Physical Wellness

In the 1960s, a Japanese exercise physiologist named Yoshiro Hatano estimated that increasing daily steps from around 4,000 to 10,000 would raise energy expenditure by about 300 calories a day. A pedometer company turned that estimate into a product name…manpo-kei, or “10,000 steps meter.” And from that marketing campaign and the wearable on your wrist, a number became a law.

It was never a clinical threshold. It was a round number that felt good.

And when you actually read the research you get a lot of different stories. A 2020 study found meaningful health benefits in older women starting around 4,400 steps. A 2022 Lancet meta-analysis suggested 6,000 to 8,000 steps is adequate for most adults. A 2024 review found even 3,000 daily steps offered some protection against early mortality. And Japanese interval walking, three minutes fast, three minutes slow, repeated for 30 minutes, outperformed both steady-state walking and the 10,000-step group in a randomized trial on cardiovascular health, strength, and blood sugar.

And from all this comes a more interesting story and question in my opinion. It’s what are we actually optimizing for?

The badge for hitting 10,000 steps rewards the performance of effort. A leisurely 10,000-step stroll may do less for your heart than 4,000 brisk ones, but your app rewards both exactly the same. The number became the point. And once that happens the why shifts.

This is something I’ve been thinking about across all four pillars lately. The wellness industry, along with a lot of others, has built its model on the premise that there is always a better number to chase. More steps. Higher returns. Bigger homes. More. But I believe the question no one is incentivized to ask is the one that actually matters.

Optimized for what, exactly?

We’ll be coming back to that question across all four pillars in the weeks and months ahead.

Mental Wellness

The American Psychological Association released its 2025 Stress in America report. They titled it A Crisis of Connection. That title is doing a lot of work.

Among more than 3,000 adults surveyed, half reported feeling isolated, left out, or lacking companionship often or some of the time. Nearly seven in ten said they needed more emotional support in the past year than they actually received. That number went up from the year before.

And 92% of those same adults said relationships are a primary source of meaning in their lives. So we know what matters. We are just not tending to it.

The cost is not abstract. Adults with high levels of loneliness were significantly more likely to live with chronic illness, depression, anxiety, and chronic pain. The emotional and the physical are not separate categories. They are woven together.

We have optimized for productivity and output and somehow ended up with fewer people we can actually call at ten o’clock at night.

The report is worth reading. And the question it leaves me with is not complicated. When is the last time you gave someone your full attention and presence? Not your half-attention, not the version of you that is also managing the inbox, on your phone, looking at your watch, but actually showed up, completely, for someone who needed it?

That is where connection lives.

Financial Wellness

Easter morning was last weekend. The baskets. The carrots left out the night before. The little tracks pressed into the floor to make it feel real. The boys waking up and trying to find their hidden baskets.

This year they couldn’t find one. I did a pretty good job the night before. They looked everywhere and finally my oldest stopped, turned to me, and said…can you help us find it?

I told him I didn’t know where it was.

He looked at me and said — you do. You hid it. We know the Easter Bunny isn’t real.

I laughed. Then I smiled. And then I felt something else entirely.

Because he was right. And in that moment I knew we weren’t going back. Not to that morning. Not to the version of those mornings that existed before that sentence. The Santa mornings. The tooth fairy mornings. The ones where the whole thing was still magic and nobody was asking the obvious question yet.

They are growing up. And time only moves in one direction.

I say this to people constantly in the work I do. I say it because I believe it and because I have watched what happens when people defer the things that matter most. The experiences, the classroom parties, 5th grade graduations, ordinary weekday games all under the assumption that there will be more time later.

There will be more time. Just not for this.

Time is the only currency that cannot be earned back. Spend it like your life depends on it.

Spiritual Wellness

A series of studies with more than 1,100 participants across the United States and Australia just added more insights to one of my favorite topics…awe.

When people wrote about or experienced something genuinely awe-inspiring, something that made them feel small in a good way, they reported a greater sense of connection between their individual identity and something larger. Their country. Their community. Their university. The group.

Awe, it turns out, doesn’t just make you feel wonder. It fuses you to something beyond yourself. The researchers published the findings in Emotion and noted that when people experience awe, the boundary between self and group breaks down. Your identity doesn’t disappear, it deepens, and in deepening it connects to something bigger.

I have felt this. In a long ultra race or Ironman. At a concert. Watching the sunrise come up over the ridgeline or mountain. In places and spaces that remind you that the world was here long before you arrived and will be here long after.

Those moments don’t just feel good. The research says they actually change how you see yourself in relation to everything else.

Go find something that makes you feel that this week. Something large enough to make you remember you are part of something larger than your inbox.

And In The End

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you’ve been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you haven’t already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week…

The Journey Team & The 9:03