Achieving Optimal Wellness
To foster deep and meaningful conversations that promote optimal wellness. Here are the 8 dimensions of wellness you need to be mindful of:
Physical Dimension
This dimension is all about the physical body. How well you take care of your physical health through exercise, recreational habits, diet, and medical checkups.
The physical dimension encourages regular activities that produce endurance, flexibility, and strength. This dimension also promotes caring for your body’s health, protecting your body from severe injuries and harm such as motor vehicle accidents, identifying disease symptoms, increasing your knowledge about nutrition, and abstaining from drugs, alcohol, and tobacco.
Intellectual Dimension
The intellectual dimension of wellness works to foster creative and stimulating activities. People who have high levels of intellectual wellness have an active mind and are always eager to learn something new. An intellectual mind uses the resources around them to build their knowledge and improve upon their skills. These individuals tend to keep up-to-date on current events, take part in activities that stimulate their minds or enjoy traveling to learn different cultures for additional exposure.
When you’re intellectually well, you are open to growing intellectually, maintaining your curiosity about all there is to learn in this world, valuing lifelong learning, and responding positively to intellectual challenges.
Emotional Dimension
Emotional wellness is at the core of who we are as people. This dimension promotes the ability to feel and express our various human emotion such as happiness, sadness, and anger. Through emotions, you have the ability to love and to be loved all while achieving a sense of fulfilment in life.
The emotional dimension of wellness includes optimism, self-esteem, self-acceptance, and the ability to share our feelings. Navigating around peer pressure and dealing with relationships/dating all have a part to play in understanding and respecting your feelings, values, and attitudes.
Sometimes when you feel down or at your lowest, it can be hard to feel positive and enthusiastic about life. Feeling positive stems from creating a positive self-esteem image about yourself.
Negative self-esteem can bring about feelings of depression and anxiety. Examples of this include feeling depressed during post-partum or traumatized rape victims wondering where the trajectory of their lives is going to take them.
Social Dimension
With the social dimension of wellness, it’s all about maintaining healthy relationships around you, enjoying the company of others, fostering friendships and intimate relationships, caring for other people, and letting others care for you. This dimension draws emphasis on the individuals that make up your support system- whom you spend your day to day interations with and how well they support you in maneuvering through life. It looks at when life gets tough, who can you lean on for support and when life is going on who can you share your joy with?
Spiritual Dimension
This dimension encourages the mission to find your purpose, value, and the meaning of your life — with or without the help of an organized religion.
To foster spiritual wellness, you must learn how to identify and manifest your purpose. It helps to clearly state what your values are and understand how you make decisions. Do you compromise your values to get ahead, just to fit in? Or do you use your talents to make a difference?
Believing in a higher power can also increase your spiritual wellness. The key to this is to rely on God and have faith when life gets tough. You can also participate in activities that are consistent with your beliefs and values. Different activities include getting involved in the church and giving your time and money to support ministries.
Vocational/Career Dimension
The vocational/career dimension of wellness prepares you for work that provides complete personal satisfaction and life enrichment that is in line with your values, goals, and lifestyle.
The goal is to have a career that allows you to have a well balanced life so you can achieve optimal wellness. As the career you end up pursuing will have a direct effect on your health, family, and social life. While your career can be stressful, the goal is to not experience episodes of burnout and fatigue.
Financial Dimension
The financial dimension of wellness is about managing the resources that you have and living within your means. This dimension involves making informed, financial decisions and investments, setting realistic goals, preparing for emergencies, and planning for short-term and long-term needs.
This dimension is very important because it is sometimes that reason we see many people compromised their values and beliefs especially when dealing with poverty issues. This dimesion cuts across the other dimensions because if you don’t have money, how can you take care of the physical health, be emotionally sound, engage positively in other social activities and enjoy life as a whole?
Financial wellness includes estate planning and gaining financial freedom from debts.
Environmental Dimension
The environmental dimension of wellness includes understanding how your social, natural, and built environments can have a lasting effect on your health and overall well-being. The culture and neighborhood in which you grew up in can be categorized under the environmental dimesion. How we take care of our environment as it pertains to pollution control can help minimize diseases allowing us to achieve physical wellness.
Everyone can play their part in fostering environmental wellness by committing to building and keeping the earth clean and healthy.