The first wealth is health.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In 1860, American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the quote stated above. 161 years after, the same saying still holds true. Health is a vital factor if we want to live a good life. No matter how rich you are, you can easily lose all that you have when you need to pay for expensive medical treatments whenever you are sick. That is why we need to make sure that we all strive to live a good and healthy life, especially now that we are in the middle of a pandemic.
Dimensions of Wellness
Wellness does not mean physical health alone. It encompasses 8 interdependent dimensions that all of us need to balance to stay on top of our health.
- Emotional. Emotional Wellness refers to a person’s emotional state. Can you understand your own feelings? How do you cope up with stress? It also involves how you recognize different values and attitudes, as well as being sensitive to the feelings of other people around you. Emotional pain affects our brain too, and we need to learn how to deal with it constructively.
- Financial. We all know that money can lead to a lot of stress. With all the bills to pay and our day-to-day expenses, it is hard to budget what we earn. However, Financial Wellness must be attained for us to live healthily. Knowing how to successfully handle one’s finances and how to positively deal with financial stress must be learned to achieve Financial Wellness.
- Environmental. With the pollution and global warming happening worldwide, it gives us a glimpse of how the environment can affect our health. Recognizing how our surroundings affect our well-being and being aware of what we need to do to protect Mother Nature is vital to ensure a healthy future – not only for ourselves but for the future generation to come.
- Physical. Physical Wellness is all about taking care of our physical body to stay in top shape. Doing regular exercise, eating healthy foods, and drinking the right supplements and vitamins, are just a few of the things we do to take care of our physical well-being. Taking care of our physical body keeps our future more secure. As soon as we see any signs of illness such as pain or fatigue, we take a rest or even visit a doctor. The physical dimension of wellness is the main priority for most people.
- Intellectual. To achieve holistic health, one needs to be intellectually curious. You don’t have to be as smart as Einstein or have an IQ over 140 to achieve Intellectual Wellness. Intellectual Wellness simply means stimulating your mind while undergoing a constant learning process in whatever it is that you are doing. Humans do not stop learning after graduating from school or after learning a new skill. We all continue to learn and grow every day of our lives, and we only cease to learn once we die.
- Social. The current pandemic has brought our social life to a halt. That’s an unfortunate truth that many of us still struggle to deal with. The pandemic has shown us that our health is, indeed, affected by our relationships with others and our community.
- Occupational/Vocational. This dimension of wellness primarily focuses on personal satisfaction with one’s work. If we don’t like the work we are doing, we tend to get burn out easily and struggle with task completion. We also feel unfulfilled regardless of the achievements the work has provided us with. And when we are unhappy, it affects our health too. When the workplace gets too stressful and anxiety kicks in, it also affects our well-being negatively.
- Spiritual. The meaning and purpose that we have are the ultimate driving force for us to achieve our goals. Most people equate spirituality with religion. However, it can be expressed in many ways as you go through with life. Participating in various activities like meditation and being one with nature are also ways to enhance your Spiritual Wellness.
When one of these 8 dimensions suffers, the other dimensions are also affected. This will result in a decreased level of capacity and even lead to ill health. Thus, you need to ensure that in everything that you do, you must prioritize and balance all these dimensions. The instability of one may lead to the instability of all, which can negatively impact your strength.
Love Yourself, Practice Self-Care
Practicing self-care needs to be a requirement for all. Some people thought that loving ourselves is selfish because we tend to prioritize ourselves. But, we should stop that mindset. One of the reasons why people suffer from depression and anxiety is because we think too much of others’ well-being and ignoring our own mental and emotional state. This disparity in the dimension of wellness affects the other parts as well. Thus, creating a void that is oftentimes too hard to cure.
Loving ourselves is not bad. Prioritizing our own needs is not taboo. We need to take care of ourselves first so that we can take care of others better. Similarly, we need to love ourselves first so that we will have too much love so much so that it overflows and reach others too.
Therefore, go on and live life the way you want it. Go to the gym, know when to drink that protein shake. Travel the world, capture as many photos as you can. Start a new hobby, learn how to draw or crochet. Do not be afraid to live a life you are worthy of.
Takeaway
Taking care of our health is taking care of our future. If we want to live longer, then we should remain healthy as much as we can. Now that we are still in a pandemic mode, we need to be more vigilant and boost our immune systems. In doing so, we must not only focus on our physical health but rather have a holistic approach. Nurturing the 8 dimensions of wellness allows us to comprehensively tackle all possible causes of sickness and prevent our bodies from shutting down.