Complete Wellness

To achieve lifelong health and wellness the body must be well balanced. Healthy refers not only to the physical well being, but also to the state of a number of related processes. It involves the integration of the physical, emotional, spiritual, and social dimensions of people’s lives. A problem with any of these will directly affect our body’s overall performance or total fitness. 

Physical Fitness

Physical fitness enables us to perform up to our potential. It can be described as a condition that helps us look, feel and do our best. It gives us the ability to perform daily tasks vigorously and alert, with energy left over for enjoying leisure-time activities and meeting emergency demands.

Social Fitness

As with physical exercise, there are many ways to exercise socially, and many different kinds of situations in which to practice and find enjoyment. A person may change behaviour, thinking patterns, and attitudes, become more skilled at emotion regulation or simply choose a more appropriate social niche in order to attain a state of improved conditioning. With effort and practice, most people can attain an adaptive state of social fitness the same way that most people can attain an adaptive state of physical fitness.

Spiritual Fitness

A spiritually well person is one who experience meaning and purpose in life and who has an intrinsic value system that informs both life and decision. It usually includes a awareness and appreciations for the vastness of the universe and notions such as a relationship with self, God and others.

Emotional Fitness

Taking a personal look inside is a great way to develop inner peace and happiness. Awareness is an orientation to living so that we are not working at cross-purpose with anything that is moving organically on its own. Human excellence in virtually all domains is guided by mental facors. 

Psychological Fitness

Psychological fitness equips people with the knowledge and skills needed for dealing with the difficulties encountered in the normal course of life. It is a process of building internal resiliency to the many shocks and influences that directly and indirectly affect our actions concerning health, career and relationships. It involves an integration of the physical, emotional, spiritual, dimension of people lives.

Physical, emotional, social and spiritual fitness requires genuine effortand a type of exercise. It takes energy, willingness and commitment to self-cange. By setting goals on a routine basis you decide what you want to achieve, and then move step-by-step toward the achievement of these goals. It focuses your acquisition of knowledge and helps you to organize your resources.

You can control your emotional wellness.

• Express yourself by talking over your feelings with a friend or councilor.
• Analyze your anger. Ask yourself questions before deciding to act on your anger. Is the matter important? Is the situation modifiable?
• Cultivate the relaxation response. Progressive muscle relaxation allows people to exert astonishing control over their reaction to stress.
• Respectfully confront someone when you are bothered by his or her behavior. It prevents feelings from building up and festering into a bigger problem. Express “I feel statements.” For example “I feel hurt and disappointed that you forgot our anniversary.”
• Don’t send nonverbal body language contradicting your words. Using body language out of synch with your feelings can block the impact of your message. Smiling when you are annoyed thwarts good feelings communication. Nervous laughter, when you are expressing anger, disempowers what you are saying.
• Be wary of only expressing feelings about negative areas. Problems begin when you focus on the wrong things. Like when your attention gets stuck on a mistake made in the past, or if you zoom in on someone who doesn’t seem to like what you’re saying.
• Try being present for things like taking a shower. Notice the feelings that push you towards the telephone or doorbell on the first ring.
• Forgive yourself. This does not mean making excuses for oneself. Rather we want to try and learn from our mistakes, to gain a degree of self-control and to grow in our capacity for love and peace. Not forgiving ourselves makes goals harder to reach since the event from the past remains powerful and unchanging.
• Learn to make amends. Think how you might respond to someone else guilty of the same mistake.

By Meeka O’Brien – Dip.Clin.Hyp