CHAPTER 10 – How to achieve wellness

HOW TO ACHIEVE WELLNESS

CHAPTER 10

Wellness is an experience of health, happiness, and prosperity. This includes good mental health, high satisfaction with life, meaning or purpose, and the ability to handle stress. More generally, well-being is simply about feeling good.

Well-being is something almost everyone seeks because it includes so many positive things like feeling happy, healthy, socially connected, and useful.

Unfortunately, well-being appears to be declining, at least in North America. And increasing your well-being can be difficult without knowing what to do and how to do it.

You probably already know that if you stop eating healthy and start eating junk food again, you will find yourself back where you started. It turns out the same is true for different types of wellness.

If you want to maintain the benefits you gain, you will need to continue to engage in wellness-promoting practices to maintain your body of knowledge.

It is therefore very useful to have strategies and tools that help you stick to your long-term goals, for example, a happiness and well-being plan or a well-beingboosting activity that you can use throughout your life.

Where does wellness come from?

Well-being emerges from your thoughts, actions, and experiences, most of which you have control over. For example, when we think positively, we tend to have greater emotional well-being. When we seek out meaningful relationships, we tend to have better collective well-being.

And when we lose our job or just hate it, we tend to have lower well-being at work. These examples begin to reveal just how broad wellness is and how many different types of wellness there are.

Because wellness is such a vast experience, let's break it down into its different types:

1. Emotional well-being: the ability to practice stress management and relaxation techniques, to be resilient, to stimulate self-love, and to generate the emotions that lead to good feelings.

2. Physical well-being: the ability to improve the functioning of your body through healthy living and good exercise habits.

3. Collective well-being: the ability to communicate, develop meaningful relationships with others, and maintain a support network that helps you overcome loneliness.

4. Well-being in the workplace: the ability to pursue your interests, values, and life purpose in order to gain meaning, happiness, and professional enrichment.

5. Societal well-being: the ability to actively participate in a thriving community, culture and environment.

To develop your overall well-being, you need to make sure that all of these types work to some extent.

Remember that having skills like a growth mindset or a positive attitude can actually help you develop your other wellness skills more easily.

This is why it is encouraged to develop these skills first, after which you may be able to increase the other types of well-being more easily.

Additionally, developing wellness skills is even more beneficial for people, who struggle, the most, especially if they've recently been through something stressful.

It may be more difficult to create wellness during this time, but the impact may be greater because there is more room for improvement.

Keep in mind that it takes time and effort to develop a new set of skills, including wellness skills. It's important to be realistic with yourself about what you can realistically accomplish in a given time frame.

Having unrealistic expectations can cause you to give up before you've reached your wellness goals.

So, it's essential to create a realistic plan for your well-being, stick to it, and take small steps each day that add up to big improvements over time.

Remember that developing your well-being is a lifelong pursuit, but it is worth it for your success in life.