If you’ve recently decided to improve your wellness, you may have seen the term holistic wellness floating around. Holistic wellness is similar to holistic medicine, but with more of a focus on improving your overall health, rather than just a more comprehensive way of treating problems. It’s a more rounded approach to achieving good health overall.
The holistic approach considers the many different contributing factors to your overall health and wellness. There are seven major aspects holistic wellness focuses on in order to get your health and life in balance. In this article, we’ll explore these six aspects of your holistic wellness and how they can improve your life.
Emotional
The first step on your journey to holistic wellness is your emotional wellness. Your emotional wellness affects your physical and mental wellness; it plays a large role in your overall health. Emotional wellness is all about being in touch with your emotions, understanding what you’re feeling, why you’re feeling it, and how you tend to react to those emotions. If you have good emotional health, you do the following:
● Being fully aware of your emotions
● Accepting faults and mistakes and learning from them
● Admitting the need for and accepting help
● Being responsible for your actions
Physical
Your physical wellness is crucial to being in optimal health and having your life in balance. There are three elements to your physical wellness: mental wellbeing, physical activity, and nutrition.
● Physical activity is important for your dexterity, flexibility, and overall health
● Your mental wellbeing is important to keeping in good physical condition as it plays an important role in motivation
● Maintaining proper nutrition and eating a well-balanced diet is crucial to maintaining good physical wellness
Spiritual
It’s a common misconception that “spiritual wellness” refers only to religion. Spiritual wellness encompasses everything from spiritual faith to your morals, ethics, and values. The path to improve your wellness can be reached through prayer, yoga, meditation, personal reflection, etc. The result of this can be religious faith, yoga routines, regular meditation, etc., whatever “helps you to live in the present and [be] grateful for everything you have.”
Occupational
Your overall wellness suffers if you’re unsatisfied with your job. Being unhappy, disillusioned, or disappointed with your job can lead to depression. It can make you feel like you’ve lost energy or motivation when really, you’ve lost the enjoyment you had in your job. Think carefully about how you feel about your job; what is it you don’t like? Is it that you aren’t making enough money? Are you under appreciated? Do you not like what you’re having to do? Once you’ve identified the problem, you can work to rectify it.
Social
The relationships you have with others and your social life greatly affect our holistic wellness. In order to improve your social wellness, you should reflect on the type of person you are socially (introvert, extrovert, etc.), determine your specific social needs, and examine the relationships you’re currently managing (are they toxic, are you nurturing the relationships, are there any problems left unaddressed, etc.).
Intellectual
Your intellectual wellness is important to every aspect of your holistic wellness, the process of improving your holistic health, and improving yourself as a person. You can improve your intellectual wellness by reading regularly, keeping up with current events, and even doing puzzles like crosswords and sudoku.
While all of these aspects have been broken down to explain their individual importance, they work better together through a holistic approach. If you truly desire to improve your overall health and wellness, you need to devote special care and focus to all six of these facets of your holistic wellness.
