Richard Golian

1995-born. Charles University alum. Head of Performance at Mixit. 10+ years in marketing and data.

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The Intention-Action Gap: Why I Did Not Live by 'Health Comes First'

Treating health like a priority project: clear goals, better sleep, and finally listening to my body's signals
Richard Golian
Richard Golian · 2 301 reads
Hi, I am Richard. On this blog, I share thoughts, personal stories, findings and what I am working on. I hope this article brings you some value.
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The end of 2024 is approaching, and I find myself on a train, heading to my hometown to spend the holidays with my family. In just a few hours, I’ll be in Banská Bystrica, the place I hold so dearly in my heart. As I sit here, I’ve been reflecting on what 2024 has taught me and what challenges await me in 2025.

Why Knowing Health Comes First Is Not Enough

When I first considered what 2024 taught me, my mind wandered to the usual contenders: professional missteps, personal struggles, or relationship challenges. But none of those compared to the realisation that health, my own health, had been neglected.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Everyone knows health is important; it’s obvious. And to those around me, it probably seemed like I understood this too. I’ve often told my colleagues, "Health comes first," whenever they faced an issue. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: I didn’t live by my own words.

In my professional life, I’m quick to act when problems arise, a data discrepancy, a sudden error, or an unresolved issue. These challenges can frustrate me, but they also motivate me to dive in and fix them immediately. Why, then, don’t I respond with the same urgency when it comes to my health? Why don’t I pay attention to my body’s signals and take them seriously?

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Summary

In 2024, I responded with urgency to every professional problem, while ignoring my body's signals. That disconnect was the year's most significant lesson. In 2025, health becomes a project with deliverables, deadlines, and accountability. Sleep quality. Physical signals. Not just a phrase.

Common questions on this article's topic

Why do professionals often neglect their own health?
In the article, the answer is a disconnect between urgency at work and passivity about personal health. Professional problems, data discrepancies, errors, system failures, trigger an immediate response. But the body's signals are treated with far less seriousness. Research in occupational health confirms this pattern: the intention-action gap, where people know health is important but consistently fail to act on it, is one of the most documented phenomena in health psychology.
What is the intention-action gap in health?
It is the well-documented discrepancy between knowing something is important and actually doing it. Research shows that intentions explain only 18 to 23 percent of the variance in actual health behaviour. Short-term desires, habits, and social pressures consistently override good intentions. In the article, this gap is experienced personally: telling colleagues that health comes first while not living by those words.
Can treating health like a work project actually help?
Research in health psychology supports structured goal-setting with clear deliverables and accountability, similar to project management. SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) are routinely used in health interventions. In the article, this is exactly the approach adopted: a comprehensive to-do list, clear deadlines, and personal accountability, treating health with the same seriousness applied to professional challenges.
Why is sleep quality so important for professionals?
Research shows that workers sleeping less than seven hours are over eight times more likely to experience burnout. Sleep deprivation reduces creativity, makes it harder to stay focused on important projects, and doubles the risk of workplace accidents. In the article, healthy sleep is identified as one of the foundational practices that needs to become a priority, not a luxury to be sacrificed for productivity.
What does it mean to listen to your body's signals?
It means practising interoception, the ability to notice and interpret internal signals such as fatigue, tension, hunger, and disrupted sleep. In the article, the failure was ignoring these signals while responding instantly to every problem at work. Learning to listen to your body, and treating its signals as real data rather than noise to push through, is the first step towards making health a priority.
Is the intention-action gap the same as the say-do gap?
Yes. The intention-action gap is also called the intention-behaviour gap, the value-action gap, and the say-do gap. All describe the same well-documented phenomenon: the distance between what people say they value and what they actually do. In the article, it takes a personal form, telling colleagues that health comes first while not living by those words.
How can you make health a priority when work always comes first?
The approach in the article is to treat health with the same structure applied to a professional project: a clear to-do list, deadlines, and personal accountability, rather than vague intentions. This directly targets the intention-action gap. Naming health as a project with deliverables makes it harder to keep postponing, the same way an urgent problem at work is never postponed.
Richard Golian

If you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback, feel free to drop me a message at mail@richardgolian.com.

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