Want to get healthier as an enneagram three? Let your enneagram number be your guide. Inside, I share the enneagram three health tips that include an ultimate guide on how to get healthy based on your enneagram strengths and weaknesses.
How To Use The Enneagram To Get Healthy
It’s no surprise that everyone ticks a little differently, making health more than just a one-size-fits-all approach. What motivates, scares, and pushes you is very different yet critical in understanding what it will take to help you change. You can not expect what works for someone else will work the same for you because you’re not the same.
That’s what I love about the Enneagram. It adds more personality to what you do and why you do it. Plus, it’s invaluable in understanding specific action steps you should begin and those to stop doing, creating a more realistic plan suitable for you.
Today, we’re talking all about Enneagram type two. As a two, you function very differently than a five or a six, and yet you do it in your own beautiful way. If you’re an enneagram two or know one, this could be powerful information in helping you achieve health and live a more fulfilling life.
If you don’t know your enneagram type, take this quiz to find out.
Enneagram Type Three
Threes, you’re a spark plug. You love setting goals and checking them off, living through a cycle of setting goals and meeting them. When challenged, you rise to the occasion. Being disciplined and not easily distracted, you inspire others by achieving what others think cannot be done. You have many highly possessed strengths when it comes to living a healthy life.
But through the hype, what you want most is to be loved. You’ve believed love comes through what you achieve. Your version of love is performance based, dictated by how you look and what you do. Arriving at a place you think will bring love is your motivation, leaving you to fear failure.
Your fear of failure is so great that you mask yourself, covering up the real you with what you think people want you to be
To get healthy, threes, you have to believe you are not loved because of what you’ve accomplished but because of who you are.
The work isn’t easy, but it is worth it. Inside this post, I help enneagram threes get healthy from the inside out. Health benefits that happen when you learn to process your emotions, create nourishing rhythms, and balance.
Get 10+ pages of health tips for enneagram-type threes inside this guide. Download the guide, print it off, and see how much this resonates with your life.
Enneagram Three Health Tips
As a three, you reside in the heart triad, meaning you work out of your emotions or feeling center. The problem is, you’re one of the best at suppressing your true feelings, neglecting the parts of you that make you whole—leaving you to associate diet and exercise with how you look rather than how you feel.
Your natural bend is towards wanting to do things the best way, achieving the most accomplishments, including your health goals. You often set unrealistic expectations, living for a faulty definition of what health is.
As one of the most-image-conscious enneagram types, it’s crucial to balance the vision of what health means for you with what health is, a tool to live. You must believe health is not a measure to compete or compare, but it’s how you thrive.
Shift your focus away from the moral values you’ve placed on food and back to how food makes you feel. A life where there is enough grace and balance to drink a green smoothie and eat a mouthful of raw cookie dough all in the same morning.
Health should be doing more of what energizes and less about the big-boxed approach promising quick results. Go back to what your body needs.
Make a conscious choice to make health less about benchmarks and goals and more about who you are—working to create wholeness through being true to the real you and using health as a means to reach your goals, not the goal itself.
Health is not the goal of life. It’s the tool to live life.
Strengths of enneagram three
Threes, you are a go-getter. As one of the most image-conscious types, you want to look good and place a higher value on health. The goal is doing it with the right intentions and motives.
Given that you are highly motivated and action-oriented, you tend to be a few steps ahead of most types. Use these strengths not just to arrive but to live healthy for life.
- Action-oriented
- Ability to set and achieve goals
- Highly disciplined
- Sticks to a routine
- Focused and resourceful
- Ready for anything
- Self-starter
- Goes the extra mile
- Have the ability to envision and frame your mindset
Enneagram Three Health Struggles
Of all the enneagram numbers, threes are the most body-conscious. When channeled in a healthy direction, you can detach your emotions from food and health, allowing health to come more naturally.
The problem is when health is too much of a focus or not one at all. Let’s start by addressing when health is not a focus.
Threes are the most likely to box up their life into specific segments. You have your work life, home life, health, spiritual life, etc. Rarely are they interconnected because segmenting makes them easier to control and achieve. Problems for threes arise when they put their eggs in one basket, focusing solely on work or that passion project. When they do this, the other areas of your life get neglected. In the case of health, you’ll find you have no time for it. If this is you, you have to redistribute your eggs, reminding yourself enhancing your health will give you the energy to be more productive in every other area of your life.
On the other hand, threes can also become obsessive about their body. You can make body image the gold standard for how you are perceived and loved. Obsessing about health enables threes to keep masking themselves, building a false representation of who they think they need to be rather than living true to who they are.
As a three, you can easily detach from your emotions, leaving you numb to what you feel. When you can no longer understand what you feel or who you are, you chase things that never fill you. Threes, it’s uncomfortable but essential to get back in touch with your emotions. Health for you is learning how to heal your insides to create your outer appearance, not masking your insides with the perfect external shell.
Remember – you are not loved for what you’ve accomplished but because of who you are.
5 Practical Health Tips for Enneagram Three
You are a mover and shaker! You are highly disciplined, ready for anything, and focused as a three. When a three takes care of their mind and body, everything else seems to fall into place. Here are some practical steps or rhythms that you can choose to fill yourself up. Remember, these are just ideas and not the end all be all. What would you add to the list?
1. Unplug
Three’s you love to work. As long as there is work to do, you will do it. It’s harder for you to shut work off than to keep working, making it essential to set boundaries. Work is necessary, but it can be detrimental to your healing. Health for you means regaining a sense of balance.
Create space by setting daily time to unplug. Designate phone-free and work-free areas each day. That might mean leaving your phone in your car or taking off social media. Create a rhythm of rest through strict boundaries that balance your life.
2. Start Your Day With Movement
Given that you tend to put all your eggs in one basket, you can neglect things that matter to your health. If you find yourself stuck focusing most of your attention on one area, break out by incorporating a new rhythm.
As one of the most energetic enneagrams, break up your basket by incorporating a rhythm of daily movement. More than most enneagram types, you find the act of movement productive. Unknowingly it is also therapeutic. Make movement a part of your daily routine, preferably starting your day with it before you dive into work.
3. Hire A Therapist
As a three, you are often the most detached from your feelings. Mentioning therapy may sound like the worst-case scenario for you, but what if it’s the best at redirecting your path?
Given your ability to detach from how you feel, it’s easy for a three to get so focused on achieving the destination that they fail to understand if that place they are seeking to arrive is a place they want to go. In the process, they can work themselves sick.
It’s time to get back in touch with yourself. Find a place where you can share your emotions and, most importantly, where someone can push you to dig it all up and deal with it. You’ll stay surface-level until you’re forced not to. Getting back in touch with your feelings is a critical aspect of healing. It’s okay to need help to do this work. It might be the best step you could take for your health.
4. Eat Without Distraction
Three’s you’re busy, so busy it’s easy to skip meals. Other enneagram types do not understand how you set aside food because it’s not productive in your day. But you can easily neglect food and meal times, even your health, to get more done.
Stop pushing your health to the bottom of the totem pole. Remind yourself that you’ll achieve more the healthier your mind, body, and soul. Make eating a priority. Sit down in the absence of distractions to enjoy your food. Preferably eat with others.
5. Focus On A Relationship
There is so much to get done and rarely enough time to do it, leaving you to push out useless things to create more room in your schedule. Relationships, while critical to your health, tend to get put on the back burner of your success. It’s no fault to you. You learned that to get love you had to achieve something that would bring love.
You want healthy relationships, but you’ve made yourself believe you have to achieve something to get it. Stop this unhealthy thinking and know relationships are your motivation for achieving. Spend more time with people you love. Don’t wait to take adventures or go on dates; use relationships to boost your productivity.
Bonus Tip: Do More Planning
You are a go-getter, determined to set goals and meet them. You can get more done in less time than most people. But when stressed, you become overwhelmed and begin neglecting all the things in life that matter, including having fun, building relationships, and your health. One of the ways to help yourself is to set boundaries and create a plan. A schedule that proves you can work hard and play hard.
The Nourished Planner is a place of structure, flexibility, and a home to map your weeks, plan projects, and set goals. But it also helps you stay on track with your health and plan to have fun.
You can’t do it all, but you can plan what’s most important. Let the pages of the Nourished Planner guide you to do just that. Get your Nourished Planner here.
Want More Enneagram Three Tips?
Enneagram threes, you have so much to offer and enough discipline to help everyone get healthy. Unfortunately, it’s not as easily shared.
Spend time balancing your energy. Spread out your eggs to gain the success you want. If you want more tips, download the free guide below. Inside, you’ll get the full run-down and complete health tips for your type.
