overwhelmed Adaptation Pattern

Your results suggest that your organism may currently be struggling to maintain equilibrium with the resources available to it. Your adaptive capacity may already be significantly stretched or depleted.

This is probably not the ideal moment to embark on a major self-improvement project. When capacity is already low, even well-intentioned changes can become another demand to manage.

The most useful next step may be to seek support and identify the smallest intervention with the greatest impact. A practitioner or other appropriate professional can help you find that point of leverage, and help you create enough breathing room for other changes to become possible.

You can return to the rest of your map once you have more bandwidth and capacity.

Noteworthy Imbalance Patterns

If three or more qualities are out of balance, or if one or two have a very high score, you may wish to stop here and consult a practitioner. Your organism may be facing a subtantial amount of internal stress. Checking your recovery foundations and stress load will still provide useful information to draw your map. These may even highlight some low hanging fruit that you can autonomously take care of. But the priority, at this time, may be to consult.

Substantial Adaptive Load

If the storm is raging around you, finding a way into calmer waters may be the most urgent priority.

It may need to come first, even if your recovery foundations also require attention. In fact, sometimes your adaptive load may be so high as to make it very difficult or impossible to make sustainable changes to your daily habits.

The most useful response will depend on the kind of adaptive load involved.

Physical load

If your environment is placing a substantial demand on your body, there may be ways to reduce, buffer or compensate for the exposure.

If you can limit exposure to the physical stressors identified in the assessment—or leave a harmful environment altogether—that may be the place to start.
If the situation cannot be changed or cannot be changed easily, a practitioner may be able to help you identify if and where you do have leverage to protect and support your organism.

Relational load

Relationships can also become a persistent source of load.

If you are lacking meaningful social connection or support, joining a support group, or even receiving massage, can be a great starting point – if you can.
If you are willing and able to set firmer boundaries, renegotiate expectations or step away from relationships that are currently too draining, this can also be a good place to start.
If you are not sure if or how to make changes, psychological or practitioner support may help you build boundaries and buffers around these loads.

Internal pressures

When internal pressures are high, there may be more than one route forward.

You have control over your learnt behaviours, so you may work on them autonomously. However, sometimes knowing what the autopilot is doing does not necessarily teach you how to fix it.

Sometimes it needs reprogramming. Psychological support can help change the patterns of thought, interpretation and response themselves.
Sometimes the machinery underneath it needs attention. Working with a practitioner to change the physiological conditions in which these patterns arise may achieve similar results.

Occupational and structural load

This is often the part of the landscape over which we have the least control.

You may still try to reduce your exposure, seek support, renegotiate what you can, or join with others to change what cannot be changed by yourself.

But most importantly, do not turn a structural problem into a personal failure.

You may be expected to deal with more emergencies, in less time, with fewer resources, while absorbing other people’s distress and remaining calm. If the demands exceed your capacity, the problem is not your juggling skills. There are simply too many balls in the air.

Your Recovery Foundations Need Attention

If your recovery foundations need attention and you have sufficient bandwidth to work on them, this is usually the best place to start.

Why?

First, these are often the areas where we have at least some degree of control, and that are relatively easy to address.

Second, good maintenance is the sine qua non of the equation. A poorly maintained boat breaks often and is difficult to sail even in favourable weather.

Rather than trying to change everything at once, choose one to three changes that would meaningfully improve your maintenance. Give them time to become established before adding more.

→ Read: The Fundamental Daily Habits

No Major Issues Stand Out

If your recovery foundations are supporting you, no major pattern of imbalance stands out, and your adaptive load is manageable, there may be no urgent problem to fix.

There is one exception: if your results suggest that your organism is compensating to maintain equilibrium, but no particular habit, stressor or imbalance stands out elsewhere in the assessment, it may be worth looking more closely at what is consuming your capacity. A practitioner may be able to help you make sense of a pattern that is real but not easily explained by the other results.

Otherwise, you can turn your attention to a different question: what kind of boat do I have, and how can I learn to sail it well?

Your baseline tendencies can offer useful clues.

→ You may wish to read the article Understanding the Doshas

Or, if you wish to delve even deeper into your individual tendencies and learn how to work with them, the Balance Programme offers considerably more individualisation and tools than a short assessment can provide.

A few important nuances

Your Adaptive Health Map is a framework for observation, not a diagnosis or a verdict. It brings together several different kinds of information, and these layers interact. A difficult environment can disrupt a well-maintained organism. And a pre-existing vulnerability can make the same stressor more demanding. This is why none of the results should be interpreted in isolation.

The assessment is also not intended to tell you what is wrong with you or what you’re failing at. Identifying a factor that may be contributing to how you are doing is not the same as assigning blame for it. You may be struggling because of circumstances you did not choose or create, or demands that simply exceed what you can reasonably accommodate at the moment.

At the same time, not being at fault does not mean lacking agency. Some findings may point towards things you can influence, or even change. Others may simply help explain what you are dealing with. And some may highlight circumstances that are largely outside your individual control. The purpose is not to turn every difficulty into a personal project, but to help you recognise where you may have useful leverage—and where the wiser response may be adaptation, or simply understanding.

Further, not every problem calls for an individual solution. Not every vulnerability must be eliminated. And not every uncomfortable experience should be regarded as unwelcome.

The map is there to help you distinguish between these situations. It is also a snapshot of an organism in a particular place, at a particular point in its voyage. The snapshot can, and will, change.

Ultimately, the goal is not to aim for a perfectly calm sea, nor a faultless boat. It is to aim for a boat that can remain responsive and capable of finding its way.

If this assessment helped you see your own situation from a different angle, share it with someone who might find their own map useful too.

How was this assessment developed?

This assessment combines concepts from several complementary perspectives, including Ayurveda, stress and adaptation physiology, and burnout research.

Rather than aiming to diagnose disease, it seeks to identify broad patterns of adaptation and imbalance that may help make sense of your current experience.

If you’d like to understand how the assessment works, or the readings and resources that informed its design, you can read the introduction below.

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