8 Ways to Use ChatGPT to Improve Your Health

Many people find themselves struggling to figure out where to start with improving their overall health. So, why not start with ChatGPT? It's not perfect, and you should certainly verify the information it gives you before blindly trusting it, but it can be an excellent jumping point for ascertaining new habits and methods of improving your health. We've compiled a list of queries you can plug into ChatGPT to return useful health information.

To start this list, we began with looking at things doctors recommend for improving your health outcomes. Then, we started compiling queries that would return information pertinent to those recommendations. We tried all the queries and cross-referenced the answers that ChatGPT returned to ensure that they were mostly accurate. Additionally, we also weighed the risks of using ChatGPT for certain tasks.

One thing that ChatGPT is genuinely pretty good at is finding information that others have published online and aggregating it into a digestible format. We tried a few different queries, ranging from simple ("Build me a meal plan") to medium context ("Build me a vegan meal plan") to high context ("Build me a seven-day vegan meal plan that gets me 160 grams of protein daily"). All of them returned comprehensive information that was both relevant and informative. However, we would warn users that the more comprehensive they want the information to be the more context they need to give the AI.

The simple prompt returned a short-term meal plan and could be good for someone looking for a day-to-day meal plan that they query each day. However, if you're looking for a comprehensive weekly or monthly meal plan, you'll need to tell ChatGPT that you're looking for something long-term. It won't return long-form information without prompting.

Another thing ChatGPT can do for you is help you build a basic workout plan. Like building meal plans, ChatGPT can easily and quickly scrape the internet for information regarding workouts that work and can even filter the information by various categories to make the plan work best for your space, equipment, and time constraints. By adding various quantifiers you can have ChatGPT restructure its information to fit different needs.

We tried various prompts to see how ChatGPT handled different context levels and what changed. Whether we used a simple prompt ("Build me a workout plan") or a complex prompt ("Build me a space-conscious seven-day workout plan using a weighted hula hoop"), ChatGPT returned both the workout plan and contextual information regarding why these things would be good to implement in life.

Meditation apps can be very expensive and there's no one-size-fits-all answer to mindfulness. However, practicing mindfulness can help you reduce stress and anxiety, and improve emotional regulation. ChatGPT can give you some tips for mindfulness if you need them, allowing you to access some of the tools that meditation programs provide without shelling out for an expensive application or class.

We tried a few different prompts with various levels of context and constraints. Our first prompt, aimed at being very simple, was "Recommend me some mindfulness techniques." This prompt yielded good results. However, they were very basic and easily found through surface-level DuckDuckGo searches. Then, we tried some queries with more context and constraints. The one that was most interesting to me was "Recommend me some mindfulness techniques for waking up for someone who struggles with morning grogginess." ChatGPT not only recommended mindfulness techniques but also other tips for improving the process of waking up.

ChatGPT can also recommend healthy habits that will improve your day-to-day success if you ask it to. Like with other prompts, you’ll need to provide the context for both what your lifestyle is like and also what roadblocks you’re hoping to overcome with these habits for the best experience. The AI will then aggregate information from the internet to provide you with optional solutions for your problems.

This query works much better when the AI is provided with ample context. When given a simple prompt ("Recommend me some healthy habits"), ChatGPT returned very surface-level results. However, when the prompt was amended with more context ("Recommend me some healthy habits to give me energy for someone with naturally low energy") the results it provided gave more context and were more tailored to a situation, rather than catch-all "healthy habits" that you could find in just about any self-help article.

If prompted correctly, nutrition is another sector where ChatGPT can give solid advice. Since nutrition information is published online and easily findable, ChatGPT can also find and reproduce the information easily and accurately. However, for any information that doesn't seem right, don't hesitate to look for a second opinion; ChatGPT is known to produce random answers that aren't based on any science or published information from time to time.

This query is another one where the prompt's context matters greatly, especially since nutrition advice is so personal to one's situation. People have different allergies, sensitivities, and preferences that make certain advice meaningless to them. So, ensure that you use a prompt with ample context about what you do and don't want to see. We had good results with context-heavy prompts like "What are some good plant-based protein sources I can add to my vegan diet?" and "How can I improve the amino acid profile of my vegan diet?"

ChatGPT can help comb through all the reviews and product information available on different items to help you pick out the best hygiene products for your needs. We tried several different prompts to see what ChatGPT is capable of. First, we tried to see if it could aggregate large amounts of information, which it struggled to do effectively. However, more general queries returned good results. However, the more narrow queries didn’t return as good results as more general ones. For instance, “Can you recommend some hair products for hair loss?” returned excellent recommendations but “Which Innisfree products are specifically not vegan?” returned a vague result with little relevant information and a disclaimer to check the ingredients, which is exactly what we were trying to avoid by asking ChatGPT in the first place.

Another use for ChatGPT is to ask general health-related questions. It’s important to take the results from ChatGPT with a grain of salt and not be afraid to do your own research when doing this, as AI language models can sometimes “hallucinate” facts that don’t line up with how things work in the real world. However, you can use ChatGPT as a starting point to figure out what you should be researching regarding your health. If you’re having trouble with your health, you can ask ChatGPT to aggregate the information regarding your symptoms to see where to start looking and whether you’re experiencing something severe.

We did a few different prompts based on different illnesses to see what the AI came up with for each one. Prompts with more context are going to generate better results as ChatGPT will have more information to draw conclusions from. In a limited study done on ChatGPT responses, two doctors rated the language model’s responses as “mostly accurate” (1.8+/-0.47 where a 2 is completely accurate, 1 is partially accurate, and 0 is completely inaccurate). So, it’s safe to say that you can, at least, use ChatGPT as a starting place to research your symptoms and figure out what additional questions you need to ask to remain healthy.

Journaling is an excellent way to improve your mental health. It can help you process difficult emotions and situations, reduce anxiety, and help you clear your mind. You can also use journaling to chart important health-related information such as chronic symptom severity, food intake, and sleep. When journaling for mental health, it can be helpful to have a guide that tells you what to write. This can help you think through issues that you didn’t know you had and process emotions that might be buried under layers of other issues.

We tried some different prompts to get various journaling ideas. When given a simple prompt, like many topics, ChatGPT only returned the most surface-level, self-help book for teens-type responses. However, when we added situational info, the prompts became more focused. They aimed to process the difficult emotions that might arise in different situations. For instance, “Generate some journaling prompts for processing the loss of a grandparent” and “Generate some journaling prompts to navigate getting back together with my ex” returned much more personalized and interesting results than simply, “Generate some journaling prompts.”