The Pillars of Health: Supporting Lasting Change

In order to successfully navigate your Tower Block and create lasting change, you need a solid foundation in place. This foundation comes from what I call the Pillars of Health—four key areas that contribute to your overall well-being. These pillars support your mental, emotional, and physical health and are crucial for resilience, energy, and motivation as you work through the process of change.

When these pillars are strong, you’ll find it easier to move upward in the Tower Block, maintain focus, and work toward your goals. When they’re weak, you’ll find yourself slipping into lower levels, struggling with energy, concentration, and emotional balance.

The Pillars of Health are essential to every aspect of the Mind Works with Craig approach, as they provide the strength and stability needed to achieve meaningful and lasting change.

What are the Pillars of Health?

The Pillars of Health encompass four fundamental areas of life:

1. Psychology: This pillar represents the mental and emotional aspects of health. It includes understanding thought patterns, managing stress, building mental resilience, and working through emotional challenges. Strengthening your psychological health helps you manage anxiety, depression, and emotional distress, empowering you to face life’s challenges with greater clarity and control.

2. Physiology: Physiology refers to the biological processes that keep your body functioning optimally. This includes sleep, nutrition, exercise, and how you manage physical stress. The body and mind are deeply connected, and your physiological health directly impacts your ability to focus, manage stress, and maintain energy throughout the day.

3. Physical Health: Your physical health involves the overall state of your body, including movement, fitness, and recovery. This pillar ensures that your body is resilient, capable of handling both the demands of life and the energy required to work through change. A strong body supports a strong mind, giving you the stamina to pursue your goals.

4. Environment and Relationships: This pillar covers the external factors in your life, including your relationships, work environment, home life, and social surroundings. Your environment has a profound influence on your well-being. Healthy relationships and supportive surroundings create a nurturing space for change, while toxic environments can drag you down into lower levels of the Tower Block.

How These Pillars Work Together

To create lasting change, each of these pillars must be attended to. If one pillar is weak, it can destabilise the others and affect your overall ability to make progress. For example, neglecting your physiological health—perhaps by not getting enough sleep or failing to manage physical stress—can make it harder to focus on psychological health, leading to poor concentration, irritability, and decreased motivation.

When all the pillars are strong, they work together to provide the foundation you need to move forward. Here’s how we strengthen each pillar in the Mind Works approach:

• Psychology: We focus on developing mental strength, building resilience, and addressing negative thought patterns that contribute to anxiety, depression, and burnout.
• Physiology: We help you optimise sleep, nutrition, and stress management to support brain function and emotional regulation.
• Physical Health: We incorporate practical advice on movement and fitness to build physical resilience, improving your overall energy and stamina.
• Environment and Relationships: We guide you in creating positive environments, improving relationships, and setting healthy boundaries to foster personal growth.

Why the Pillars of Health Matter

If any one of these pillars is neglected, it can limit your ability to achieve your goals. For example, if your psychological health is weak, you may struggle with negative self-talk and limiting beliefs, preventing you from making progress. Likewise, if your environment is unsupportive, it can pull you down into stress and distraction.

Strengthening each pillar ensures that you’re supported on all fronts—mentally, physically, and emotionally. This balance is key to building long-term resilience, overcoming challenges, and making the changes you need to live a healthier, more fulfilling life.

Up Next: Gears, Pressure and Scales ↓

The Pillars of Health explain the foundations that keep your system stable. When these four areas are supported, your emotional capacity rises, your reactions soften and your Parts of Self work together more easily. But even with strong foundations, life still brings pressure, challenge and moments where everything feels harder to manage.

To understand what happens next, you need a way of seeing how your system responds to increasing load in real time.

This is where Gears, Pressure and Scales become essential.

While the Pillars describe the structure that supports you, Gears and Scales describe the mechanics of how your system operates day to day:

• The Gears show how your motivation shifts depending on your internal state.
  Survival Gear, Comfort Gear and Growth Gear each create a different level of capacity and drive.

• The Pressure Gauge shows how much emotional, physiological or environmental load your system is carrying at any given moment.
  Low pressure allows clarity. High pressure forces your protective parts forward.

• The Scales show the balance between demand and capacity.
  When life places more weight on the scale than your system can carry, distress increases, habits change and your behaviours shift.

Together, these models help you understand:

• why you can function well one day and struggle the next

• why motivation rises and falls

• why certain tasks feel impossible under pressure

• why protective behaviours activate when load increases

• how much bandwidth you actually have before collapse or shutdown

These tools link directly back to the Tower Block, showing how shifting gears, increasing pressure and changing balance affect your emotional floor. They also prepare you for the Managing stage of the Process of Change, where understanding load management becomes essential for long-term stability.

Explore the next concept to see how Gears, Pressure and Scales give you a practical way to understand your system and prevent overwhelm before it happens.