Is your goal for the coming year to feel better by getting healthy and fit? First you need to determine what wellness means and then how to achieve it.
Most people don’t realize everything that wellness encompasses. Many tend to think of wellness as how they feel, whether they eat healthy or exercise enough. But true wellness includes more than that.
Wellness has to do with the following eight different parts of your life. These components include physical, emotional, social, occupational, intellectual, financial, environmental and spiritual wellness.
Physical Wellness
Be aware of the need to try and make healthy eating choices at least 80% of the time because none of us really last too long if we set a goal of 100% of the time. We also need to move and be active.
Simple things like parking away from the building entrance so you can walk further or take the stairs rather than the elevator. You also need to get enough sleep.
Emotional Wellness
To be emotionally well, you have to be aware of your emotions and feelings and share them if necessary so you can effectively cope with life.
Social Wellness
Humans need to be connected to the world around them. We need to belong and have support systems through our family and friends.
Occupational Wellness
We should try to be occupied, including for our work, with something that agrees with your personal beliefs, values and interests. The same goes with hobbies you may have or anything else you do to keep yourself occupied.
Intellectual Wellness
Never stop learning. Connect with your creative side to help you grow your skills and knowledge so that your brain is active. Hobbies, reading, puzzles all help to stimulate the mind.
Financial Wellness
If this part of your life isn’t healthy, it will affect several of the other parts. Learn enough about how to handle finances so that you keep your head above water which will take a lot of stress out of your life. Something as simple as sticking to a budget can make a big difference in your life.
Environmental Wellness
Our environment can affect us much more than you might think. Keep places you spend most of your time as clutter free as possible and calming and peaceful. Also spend time in nature. Take your pets for a walk so that you can relax.
Spiritual Wellness
This is a very personal part of most lives. It could have to do with religion for some while others want to feel connections with others, a higher being or even a better connection with themselves.
For more information about these eight areas of wellness see my post on What is Holistic Living where I go into more details.
How to Achieve Wellness
To me wellness is a journey. We never seem to be fully there because life can throw all kinds of things in our paths. There are certain things that we can work on to keep us moving toward the all mighty “wellness” that seems to be just out of reach sometimes.
Change Habits
Habits are powerful and they are important in our quest for wellness. We must rewire our brains in order to make new actions become habits to help us reach wellness. We need more good habits rather than the bad ones that lead us astray.
There is a book called “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. In his book, Duhigg writes “Any behavior that can be reduced to a routine is one less behavior that we must spend time and energy consciously thinking about and deciding upon.”
Habits are behaviors that recur often when cued by something specific. Many habits also occur without us being aware of them which can make those habits even harder to change. It’s hard to change them, but if we don’t, we continue to do something that we really don’t want to. And according to Duhigg, it can take around 66 days to change a habit or create a new habit to replace another.
Habits Shape Our Lives
To really change your habits, to make better ones, a few things need to come into play. You need a plan; you need to be self-aware and then comes the hardest part; you need to be able to self-regulate.
Habits actually help shape our lives. It used to be a habit for me to sleep until the very last minute I could without being late to work. These days, I’m awake early.
It has become a new habit that my body has gotten used to. I wake with the sun, and I’m no longer able to fall back to sleep. It was very hard at first, but I’ve come to love actually having time in the mornings now. And on the days I’m not in the office, I can accomplish quite a bit by 9:00 a.m. This is something I’ve come to really like and appreciate as a new habit.
Do you have a habit or two that you would like to change. Here’s how.
Self-Awareness
First you have to be aware of the behaviors you have created, especially the ones you want to change. Self-awareness also includes knowing what your strengths are so that you can use them when stopping bad habits and creating new ones.
Make a Plan
Changing is hard, so it’s best to plan out strategies that can help you get to your end game. Your plan needs to include things such as accountability, convenience (easier or harder), being aware of your thinking so you can change it when the old habit has been triggered and then you need to give yourself rewards. Try planning out skills that will help strengthen your self-regulation and control first.
Self-regulation
This is a really hard part of changing behaviors and actions. You may want to set-up accountability for yourself geared toward helping to control yourself.
With a plan, it’s easier to regulate yourself. For instance, if you want to stop snacking in between meals, simply don’t have snacks that trigger you in your house or your desk at work. This is prevention being used to help self-control. That makes your self-regulation work for you rather than against you.
Or pick an exercise that you can live with rather than something everyone tells you that you should be doing. For instance, I don’t like going to a gym, so getting a gym membership would set me up for failure. I prefer using my Fitbit and making sure I hit a certain number of steps per day. Or dance around to some of my favorite music for 15 minutes.
Be aware of your strengths and what you like and implement these things into your plan for helping you create the behaviors that you want.
Things You Can Do to Achieve Wellness for Yourself
Fitness Tracker
Get a fitness planner/tracker and start tracking yourself for your fitness, your eating and anything you want to track so that you get a better idea of what needs to be done. This will help with accountability too.
For a week or two track everything you do, what you eat and your sleep patterns. This should show you what you are doing that keeps you from hitting your goal of wellness. These are the behaviors you want to change. And the tracking should also tell you what you are doing correctly.
Start Out Small
Don’t try to tackle all your behaviors at once. That would be setting yourself up for failure. Instead choose 1-3 things per week that you want to change, then go from there. And remember most of us can’t change our behaviors very quickly. It could take 2-3 months.
Below are tons of activities and things you can do. I’ve put the activities in five different categories. They are in general, exercise/fitness, diet, sleep and stress. All these elements are equally important to our mental and physical wellness.
Final Thoughts
While I’ve given plenty of suggestions to help reach your wellness goal, DON’T be overwhelmed by them. They are just suggestions and remember to take only 2 or 3 at a time to work on. Or use any ideas you come up with for yourself. That’s even better.
The point is to keep trying. Perseverance is the name of the game to move forward in the wellness game.
Remember life is a journey and so is our path to wellness.
Stay Awesome!
Cher
P.S. I wanted to make you aware that sometime soon, Own Our Awesome is going to be changing its name to Journey My Way. Our life’s path is simply a journey and I want this site to be about our journey as women and about women, with an emphasis on health in all aspects of our lives.
Relevant Reading:
Be Happier–Stop or Change These Behaviors
Self-Care and Wellness Gifts
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