May is Mental Health Awareness Month.
Many of my posts focus on physical health, training goals, and the like. However, our physical bodies are only one part of our overall wellness. It is awesome that in the past several years, more focus and attention has been brought to mental health and the impact it can have on one’s overall wellness. Certainly because of this effort many of us are discussing things like meditation and mindfulness techniques as part of our overall wellness journey. While the benefits that can be reaped by viewing health in a broader context are many, I believe that there are more than just two aspects to wellness.
Think about it, we as humans don’t exist as just a physical body. There are all of these other intangible things going on. Things that we choose to define ourselves that have little to nothing to do with our physical shells. We are, after all, more than just a sum of our parts. And it is time we started viewing and treating our overall wellness as such.
When I was in grad school, several TAs in the Kinesiology Department were charged with teaching a general education course. You know, one of those that were required for you to leave the school with a diploma. This particular course was aimed at teaching health and wellness skills that students could use over their entire lifespan and one of the first topics covered was the Dimensions of Wellness. Even though I did not teach this particular course, I always liked the idea that a person needed to consider many different areas and their relative health in each of them to be considered well. It’s why, at least to me, health and wellness do not mean the same thing and are not interchangeable. Health is how free from illness or injury we are on any one of these Dimensions. Wellness describes the active process through which people become aware of, and make choices toward, a more successful existence.
James Madison University, where I received my Masters, taught the Six Dimensions of Wellness as Physical, Mental, Emotional/Spiritual, Social, Intellectual, and Environmental. Each one of these Dimensions covers a different area of our existence and one aspect of health. For example, the Mental Health Dimension covers things like anxiety, depression, psychiatric conditions, self talk and the like. The Intellectual Health Dimension covers things like our hobbies, brain plasticity and our ability to learn new skills.
While each of the Dimensions is different from each other, they all interact and overlap. It should be easy to see, though, that if someone is suffering from depression (poor health in the Mental Health Dimension) they may lose interest in hobbies or be unlikely to venture out of their comfort zones to try and learn a new skill thus causing poorer health in the Intellectual Dimension as well. The important take-away here is that poor health in one Dimension will eventually spill over into other Dimensions causing a ripple effect. The good news is that the opposite is also true. As one makes better choices and improves health in one Dimension, it will again, ripple out like the proverbial stone in the pond, improving health or at least allowing better choices in other Dimensions.
The National Wellness Institute also orders wellness based on Dimensions. The NWI Dimensions of Wellness are Physical, Social, Intellectual, Spiritual, Emotional, and Occupational. While these are slightly different from those I outlined above, the point is more that wellness is being viewed as an interdependent model with different areas being addressed. It is less important what the categories are and more important that you are able to view the pieces of your life and suss out strengths and weaknesses from a holistic and long term perspective.
The point is simply that we need to start viewing our wellness in this way. We are more than a sum of our physical and mental parts. Each aspect of ourselves and our lives should be looked at with the goal of helping us maximize our potential. We all have aspects of our lives that we do well managing our health, and we all have aspects that could use a little tune up. I encourage you to take a few minutes and block out your Dimensions and then give yourself a grade in each area. If you need help, the NWI website is a gold mine of information and tools you can use.
