On Wellness as A Journey
And charting our own course
What is wellness?
That’s a huge question that feels sort of akin to starting an essay with the question “what is the meaning of life?” There are a million directions to go in an attempt to define wellness, any of which feels like it could become a seventeen essay series, or lengthy research-based article. While wellness is a fundamental concept in my writing here, I’m not sure I’m interested in veering down either of those deep, deep, dives. However, more than six months into writing the Healthier Hustle, it does see apropos to pause and define this central concept just a bit.
My personal favorite definition of wellness come from the National Wellness Institute (NWI) and defines wellness as:
“An active process through which people become aware of, and make choices toward, a more successful existence.” -National Wellness Institute (2010)
I love the words “active process” in this definition. They remind me that Wellness isn’t some destination to arrive at. I won’t wake up one day, with birds chirping , the sun high in the bluest of blue skies, the smell of citrus wafting through the air and think “I am now well. I have reached Wellness.”
It’s something I’ll keep working toward.
And it will require choices. I will choose to pause before reacting. I will choose to turn off the TV and put my phone down an hour before bed. I will choose to roll out my yoga mat or lace up my running shoes. I will choose to make space for meditation in the morning. I will choose to drink water. I will choose to opt-in to experiences that feel like they will be hard (in all the right ways). I will choose to see tiny daily joys. I will strive to have honest conversations and deepen relationships. And sometimes I will also choose things that don’t support my wellness, and I’ll need to work to get back on track. This is an active process.
I can reset and begin again.
I also love that the phrasing of the goal of wellness is to move toward a “more successful existence.” The semantics here are really important. Notice it does not say move toward “health.” It’s really easy to conflate wellness with the idea of peak physical health or to think of illness as the opposite of wellness on a continuum. The NWI definition is intentional in its avoidance of that. The idea is that every person, even those dealing with mental or physical struggles (acute or chronic in nature) can still define success and quality of life for themselves.
Embracing this definition of wellness means acknowledging that wellness is more than just physical and mental health.
For me, right now, I think about my personal wellness across these four areas:
connection
work
joy
health (physical & mental)
This shows up for me in different ways. I have a daily tracker in Notion for the health things- so I note things like meditation, sleeping more than 7 hours a night, running/do other physical activity, drinking at least one of my refillable bottles full of water. The goal isn’t to berate myself for not doing all these things everyday, but more that I notice when I’ve gone multiple days without moving my body, or sleeping enough, or being intentional about drinking water. I also set reminders to follow-up with friends to keep connection top of mind. My daily Things of Beauty practice supports the joy area. My husband and I have some financial goals around paying off our mortgage and investing that we check in on fairly regularly that fall into the work category.
I’m not prefect at any of this. Not by any stretch of the imagination. For example, I don’t have a super regular practice around the “work” area other than those few financial goals. I have some general ideas about taking on projects that feel aligned and creative, but as I’ve mentioned before, I can be a bit goal-setting reluctant, so this area can feel wobbly and neglected at times. I could certainly seek out more joy and less doom-scrolling. And those reminders to reach out to friends sometimes get moved from day-to-day on my Notion dashboard without getting checked off more times than I’d like to admit. I also forget to drink my water and guzzle it at the end of the day. Or go a week without being intentional about exercise.
There is much resetting and beginning again.
If the NWI definition of wellness resonates with you too, and you like the idea of thinking about your wellness beyond just physical and mental health there are some models out there that might help you think about other dimensions that feel important to you. Here are two examples:
- National Wellness Institute’s Six Dimensions of Wellness - It makes sense to start here, since I’ve been talking about their definition of wellness. NWI’s six dimensions include:
Emotional - awareness of and acceptance of your feelings
Occupational - work that feels meaningful and rewarding to you
Physical - everything around exercise, nutrition, and taking care of your physical body
Social - contributing to and being part of your community
Intellectual - engaging in creative, stimulating, mental activities
Spiritual - your search for meaning and purpose in life
- IS-Wel The Indivisible Self - Another five factor model, with each factor made up of sub components that define that area. Here are the factors and components:
The Creative Self - thinking, emotions, control, positive humor, and work
The Coping Self - realistic beliefs, stress management, self-worth, and leisure
The Social Self - friendship and love
The Essential Self - spirituality, self- care, gender identity, and cultural identity
The Physical Self - exercise and nutrition
The IS-Wel model also includes four different areas of contextual variables that can affect personal wellness, as shown below. I think this is a really nice acknowledgment of the fact that there are pieces of our wellness that are affected by external forces that we often have very little control over.
You’ll notice that my personal plan for wellness doesn’t perfectly line up with either of these. I’ve got four areas of focus, not five. Four feels doable to me, right now, in this moment. I don’t use all the terminology in all the same way any of the models do, though some of the same the concepts are reflected.
To me the models are academic frameworks (which means there is a whole history of how they were developed, and who they were and weren’t normed on to unpack, but that’s not where I’m going with this today.) They serve as an important reminder that wellness is multidimensional, they give me some vocabulary for things that are important to me, but they don’t have to be prescriptive. I don’t have to check all the categories on a wellness model to engage in the active process of “become[ing] aware of, and mak[ing] choices toward, a more successful existence.”
It’s about awareness, about being intentional, making choices, evaluating those choices, and beginning again. It’s super cliche, but true— wellness is a journey, not a destination.
And there isn’t one right map to follow.
Things of Beauty
Just a few things that felt particularly soul-nourishing recently (or maybe just made me smile).
📓 In this post on Shangrilogs, author Kelton describes her “Take Care” spreadsheet tracker. She explains that she uses this when she is feeling overwhelmed to make sure she is incorporating habits that make her happy each day. She prints it out and puts it on her bathroom mirror as a tangible, visual, reminder each morning. I love this example of personalizing wellness practices in a way that works for you. (There is a link to her spreadsheet in her article, if this resonates with you and you want to give it a try).
❤️ I wrote this piece at the prompting of my Friday morning writers group. Wellness is a similar thread throughout what each of us write about in our own ways— so we are each writing a piece on the subject and workshopping it together. Super grateful for their feedback and how it helped shape this article (and just in general for being a great community of creatives in this space). My group writes: We Can Do This with Love + Our Medicine, Road Trip with Sara Parker, Odyssey of the Body, Physician Interrupted and Longevity Minded.
🌶️ Pimento Pepper on my patio! I don’t have a ton of outdoor space, but growing a few herbs/veggies on my patio brings me great joy! And this year I grew a pepper! Pimento cheese is a favorite of mine, and I’m patiently waiting for this little one to turn red so I can make a small batch with my very own homegrown pepper. (I think I might have to quick pickle it first? Please share if you know your way around making pimento cheese— I’m mostly an expert in eating it).
If any of this resonates with you I’d love to know what dimensions would you include on your personal model of wellness? What feels helpful on your journey?
Postscript: In writing this piece I pulled out notes from a class I took in 2020, where I studied that definition of wellness and the models above (as well as others). If you really want a deep dive into this, the textbook we used was great: Wellness Counseling: A Holistic Approach to Prevention and Intervention. (One of the authors, Abigail Conley, was my instructor!) Note: If you have any affiliation with an academic library, you might be able to download this text for free.
Post-Post Script: I picked two models to give a very high level overview of here to illustrate my point about academic models. Please follow the links above for more detailed information on those models if you are interested. Also know that there are lots of other examples like the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) model and Gallup’s Five Essential Elements of Well-Being.