Wellness is the pursuit of continued growth and balance in the seven dimensions of wellness.Wellness is much more than physical health. Wellness is a full integration of physical, mental and spiritual well-being. It is a complex interaction that leads to quality of life.

Wellness is commonly viewed as having seven dimensions. Each dimension contributes to our own sense of wellness or quality of life, and each affects and overlaps the others. At times one may be more prominent than others, but neglect of any one dimension for any length of time has adverse effects on overall health.

The Seven Dimensions of Wellness

• Physical
• Emotional
• Intellectual
• Social
• Spiritual
• Environmental
• Occupational

Physical Dimension

Physical wellness encompasses a variety of healthy behaviours including adequate exercise, proper nutrition and abstaining from harmful habits such as drug use and alcohol abuse. It means learning about and identifying symptoms of disease, getting regular medical checkups, and protecting yourself from injuries and harm. Developing such healthy habits today will not only add years to your life but will enhance the enjoyment and quality of those years.

Tips for optimal physical wellness:

• Exercise daily
• Get adequate rest
• Use seat belts, helmets, and other protective equipment
• Learn to recognise early signs of illness
• Eat a variety of healthy foods
• Control your meal portions
• Stop smoking and protect yourself against second-hand smoke
• Use alcohol in moderation, if at all

Emotional Dimension

Emotional wellness is a dynamic state that fluctuates frequently with your other six dimensions of wellness. Being emotionally well is typically defined as possessing the ability to feel and express human emotions such as happiness, sadness and anger. It means having the ability to love and be loved and achieving a sense of fulfillment in life. Emotional wellness encompasses optimism, self-esteem, self-acceptance and the ability to share feelings.

Tips for optimal emotional wellness:

• Tune-in to your thoughts and feelings
• Cultivate an optimistic attitude
• Seek and provide support
• Learn time management skills
• Practice stress management techniques
• Accept and forgive yourself

Intellectual Dimension

The intellectual dimension encourages creative, stimulating mental activities. Our minds need to be continually inspired and exercised just as our bodies do. People who possess a high level of intellectual wellness have an active mind and continue to learn. An intellectually well person uses the resources available to expand one’s knowledge and improve skills. Keeping up-to-date on current events and participating in activities that arouse our minds are also important.

Tips and suggestions for optimal intellectual wellness include:

• Take a course or workshop
• Learn (or perfect) a foreign language
• Seek out people who challenge you intellectually
• Read
• Learn to appreciate art

Social Dimension

Social wellness refers to our ability to interact successfully in our global community and to live up to the expectations and demands of our personal roles. This means learning good communication skills, developing intimacy with others, and creating a support network of friends and family members.

Social wellness includes showing respect for others and yourself. Contributing to your community and to the world builds a sense of belonging.

Tips and suggestions for optimal social wellness include:

• Cultivate healthy relationships
• Get involved
• Contribute to your community
• Share your talents and skills
• Communicate your thoughts, feelings and ideas

Spiritual Dimension

Spiritual wellness involves possessing a set of guiding beliefs, principles, or values that help give direction to one’s life. It encompasses a high level of faith, hope and commitment to your individual beliefs that provide a sense of meaning and purpose. It is willingness to seek meaning and purpose in human existence, to question everything and to appreciate the things which cannot be readily explained or understood.

A spiritually well person seeks harmony between what lies within as well as the forces outside.

Tips and suggestions for optimal spiritual wellness:

• Explore your spiritual core
• Spend time alone/meditate regularly
• Be inquisitive and curious
• Be fully present in everything you do
• Listen with your heart and live by your principles
• Allow yourself and those around you the freedom to be who they are
• See opportunities for growth in the challenges life brings you

Environmental Wellness

Environmental wellness is an awareness of the unstable state of the earth and the effects of your daily habits on the physical environment. It consists of maintaining a way of life that maximizes harmony with the earth and minimizes harm to the environment. It includes being involved in socially responsible activities to protect the environment.

Tips and suggestions for optimal environmental wellness:

• Stop your junk mail
• Conserve water and other resources
• Minimize chemical use
• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
• Renew your relationship with the earth

Occupational Dimension

Occupational/Vocational wellness involves preparing and making use of your gifts, skills, and talents in order to gain purpose, happiness, and enrichment in your life. The development of occupational satisfaction and wellness is related to your attitude about your work. Achieving optimal occupational wellness allows you to maintain a positive attitude and experience satisfaction/pleasure in your employment. Occupational wellness means successfully integrating a commitment to your occupation into a total lifestyle that is satisfying and rewarding.

Tips and suggestions for optimal occupational wellness include:

• Explore a variety of career options
• Create a vision for your future
• Choose a career that suits your personality, interests and talents
• Be open to change and learn new skills

Source(s):

GRCC

The Johari window is a technique^[ that helps people better understand their relationship with themselves and others. It was created by psychologists Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916–1995) in 1955, and is used primarily in self-help groups and corporate settings as a heuristic exercise.^[ Luft and Ingham named their model “Johari” using a combination of their first names.

In the exercise, subjects pick a number of adjectives from a list, choosing ones they feel describe their own personality. The subject’s peers then get the same list, and each picks an equal number of adjectives that describe the subject. These adjectives are then inserted into a two-by-two grid of four cells.^[

The philosopher Charles Handy calls this concept the Johari window with four Quadrants. 

Quadrant one is the part of ourselves that we and others see.
Quadrant two contains aspects that others see but we are unaware of. Quadrant three is the private space we know but hide from others.
Quadrant four is the unconscious part of us that neither ourselves nor others see.

The exercise can be used in knowing ourself properly and hence improving our interactions with others which will lead to enhanced Mental and Social Well Being.

Source(s):

Wikipedia

One possibility is to use large opinion surveys in which individuals answer simple questions on their degree of happiness or life satisfaction. These have revealed robust patterns, confirming that economic growth has a weaker than expected effect on satisfaction, and that other aspects of life, such as health and unemployment, are important.

These simple survey measures seem credible. But according to psychologists, happiness and life satisfaction do not coincide. Life satisfaction has a cognitive component – individuals have to step back to assess their lives – while happiness reflects positive and negative emotions that fluctuate.

A focus on positive and negative emotions can lead to understanding well-being in an “hedonic” way, based in pleasure and the absence of pain. Looking instead to individuals’ judgements about what is worth seeking suggests a preference-based approach (a possibility we discuss below). People judge all sorts of different things to be worth seeking.

In other words, happiness may be an element in evaluating one’s well-being, but it is not the only one.

The capability approach

Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen has pointed out that understanding well-being on the basis of feelings of satisfaction, pleasure, or happiness have two problems.

The first he calls “physical-condition neglect”. Human beings adapt at least partially to unfavourable situations, meaning the poor and the sick can still be relatively happy. One striking study by a team of Belgian and French physicians has shown that even in a cohort of patients with chronic locked-in syndrome, a majority reported being happy.

The second problem is “valuation neglect”. Valuing a life is a reflective activity that should not be reduced to feeling happy or unhappy. Of course, Sen admits, “it would be odd to claim that a person broken down by pain and misery is doing very well”.

We should therefore not fully neglect the importance of feeling well, but also acknowledge it is not the only thing people care about.

Together with Martha Nussbaum, Sen formulated an alternative: the capability approach, which stipulates that both personal characteristics and social circumstances affect what people can achieve with a given amount of resources.

Giving books to a person who cannot read does not increase their well-being (probably the opposite), just as providing them with a car does not increase mobility if there are no decent roads.

According to Sen, what the person manages to do or to be – such as being well-nourished or being able to appear in public without shame – are what really matter for well-being. Sen calls these achievements the “functionings” of the person. However, he further claims that defining well-being only in terms of functioning is insufficient, because well-being also includes freedom.

His classic example involves the comparison between two undernourished individuals. The first person is poor and cannot afford food; the second is wealthy but chooses to fast for religious reasons. While they achieve the same level of nourishment, they cannot be said to enjoy the same level of well-being.

Therefore, Sen suggests that well-being should be understood in terms of people’s real opportunities – that is, all possible combinations of functionings from which they can choose.

The capability approach is inherently multidimensional; but those seeking to guide policy often think that rationally dealing with trade-offs requires having one single ultimate measure. Adherents of the capability approach who succumb to this thought often mistrust individual preferences and apply instead a set of indicators that are common to all individuals.

So-called “composite indicators” – like the United Nations’ Human Development Index, which adds together consumption, life expectancy and educational performance at the country level – are a frequent outcome of this kind of thinking. They have become popular in policy circles, but they fall victim to simply adding up scores on different dimensions, all deemed equally important.

Taking individual convictions seriously

Beyond the subjective approach and the capability approach, a third perspective – the preference-based approach to well-being – takes into account that people disagree about the relative importance of different life dimensions.

Some people think that hard work is necessary to have a valuable life while others prefer to spend more time with family. Some think that going out with friends is key, while others prefer reading a book in a quiet place.

The “preference-based” perspective starts from the idea that people are better off when their reality matches better what they themselves consider to be important.

Preferences thus have a cognitive “valuational” component: they reflect people’s well-informed and well-considered ideas about what a good life is, not merely their market behaviour.

This does not coincide with subjective life satisfaction. Recall the example of patients with the locked-in syndrome reporting high levels of satisfaction because they have adapted to their situation. This does not mean that they would not prefer to have their health back – and it certainly does not mean that citizens without locked-in syndrome would not mind falling ill with it.

One example of a preference-based measure, advocated by the French economist Marc Fleurbaey, directs people to choose reference values for all non-income aspects of life (such as health or number of hours worked). These reference values will depend on the individual: everyone probably agrees that not being ill is the best possible state, but a workaholic lawyer is likely to place a very different value on work hours than someone with an arduous and hazardous factory job.

Fleurbaey then suggests that people define a salary that, combined with the non-income-based reference value, would satisfy the individual as much as their current situation.

The amount by which this “equivalent income” differs from the person’s actual work-based income can help answer the question: “How much income you would be willing to give up for better health or more free time?”

Some psychologists are sceptical about preference-based approaches because they assume that human beings have well-informed and well-considered ideas about what makes a good life. Even if such rational preferences exist, one struggles to measure them because these are aspects of life – family time, health – that are not traded on markets.

Does all this matter in practice?

The following table, compiled by the Belgian economists Koen Decancq and Erik Schokkaert, shows how differing approaches to well-being can have practical consequences.

It ranks 18 European countries in 2010 (just after the financial crisis) according to three possible measures: average income, average life satisfaction and average “equivalent income” (taking into account health, unemployment, safety and the quality of social interactions).

	Income	Subjective life satisfaction	Equivalent income
1	Norway	Denmark	Norway
2	Switzerland	Switzerland	Switzerland
3	Netherlands	Finland	Sweden
4	Sweden	Norway	Denmark
5	Great Britain	Sweden	Great Britain
6	Germany	Netherlands	Belgium
7	Denmark	Belgium	Netherlands
8	Belgium	Spain	Finland
9	Finland	Germany	France
10	France	Great Britain	Germany
11	Spain	Poland	Spain
12	Slovenia	Slovenia	Greece
13	Greece	Estonia	Slovenia
14	Czech Republic	Czech Republic	Czech Republic
15	Poland	France	Poland
16	Hungary	Hungary	Estonia
17	Russia	Greece	Russia
18	Estonia	Russia	Hungary

Some results are striking. Danes are much more satisfied than they are wealthy, while France is the opposite. These large divergences are not seen when comparing equivalent incomes, however, which suggests that satisfaction in these two countries is heavily influenced by cultural differences.

Germany and the Netherlands also do worse on satisfaction than on income, but their equivalent income rankings confirm that they do relatively worse on the non-income dimensions.

Greece has a remarkably low level of life satisfaction. Cultural factors may play a role here, but Greece is also characterised by high income inequality, which is not captured by the averages in the table.

These differences among various measures of well-being hint at the important issues involved in deciding which measure of well-being – if any – to select. If we want to use the measure to rank nations’ performance at providing well-being, then we will be pulled towards a single, simple measure, such as subjective happiness. If we seek to keep track, for policy purposes, of whether individuals are doing well in the respects that really matter, we will be pulled towards a more multi-dimensional assessment, such as that offered by the capability approach. And if we are most impressed by disagreement among individuals as to what matters, we will have reason to understand well-being along the lines suggested by the preference-based approach.

Source:

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