A Wellness Lifestyle is a commitment toward improved health and fitness, as well as increased satisfaction and fulfillment in all the important areas of your life including the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions.
Unlike other approaches toward health that focus on treating problems after they have already happened, a Wellness Lifestyle aims at preventing problems such as depression, burn out, and anxiety from developing in the first place.
A Wellness Lifestyle is a commitment to your own wholeness and happiness with the ultimate goal of living life as fully as possible. Improving wellness in any one area of your life will increase your self esteem and spill over it’s positive effects into other areas of your life. Spending the time to improve your nutrition, for example, will give you more energy, which will make you perform better at work, or be more likely to get outside for a run or to the gym for a workout. A Wellness Lifestyle is a commitment to balance and growth as a whole person.
Each dimension of wellness contributes to our overall quality of life, and each dimension affects and overlaps with the others. At times one aspect of wellness may seem to be more important than the others in our lives, but we can’t neglect any one dimension for too long and remain healthy and balanced.
Each dimension of wellness contains many individual elements that are unique to the individual circumstances of our lives. For example, the social dimension of wellness might include everything from the quality of communication in our marriage or our relationships with our children to our broader sense of community and the broader roles we play in the world. Similarly, the physical dimension of wellness includes everything from how often we exercise to what we eat every day. It is interesting to note that research shows that a regular meditation practice positively impacts all seven dimensions of wellness.
Exercise:
1.Of the four main components of a Wellness Lifestyle – Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual which is currently the most important to you?
2.Of the four main components of a Wellness Lifestyle – which would you like learn more about?
3.What realistic steps could you plan to take right now to develop one or more of these four components of Wellness that are currently lacking attention or out of balance in your life?
