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The Great Wellness Movement
Have you heard of the “healthy” man that had a heart attack shoveling snow or jogging through the neighborhood? Or know of someone that seemed very healthy but seemed to deteriorate overnight due to cancer or arthritis?
These conditions take 10 or more years to show any symptoms that you would notice. So, although they appeared to be healthy, they were not. Without their even knowing it, those diseases were limiting their health potential and quality of life.
This begs me to ask the question – Does not having pain or symptoms = good health?
How many people are walking around with high blood pressure and don’t feel it?
How many people have a cavity and don’t yet realize it?
How many women go in for a routine mammogram, feel fine, yet have cancer forming, but don’t yet have any symptoms?
Disease is a process, not an event! In most cases, by the time you have symptoms the problem has been occurring for some time before you “feel it.”
Crisis Motivation vs. Wellness Motivation
Crisis management. That is what our society is all about. And when applied to health, it makes little sense – we are motivated to be well when we get sick. When we find ourselves sick with osteoarthritis, obesity, diabetes or heart disease, we finally find the motivation to eat right, exercise and try to live a healthy life.
Shouldn’t we instead be motivated to change in order to have and keep a great quality of life? Of course we should!
That is what the wellness movement is all about. Instead of being at the crisis end of the spectrum and seeking cure, you want to be at the wellness end of the spectrum seeking improvement.
Two big questions with regard to wellness are:
“What exactly is wellness to ME?”
“How can I improve MY current level of functioning?”
In other words, defining it for YOU, and then developing the mindset, habits, disciplines and strategies that are necessary to obtain wellness, and/or a higher level of functioning.
By asking these questions, you can apply the wellness model at any point in your life. If you are currently suffering from some illness or disease, or if you are free from any symptoms, asking these questions will move you forward to higher ground.
What Is “Wellness,” Anyway?
Today, wellness has many different definitions, connotations, perspectives and meanings.
If you ask someone to define wellness, you will get a plethora of definitions and explanations. It seems wellness has become a “fad” term, but if you truly ask the person using the word to define it they will most likely stutter, stumble, look up and to the left or right or say a lot of “umm’s”.
The definition I prefer to use and have adopted for my own practice and personal life was created by an organization called Creating WellnessTM.
Creating WellnessTM defines wellness as, “The degree to which an individual experiences health and vitality in any dimension of life.”
The reason I appreciate this definition is the fact that it talks about wellness being the product of different “dimensions,” not just one thing, but an interaction and integration of multiple things. Mainly, lifestyle choices! How we live our life on a daily basis. Not just what we do, once in awhile or in moderation, but the daily, weekly and monthly habits and disciplines that “create wellness” as an outcome.
Let’s take a closer look at this definition and break it down.
First, the definition mentions degrees of wellness. It’s important to know that people can have some wellness or a lot of wellness. Think of a test in school based on 100 degrees rather than 100%. Some people score 50 degrees, 70 degrees or 90 degrees. How “well” they do is dependent on how many questions they answer correctly. The better they perform, the higher their grade. Wellness is similar. The better choices you make in your EVERYDAY life, the better the outcome on a short-term and long-term basis.
Here is another example. Take a look at the continuum below.
Picture the left side representing illness and the right side representing wellness. As long as you are breathing, there is no standing still on this continuum. You are either moving toward wellness and away from illness, or you are moving toward illness and away from wellness. Your lifestyle will determine in what direction you are moving.
So, if you had to take a long, hard look in the mirror, in what direction do you think you are honestly moving?
Second, this definition makes a distinction between health and vitality. How many people do you think really understand and can discern the difference between them? Most people probably have never even given it a second thought.
What exactly does health mean to you? Have you ever stopped to think of that question beyond “feeling good” or “not having a disease”? How many people “feel good” when they go in for a mammogram, only to learn they have breast cancer? How many people go in for a routine blood test only to find they have high sugar and are diabetic? How many people go to a dental appointment for a routine checkup and are told they have a cavity? In all of these cases, there is a disease process present, but it has not yet progressed to a stage advanced enough for the individual to experience the symptoms. It is important to note that feeling good does not equal healthy!
The American Heritage® Stedman’s Medical Dictionary defines health as, “The overall condition of an organism at a given time; soundness, especially of body or mind; freedom from disease or abnormality.”
The same publication defines vitality as “the capacity to live, grow, or develop; physical or intellectual vigor; energy.”
If you analyze these definitions, you begin to realize that health is a state the person is in, whereas vitality is a measure of how much LIFE a person can experience and is able to experience.
Have you ever seen people of a same age and one looks much younger (or older) than the other? It always seems that the person who lives the better lifestyle looks younger, has less, or no, health problems and has more energy and “life” to them. Yes, genetics plays a small role, but their lifestyle, how they treat their body, ultimately has a tremendous influence on how much vitality a person can obtain.
The last part of the definition refers to “any dimension of life.” Life is made of multiple dimensions. There are three main dimensions that I will introduce. There may be others based on your own thoughts and categorizations, but we will keep it simple and narrow it down to three main dimensions. The three dimensions are the physical dimension (what we do to our body), nutritional dimension (what we put into our body) and the psychological dimension (how we think).
It is important to realize that even though these dimensions are separate in nature, they all influence, overlap and affect each other.
For example, if you decided you wanted to go on a diet and started a weight loss program, but you had a lot of psychological stress in your life that you faced on a daily basis, how likely are you to stay on that program before you “stress eat”? Things such as project deadlines, children, job stress, marital challenges, financial constraints and hectic schedules, just to name a few. Unless the psychological stresses are addressed in a healthy manner and worked through, it will most likely sabotage your efforts and lead to a “yo-yo” syndrome of dieting, losing weight, gaining weight and losing weight, in between trying different weight-loss programs and gimmicks.
From another standpoint, if you do not nourish yourself with clean, whole foods and a nutrient-rich diet, it can affect your psychological dimension (since nutrients produce your hormones and neurotransmitters) and also your physical dimension (energy, muscles and joints, immune function and ability to heal).
From a physical dimension perspective, if you don’t take care of your physical health and ignore symptoms such as muscle tension, stiffness and pain, it can ultimately affect your psychological dimension and further how you can physically function in your everyday life.
These are very basic examples, but hopefully begin to paint the picture for you that wellness resides not in just addressing one area of our lives, but in multiple areas. Ultimately, it all falls back on our lifestyle. Our lifestyle creates wellness in our life. Wellness comes from within!
Living Life – a Long Life
Have you ever wondered why it takes a crisis to want to be healthy? The answer partly lies in the fact that we think we can beat the odds of poor living and nothing we do is going to affect us. The other part lies in the philosophy of modern medicine.
We are taught to believe that aging is a process of disintegration. The Merriam Webster Dictionary’s definition of aging is: A declining phase of life. So many people believe that we are born, we live, we get disease, and then we die. This doesn’t have to be the truth!
There was a time when 40 years was a long time to live. What if we all still believed that – imagine how much of life we would miss. Now that is said of 80 years. But what is our real potential? And does our life at the end of our...
