WELLNESS

What is wellness?

Wellness is both a state and a process of actively being aware of and taking steps towards becoming healthy.

What does wellness encompass?

It encompasses both your mental and physical health as well as fulfillment. Wellness involves more than just being physically healthy and free of illness; it also involves having an awareness of your mental as well as physical well being.

Wellness also involves personal growth and a change in your lifestyle to improve your life in all aspects for the better. The goal behind achieving wellness is to reach your full potential and become truly fulfilled in all avenues of your life. With all of this in mind, what aspects of your life does this encompass?

The eight (8) dimensions of your life.

Let’s take a look at each dimension to get a better understanding of the importance of each dimension and how it affects your life.

Emotional

This involves our ability to handle stress, build healthy relationships, monitor our emotional state and our awareness of our feelings. Maintaining a healthy emotional state is critical for boosting your self-esteem, keeping your mind healthy, and coping with life stressors.

Environmental

Relates to our interactions with our environmental surroundings, including nature. We need stimulating environments in order to stay engaged and satisfied with our lives. It’s important that we find activities that make us happy. Maybe it’s hiking or even shopping – whatever your guilty pleasure is.

Financial

This relates to our ability to manage money and the state of our current and future financial circumstances. Financial wellness is one of the most important of the eight dimensions of wellness. This is because it can have a negative impact on all of the other dimensions.

Financial issues can negatively impact our quality of life, increase our stress levels, and eventually result in harm to our physical health. Since money plays a role in most aspects of our lives, it’s necessary to learn the skills needed to manage money effectively.

Intellectual

This involves our ability to recognize our intellectual and creative abilities. It also relates to our ability to have an open mind when faced with new information, our willingness to expand our knowledge and develop new skills. Boosting your intellectual wellness can occur in either a formal sense through post-secondary education or in an informal sense through your own pursuit of personal growth.

Occupational

This is all about the personal satisfaction and enrichment we get from our work. Having a healthy work-life balance plays a key role in our occupational wellness. We all want a job that makes us feel appreciated and fulfilled. It’s always a happy bonus to have a job that allows us to balance our workload with our personal life. Financial wellness and occupational wellness are often strongly connected and can have a huge impact on our lives.

Physical

This encompasses the maintenance of our physical health. It means seeking medical help when we are injured or ill, maintaining a healthy weight and body. This also means being in tune with our bodies and aware when we notice signs of illness.

Physical wellness includes having a healthy lifestyle by consistently eating healthy, drinking water (most of us struggle with drinking water), taking vitamins, exercising, and getting enough sleep. Proper hygiene and self-care are also important to our physical well being.

Social

Relates to our ability to bond with others, build healthy relationships with others (especially romantic partners), effectively perform our social roles, and build support networks. Bonding and interacting with others is vital to our mental and emotional health.

It’s natural to want to belong and feel connected as well as accepted by others. To achieve this, we need to have the skills to interact with others in a healthy way through social skills and etiquette. We also have different social roles that we play in life, such as a brother, sister, mother, father, husband or wife. Each role requires us to interact and engage with people in different ways. If we don’t learn those skills, we can’t perform our roles which can lead us to feel isolated and unhappy.

Spiritual

Concerns our sense of purpose and meaning in life. Spiritual wellness involves the values we adopt in life that give us a sense of purpose. This occurs throughout our life. We develop those values from people and experiences in our lives that have had a lasting impact on us. Other sources of these values can be religion or school. Feeling like you have no purpose can have a negative impact on both your emotional and physical wellness.

Now that we have touched on the eight dimensions of wellness let’s discuss why wellness is so important.

Why is wellness important?

It’s important because it has a direct impact on everything we do and every aspect of our lives. Maintaining an ideal level of wellness can give us the best quality of life; conversely not maintaining a good balance in all dimensions of wellness can drastically disrupt your life and leave you feeling unhappy, unfulfilled and can result in physical decay.

Benefits

Maintaining your wellness can also help improve your life expectancy, by keeping your body and mind healthy you reduce the risk of serious illness. Proper wellness equips us with the coping skills to handle stressors. It provides us with the social skills to connect with others, and achieve a sense of belonging as well as purpose.

There are so many benefits to maintaining an optimal level of wellness, but it’s a constant deliberate process that we have to work at every day. At the same time, it’s worth every second of the time and effort we put into the process because our happiness and health are worth it. We all want to feel like we lived our life to the fullest and reached our full potential; So how does beauty fit into all of this?

How do beauty and wellness connect?

Both are about self-awareness and self-care. Everyone wants to feel attractive, wanted, happy and connected. Pampering oneself is self-care, we pamper ourselves because we want to feel good and look good.

Wellness involves proper physical health, and so does beauty. We engage in proper hygiene, clean our face and body, wash our hair, and manicure our nails to keep our bodies in good physical health. Being well encompasses our emotional health, so does beauty. We style our hair, put on makeup, pamper ourselves, and change our style to make ourselves feel better which improves our emotional wellness and self-confidence. We even do a little retail therapy to boost our spirits when feeling down.

How wellness impacts our relationships

Wellness encourages social connections, so does beauty. We’re all guilty of a good old fashion day of shopping with our friends or a parent and on occasion. Most of us have even dragged or partner with to the store, just for the company. We already know our emotional well-being can have a major impact on our physical health; feeling attractive and in turn, happy can also keep our physical health in check.

When we care about our appearance, we’re more likely to exercise and take care of ourselves and feel a sense of purpose in life. Conversely, we exercise because we care about our appearance which makes us feel better, its a cycle. Now we can see that beauty and wellness do go hand-in-hand.

Check out all of our articles on mind and body wellness and take better care of you!

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