By Mia Eng

About 97% of Americans do not lead a healthy lifestyle. Think about your habits. Do you exercise regularly? Do you smoke? Do you drink enough water each day?

If you answered one of these questions and realized that maybe you aren’t as healthy as you thought, no worries! Most of the people around you lack in at least one of the nine areas of health and wellness. So, you may be thinking, how do I take charge of my health? Why are there so many aspects to holistic wellness? How does it even relate to mental health?

Holistic Wellness in a Nutshell

While health generally refers to the absence or presence of illness or injury to one’s body and mind, wellness encompasses all dimensions of well-being. It aims for the optimal vitality of an individual. The nine dimensions cover physical, cultural, emotional, intellectual, occupational, interpersonal, financial, environmental, and spiritual health. And yes, all of these affect our mental states.

First Up: Physical Wellness

We’ve all heard it before. Eat well. Exercise. Have regular check-ups with your doctor. Most don’t realize how little they pay attention to this area of wellness, and that both your decisions now and the habits you form over time directly contribute to the quality and length of your life.

Enhancing one’s physical health directly impacts their mental health, so it’s important to remain in top shape. For example, unhealthy physical habits can deteriorate one’s immune system or leave one vulnerable to certain illnesses, which can leave one with not only physical symptoms of disease, but social isolation due to risks with spreading infection, stress that comes along with being sick, and the mental repercussions associated with possible chronic diseases. This wellness dimension is one of the most well-known, yet also one of the most overlooked. To keep this aspect of your health in check, make sure to:

• Avoid injuries
• Practice safe/safer sex
• Get regular check-ups
• Eat well (a variety of nutritious foods)
• Recognize symptoms of disease
• Exercise (30 minutes a day)
• Avoid harmful habits (smoking, drinking, etc.)

Even if you can’t “perfectly” practice physical wellness, baby steps are important too. Parking your car further than normal each day increases daily walking time; taking vitamins if you know you don’t eat a variety of foods helps to counteract a lack of nutrients; and skipping a cigarette even once each day can all contribute to better health over time. 

So eat your greens, drink your water, and let’s learn about another aspect of your life that’s just as important as your physical health.

Cultural Wellness

Cultural wellness considers how we treat and interact with those who are different from us. Whether it’s on the basis of religion, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or customs, we must accept and value various cultures and traditions in order to satisfy this area of wellness. This dimension becomes extremely important when we consider our interpersonal relationships and the environment around us. Our mental health largely depends on having a safe, loving community, and accepting others allows us to create a diverse space in which each person has a place to belong. Through this environment we create, we expose ourselves to more enriching experiences, as well as more people to bond, have friendships, and build futures with. 

To improve this aspect of our lives, we can create relationships with others who lead different lifestyles, refrain from judging others’ behaviors until we have empathized with their experiences, and avoid stereotyping individuals or groups. Additionally, valuing and maintaining one’s own cultural identity helps to further preserve their cultural wellness.

Next: Emotional Wellness

Finding solutions to emotional problems—on your own or with professional assistance—and tackling the ups and downs of life are what makes up emotional wellness. Some key characteristics also include having self-esteem, self-acceptance, trust, optimism, self-confidence, the ability to understand and accept one’s own emotions, and the capacity to share one’s feelings with others. Self-acceptance occurs when one achieves personal satisfaction with themselves, while self-esteem refers to the way one believes others think of them. Self-confidence may involve both, and it’s important to explore your thoughts and feelings about these qualities. To maintain your emotional health, it can be helpful to think back to these reminders:

• Set realistic expectations for yourself. Don’t push yourself to your limit and try not to compare yourself to others. People are like books. Each one has a different number of pages, a different plot, and distinct main characters. Everyone is on a different chapter in their life with their own unique story, so don’t feel like you need to measure up to someone else’s climactic stage while you’re still on the rising action.
• Create your own definition of success. Many people’s self-esteem can be affected by society’s views of beauty, professional accomplishment, wealth, and other elements of “excellence”. Negative self-esteem may be amplified by harsh self-nitpicking, especially when social media comparisons come into play. Next time you doubt yourself, think: am I upset because I let myself down? Or because I don’t fit in with a “standard”?
• Do what makes you happy. For some, self-confidence grows from big, brag-worthy achievements. For others, it can be as simple as wearing the style of clothing you like. Big or small, continue the hobbies you enjoy, the job you love, and the habits that light up your days.

When we talk about mental health, we often only focus on emotional wellness. While this dimension of well-being remains important for our overall psychological health, it fluctuates with spiritual, cultural, intellectual, and interpersonal health. This is why a holistic approach to physical and mental care should be emphasized, and everyone should be aware that the areas of wellness are interdependent.

Intellectual Wellness

To stimulate intellectual wellness, we have to consistently challenge our minds. An openness to new ideas, sense of humor, curiosity about the world, creativity, motivation to acquire new skills, the ability to critically think, and a tendency to question can help us to discover new things about ourselves. By increasing our intellectual health, we can detect problems, direct behavior, and uncover solutions. These abilities transform us into lifelong learners, which is essential to finding new ways to care for ourselves.

Occupational Wellness

One’s occupational wellness concerns the fulfillment and happiness one receives from their job. Someone with high occupational wellness feels a sense of contribution with their everyday work, connections with others in their workplace, enjoyment from their job, and an eagerness to take on new challenges and opportunities. High salaries and reputable titles can be pleasing to many, but positions that cater to your passions, interests, and professional skills contribute much more to occupational satisfaction. Feeling valued by your manager and colleagues adds onto the level of happiness we obtain from our careers, and this happiness correlates with our general state of mind. 

If we have issues with our occupation, those stressors can hinder our mental and physical health. However, if we find gratification from our craft, we derive energy and vivacity from our work and spread this liveliness into the rest of our non-professional lives. Though we hear it time and time again, it is extremely important to chase your dreams! Find a career worth sticking to that you’ll be happy with for a large portion of your life. Not only is the position you strive to be in important, but where you choose to work has just as much of an impact! Pick companies or organizations that are the right fit for you. Your colleagues can change everything!

Interpersonal Wellness

Interpersonal wellness, also known as social wellness, plays an important role in emotional and physical health. These three wellness dimensions interact to affect each individual and consequently, supportive relationships, good communication skills, and expanding one’s capacity for intimacy are necessary in everyone’s life. The ability to assemble a satisfying support system of family and friends and the participation in your community and society fosters social wellness. Even if you experience social anxiety at times, building a network of loved ones is still possible. When in doubt:

• Fight your negative thoughts. It can be scary trying to meet new people! However, cognitive reframing is an effective method to overcome negative thoughts that can prevent you from approaching someone new.

1.  Identify negative thinking patterns
2.  Think to yourself: are these thoughts realistic? Or are they misconstrued?
3.  Actively challenge these doubtful beliefs
4.  Replace pessimistic thoughts with positive alternatives

• Practice, practice, practice. Say yes to invitations to events and find ways to speak to new people. Practice makes perfect!
• Stay in touch. Ask your friends how they are. Check in with your family. Send someone a TikTok. Staying in touch doesn’t always mean going for lunch every week. It’s the simple things that count.

Social belonging is one of the most important contributors to mental health. Surround yourself with loving, accepting people and remember that relationships are a two-way street! It takes effort from both sides to maintain.

Financial Wellness

Managing your money in a way that offers one comfort defines financial wellness. Understanding how money works, balancing income and expenses, and avoiding debt can bring one peace of mind, and lifts an extra source of stress off your plate. Creating and following a budget can help to track expenses, to save for the future and for emergencies, and to set goals. To take charge of your financial wellness and to ease money anxiety:

• Become financially literate. Learn to invest, save, and manage your money through free online courses and videos.

• • Start saving up for your future! Put money aside with each paycheck to contribute to a retirement fund, or in case of emergencies that come up. You never know if you may need to go to the hospital, an earthquake hits, or the economy plunges.
  • Educate yourself on how to properly use credit cards
• Prioritize paying off debts

Environmental Wellness

Clean and safe living conditions are essential for personal health. Recycling when possible, reducing waste, practicing and advocating for sustainability, and learning how to protect yourself from hazards in your environment all promotes this dimension of wellness. Having clean, abundant natural resources and a low degree of violence in society furthers the livability of one’s environment. If we have suitable surroundings to live in, we do not have to fear for our safety or basic needs. According to Abraham Maslow, in order to have feelings of self-esteem, love, and belonging, we must first have security in our resources and protection. Thus, meeting our physiological and safety needs provides the foundation for leading a happy lifestyle. 

Last but not least: Spiritual Wellness

The ninth and equally important aspect of holistic wellness is spiritual health: one’s set of guiding principles and sense of purpose. Some find spirituality in their religion/faith, while others obtain meaning from their loved ones, nature, art, personal passions, or meditation. However one gains their own meaning of life, the development of spiritual wellness requires a capacity for love, altruism, compassion, forgiveness, fulfillment, and a sense of belonging to something greater than yourself. Spirituality does not necessarily mean a dedication to a higher God or power, but the belief in something more than the individual drives us to focus on more positive features of life, rather than pessimism, anger, and cynicism. We continue to live because we have a motivation to achieve something, and we thrive because we believe we are a part of something bigger than us. Spiritual wellness is easily intertwined with emotional and interpersonal health, as spirituality often has direct effects on the mind and community that surrounds us.

That may seem like a lot of areas that we need to improve upon, but again, many people are in the same boat. The first step in taking charge of your own health is to be aware of your current habits and how you can improve. Now that you know of all nine dimensions that factor into your overall health, you can choose which area needs the most improvement and take small steps each day to become the best version of yourself. Health alone is difficult to maintain, and wellness is even harder to achieve. Nevertheless, everyone is capable of elevating their holistic wellness and thus, their mental health. Remember: all it takes is one step to set a plan into motion.

References

Cuncic, A. (2022, May 10). How to make friends when you have social anxiety. Verywell Mind. Retrieved November 23, 2022, from https://www.verywellmind.com/how-to-make-friends-3024380

Insel, P. M., Roth, W. T., & Insel, C. (2020). Connect Core Concepts In Health: Brief (Sixteenth). McGraw-Hill Education.