Research Agenda
Re-Humanizing Healthspan
It's not enough to just talk about how we can make the world a better, healthier place. We have to get involved in making change, so I rolled up my sleeves and after publishing several books to help guide people challenged with life, I started doing academic research to spread the word to the professionals in the healthcare world.
My research agenda examines healthspan as a behaviorally sustained, psychosocially mediated process, across the lifespan. Rather than focusing on isolated interventions or optimization strategies, my work explores the human conditions under which health-related behaviors are realistically maintained over time, particularly in the presence of stress, transition, and contextual constraint.
Drawing from counseling theory, stress science, lifespan development, and integrative health, this work emphasizes conceptual integration rather than clinical application. The goal is to clarify how meaning-making, identity continuity, stress regulation, relational context, and lived experience shape healthspan trajectories, and to support interdisciplinary dialogue across fields that engage health, behavior, and well-being.Conceptual Framework
My recent scholarship introduces the Psychosocial Healthspan Framework, a conceptual model that organizes healthspan sustainability around four interacting domains:
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Meaning — why health behaviors matter within identity and life narrative
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Rhythm — when behaviors are subjectively sustainable within psychological and social pacing demands
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Regulation — how stress and recovery capacity are managed over time
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Relationship — who supports continuity through relational context and support
These domains are not sequential or hierarchical, they are dynamically interrelated. Together, they offer a human-centered lens for understanding why health behaviors persist—or fail to persist—across the lifespan. The framework is intended to support theoretical clarity and interdisciplinary understanding and does not represent a treatment pathway, intervention sequence, or diagnostic model.
Current Lines of Inquiry
My ongoing and future work builds on this framework across several interconnected areas:
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Healthspan and Identity Across the Lifespan
How meaning-making, role transition, and identity continuity influence long-term engagement with health-related behaviors. -
Stress, Allostatic Load, and Lived Experience
Conceptualizing stress as both biological burden and subjective constraint shaping capacity for recovery and sustainability. -
Behavior Change as a Relational Process
Examining how relational context supports or undermines behavioral continuity beyond individual willpower models. -
Equity, Trauma, and Contextual Constraint
Understanding how structural stressors, chronic vigilance, and unequal access to recovery shape healthspan trajectories.
Publications and Works in Progress
Selected manuscripts and conceptual projects include:
(Published)
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Re-Humanizing Healthspan: A Psychosocial Framework for Sustained Health Across the Lifespan
(Conceptual manuscript under review) -
Training for Healthspan Sustainability: Psychosocial Foundations for Integrative and Counseling-Adjacent Education
(Conceptual manuscript in preparation) -
Operationalizing Healthspan in Integrative Practice
(Conceptual manuscript in preparation)
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Stress, Regulation, and Lived Experience: Reframing Allostatic Load in Healthspan Discourse
(Conceptual manuscript in preparation)
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Equity, Trauma, and Sustainability: Contextual Constraints in Healthspan Across the Lifespan
(Conceptual manuscript in preparation)
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6️⃣ Professional Identity, Scope, and Ethics in Healthspan-Oriented Practice
(Conceptual manuscript in preparation)
Interdisciplinary Relevance
This research agenda is intended to support interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars and practitioners in integrative health, lifestyle medicine, counseling and counselor education, health coaching, behavioral health, and healthspan research. By centering lived experience alongside biological capacity, this work seeks to complement existing biomedical and lifestyle approaches while addressing psychosocial processes that are often implicit but under-theorized.