September 06, 2018

wellness 360 degree

WHAT EXACTLY IS WELLNESS?

Wellness is simply about living a balanced life. A balanced life is a good blend of safety, prosperity, comfort, family, relationships, health, happiness, fun, creativity, satisfaction and peace.

Bringing all at a time looks challenging. Whenever a few are in place, other few are out of reach & Vice-versa. So, there is always an imbalance & we all are thriving day & night to restore this balance.

This tiny booklet will throw some light on artefacts of wellness, why they are out of balance & how we can restore the balance.

WHAT ARE THE KEY COMPONENTS OF WELLNESS?

WELLNESS HAS 7 KEY COMPONENTS:

Financial/Material Wellness: Goods & Stuff for basic needs, for needs of luxurious life and for long term safety and security; all account for Financial/Material Wellness.

Social Wellness: Respect, reputation, status and position in society account for social wellness.

Physical Wellness: Health, fitness, stamina etc account for physical wellness.

‎Intellectual Wellness: Knowledge, thinking, reasoning, etc account for intellectual wellness.

Emotional Wellness: Feelings, mood, Emotions etc account for Emotional Wellness.

Intuitive Wellness: Creativity, imagination, art, craft, designing, music etc account for intuitive wellness.

‎Spiritual Wellness: Experience of Self Awareness, Consciousness, meditativeness, Mindfulness, Self-Exploration, peace, stability oneness, etc account for Spiritual Wellness.

A holistic wellness is possible when there is balance in all the wellness components.

When we orient ourselves towards any specific component, sacrificing others, we lose the balance, consequently, life loses its balance.
In general, majority of the orientation is towards financial/material and social wellness ignoring other components.

HOW TO BRING BACK THE BALANCE?

The balance in all components of wellness can be brought by giving attention on each component in daily routine.

Let’s us understand these components and find out how we can give attention to each one in our daily routine.

WHAT IS FINANCIAL OR MATERIAL WELLNESS?

Financial/Material wellness is all about prosperity.

It is primarily about ensuring that we live safely, comfortably and Happily.

Just like ants & bees, we create shelter and then we accumulate food for survival.

But we are not ants and bees, we are far more talented, smart and developed, so we gather luxury also. Like TV, Fridge, furniture, classy looking car & bike and lot more stuff. Modern lifestyle is consumerism driven, so every day our demand for new stuff is increasing. Since we have unlimited demand of stuff, our demand for money to purchase them is also unlimited.

Like kids love chocolates so much that they want mountains and jungles of chocolate, similarly our demand for stuff is so much that we want even bigger and larger mountains of stuff and money. But we have limited skills, limited energy & only 8 workings hours in a day to earn money.

Skills and Energy cannot be increased easy, so we find more and more ways to create more time, so that we can create more money.

Now we have longer sitting hours at office. We save time by eating on office desk, eating easy food, which is mostly fast food or junk food.

The hunger for money is still not done. There are people who are working while they are dining, while they are with their families and while they are about to sleep. Tough to believe, but there are people who have acquired the art of working in Toilet also. Now the research is going on, how to work, while we are sleeping & dreaming.

Work is mandatory part of life, but working only for earning & accumulating money and stuff need a urgent reconsideration.

Financial/Material wellness is already over pampered and loads of content is available about how to have more, earn more. However, what is lacking is how to bring prosperity.

Prosperity is not about how much we earn & accumulate. Prosperity is what we do with what we have. Some people summaries prosperity as minimalistic elegant living. Here are some tips:

· Eat less, eat good, work less work good, don’t purchase things which we are not sure when to use.

· Let’s not save too much for our future and our kids future, and most importantly, maintain well what we already have.

· Manage things systematically at home & at workplace. Bring order, dedicate space for keeping things, keep them organized. Dedicate definite time slot for maintaining stuff. Keep them clean, up to the mark and for sure, functional.

· Study and take advice from expert about how to keep things up to the mark, functional, systematic, organized and in order.

The moment we start taking a good care of things, we think twice before purchasing new stuff.

Taking care of things is considered to be a type of mediation. Another important way to bring prosperity is by building saving mentality. Save money, avoid wastage, save food, avoid wastage, save electricity, avoid wastage, save water, avoid wastage and so on. Warren Buffet says that saving money is a bigger art than earning money.

Bring up practises to reuse & recycle. This may look like a pro-nature thought process, but in long term, this style of thinking will make our life prosperous.

WHAT IS SOCIAL WELLNESS?

Social Wellness is less popular component than financial/material wellness, but still heavily in focus.

People are really concern about their position, status, reputation in society. Most of the money earned by us is utilized in purchasing stuff which tries to demonstrate our improved social status. However, social wellness is not about our pompous position, status, reputation in society which we are building up by showing more gadgets & stuff on and around us.

Social Wellness is how we are contributing to build a better society.

Social wellness begins from taking a good care of family members. Ask ourselves, are we giving enough time for health and happiness of our family members? Are we giving enough time to our parents, our spouse and our kids? Do we have a responsible behaviour towards them? We might be spending lot of money in purchasing stuff for them, but are we giving time to them for their personal care? This need some thinking, serious thinking. Personal care doesn’t mean taking family for outing and outstation trips during holidays and vacations. That is also needed, but that is not enough. Personal care means, our care & concern on day today basis.

Everyday spending some good time with family members. Asking everyone gently if there is some task to be done, if our attention is needed in some specific area. At times careful listening is the best thing we can do for the people we care. The next step towards social wellness is our behaviour with people who are providing various services to us.

Our care-taker, cook, driver, servant, security guard, carpenter, electrician, cobbler, sweeper, the newspaper boy, the postman and so many more people are serving us. Our behaviour to them counts a lot.

While we may not be affected by these people directly, but our family is influenced by them, specially our kids. Our behaviour to them teaches a lot to our kids. There is an old saying that our kids learn less from what we say and more from what we do.

The next step towards social wellness is our behaviour with our neighbourhood.

A good smile, a good greeting, some exchange of sweets and gifts during festival is a good start.

Social Wellness also accounts our interactions with strangers on day today basis. A genuine smile, sorry, thank-you, excuse me, may I help you etc are couple of words which can really bring difference. While this all may not matter much to us directly, but it certainly affects our family, people surrounding us and hence impacting us indirectly.

WHAT IS PHYSICAL WELLNESS?

Health, fitness, stamina etc account for physical wellness. Most of us know the importance of it, but we take it for granted.

Exercise, Yoga, jogging, running, swimming, dance, aerobics etc are much talked about but a very few practices it on daily basis.

A dedicated time given for health is better investment than investing money in banks and properties. If health is not saved timely, all our saving goes in saving our health at later stage.

There is a possibility that doing exercise or yoga on daily basis might be a boring thing,

so, another way of maintaining good health is by dancing. This is not boring and it really helps to keep us healthy.

Another way is to go for walk with family members, friends and colleagues. Yet another way is to go for badminton, table tennis or some other sports with friends and family members. This way we are not just staying healthy, we are also taking good care of our social wellness. It’s like two birds with one stone.

WHAT IS INTELLECTUAL WELLNESS?

Intellectual wellness is being well aware about various information related to our wellbeing. It includes knowledge, thinking, reasoning, calculating, analysing, decision making etc.

Intellectual wellness is critically important in our job, in our profession and in our career growth. This is perfectly covered in our education system.

However, earning bread and butter is one dimension only. Other dimension of intellectual wellness is leading a good personal & social life. It also includes our moral responsibility towards family, society, nation, nature and our own health.

This all is mostly missed out in our conventional education system. Most of us have little knowledge about how to live a good life as an individual, as a family member and as a citizen.

Without this kind of knowledge, our intellectual wellness is incomplete.

To complete that, we need to acquire knowledge and skill for better living and being more responsible towards ourselves, our family, society, nation and nature.

WHAT IS EMOTIONAL WELLNESS?

Feelings, Emotions, mood etc account for Emotional Wellness. In the modern lifestyle feelings & emotions are considered to be unimportant part of life. It is left to social media and movies to decide what kind of emotion should we have.

For home and work, emotions and feelings have hardly any value. However, what most of the people don’t know that emotion cause action. What we do is mostly because what we feel about something. It is applicable 24x7x365 on each and every person.

We may find many big and strong people saying that emotions and feelings have hardly any value in life, but if we give a closer look, we will see cracks in their personal life. These cracks are because of lack of emotional wellness.

The root cause is that we do things either because they make us happy, or to safe guard ourselves from some insecurity.

Happiness driven actions create a happier life, better health, better social connects. Fear and Insecurity driven actions cause stress, adversely effecting heath, personal life and social life. So how can we restore our emotional wellness?

To understand that, we first need to understand that happiness and fear, both are integral part of our lives.

Sometimes, there will be situations which will be opportunities to act happy & then there will be situations which will force us to act out of fear & insecurity.

That means, there is no escape to fear and insecurity. Hence it obvious to do several actions in a day which are driven by fear and insecurity. However. there are several actions we want to do every day which make us happy.

But most of the people skip them trying to utilize time in doing more things to overcome fear and insecurity some real, many predicted.

Consequently, we build more stress and more emotional disbalance, affecting our mood, our relationship and even our health. Though we don’t notice, it also affects our work efficiency and productivity.