Holistic Wellness – The Pursuit of Balance, Happiness and Health.
What is wellness?. Wellness is usually defined as a person’s ability to adapt to change and overcome obstacles in their lives.
It depicts how you live and function as a person including your emotional wellness and your intellectual state. Wellness and Health are often used as synonyms. Wellness, however covers a much broader range. That’s why you’ll hear about “emotional health” or “mental health” but not “emotional wellness” or “mental wellness”.
Elements of Holistic Wellness
How many elements there are in wellness tends to vary by source, but here we will discuss five basic ones. Most sources will recognize more than that, but many of those areas are similar.
1. Physical
Your general health is very important to your overall wellness. Other aspects of wellness are partially results of the chemical composition and functioning of your body, which is impacted by things like how much you exercise, what your diet is like, how much sleep you get, and whether you use drugs.
Other aspects of wellness can also impact your physical health. For example, chronic stress can impact your heart health, or depression can make it harder to take care of yourself. Our social or environmental settings may also threaten our physical health in various ways.
2. Intellectual
Your holistic wellness doesn’t rely on degrees, but everyone needs to have a certain level of “smarts” to handle the problems that they will face in their lives. If you have a college education that doesn’t mean that you can stop learning new things, and if you don’t have a college education it doesn’t mean that you can’t learn new things.
Intellectual development can come from formal classes, from conversations with our friends and family, from reading books or from using educational apps on your mobile device or computer.
3. Emotional
What emotions tend to arise in your daily life and how you deal with those emotions are very important to how you get through the day.
Emotional health here includes what other resources call “spiritual” health. Things like having a strong conscience and a concern for others are important to the decisions that we make.
If you are religious, you may be able to nurture your emotional health through your faith.
If you are not religious you can still lead a healthy emotional life, though it you may have to find your own social groups and moral guides.
4. Social
Your social health is important to your holistic wellness for a number of reasons.
Feeling important or appreciated is very important to our emotional health. For example, a famous study once found that people who had low job satisfaction had a higher risk for health complications.
A close group can also be an important support network in times of need. Social networks can also help to provide us with intellectual stimulation.
On the other hand, you may be spending time with people who put you down or get you into dangerous situations.
A social group doesn’t have to be made up of palls that you watch sports with on the weekends or however we see this portrayed on TV. Your social group can be like that, or it can be your family members, or relationships with people from work or school.
5. Environmental
Your environment can be a benefit or a threat to your holistic wellness.
If you work in a dangerous place, or live in a dangerous neighborhood, these may impact your physical health. Not having access to things like clean air can also impact our physical and emotional health. Environment can also be closely related to your social well being.
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