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Wellness Concepts
Wellness is a term that means 'total health.' Health, of course, means the condition you are in. To define wellness you must consider all of the ways you function: physically in your body, mentally in your mind and socially in your dealings with others. These are called the dimensions of health. Some of the other dimensions that could also be considered are: spiritual, intellectual and environmental.
Mental health is your emotional side. This includes the ability to like and accept yourself, to express your emotions appropriately and to meet the many demands of life. Social health is the ability to form satisfying relationships with others and to work comfortably in a group. Physical health is the condition of the body and the ability of all the parts to work properly, avoiding disease and injury.
The three common dimensions of wellness: Mental, Physical and Social, have some important characteristics. First, they create a total picture of the state of your person. Together they are called holistic health because they create the ‘whole’ picture of how a person functions. Each one is totally important to the others. A symbol for this relationship is an equilateral triangle: the type that has all three sides exactly the same.
If you change any one side of this triangle the whole thing changes…. It is no longer equal on all sides. The sides are different and the angles change. Imagine that each side of this triangle was labeled for one dimension of wellness: mental on one side, physical on the second and social on the third. Imagine now that one part of you was hurt….a broken ankle. This certainly would damage your physical side caving in the line on that side of the triangle. As that side caves in the angle to the mental side gets smaller and, eventually that line also sags. The angle to the social side would also change causing the social line to sag. Your once perfect triangle looks totally changed.
This represents the changes that take place in each of the wellness dimensions as a result of the physical injury. A badly broken ankle would slow you down and keep you from doing all that you want to do. That can cause you to be depressed, hurting your mental (emotional) health. If you are depressed you will probably not feel much like being very social. This causes your social health to change. There you have it…. A problem on one side of the health triangle caused the other sides to change until it was totally out of balance. Take a rubber band and form a triangle from it. See how the pressure changes on the sides as you pull one side out. This is the pressure that causes the changes on all sides.
The same results could happen if the problem started on another side of the triangle… say the mental side. Many Americans deal with periods of depression. With the mental segment of the triangle changing, it affects the social and physical sides, also. Through depression, a person often doesn’t want to eat or the opposite happens... they eat all the time. They seldom feel like exercising. You can imagine the results to your physical health side of the triangle. Obviously, a depressed person doesn’t want to be social so that takes care of the social side. It’s easy to see how they all effect each other. This is a characteristic called interdependence … each part dependent on the others.
Just as people seldom stay exactly the same, your wellness changes along with you. This characteristic is termed dynamic… always changing. There are two major categories that influence these changes: 1) your lifestyle and 2) the choices you make. Lifestyle is the term used to describe your daily living pattern. It includes what you eat, how much you exercise, your sleep pattern, and the amount of stress in your life. Choices refer to all the other behaviors a person chooses to do: smoke or not?, drink or not?, seat belts?, bike helmets?, etc. These behaviors can be considered as ones that increase your wellness or as ones that risk your wellness.
The balance between the wellness and risk behaviors, along with your daily living pattern, cause your wellness to change; moving closer to excellent health or away from it. You could imagine it like a teeter/totter. One end of the bench can touch down at the excellent end (perfect health) and the other end can touch down at the very bad end (death).
The balance in the middle is neither good nor bad. Not sick but not really well! The object, of course, is to get the bench to the excellent end of perfect health. To do this the lifestyle factors must be positive and there can be few risks.
