Lifestyle of Total Wellness

Today I want to talk about the concept of a lifestyle of total wellness. This is a multifaceted philosophy of health and wellness consisting of more than just physical prowess.

A lifestyle of total wellness is one where we are feeling, functioning and thriving in multiple areas of our lives. This may also be referred to as the different dimensions of wellness.

Imagine this as a pie chart. Maybe you have 8 slices of the pie, and maybe you have six. The different slices could be

Physical Health
Emotional Health
Mental Health
Spiritual Health
Environmental Health
Relational Health

Two areas of our lives we are passionate about are our faith and fitness. Let's do a check, how is your faith or spiritual health? Do you feel healthy and thriving in that area? How about fitness or physical health? Perhaps the spiritual health part of your life is thriving, however, your physical health could use some work.

When it comes to total health, how are you feeling/doing in the other areas of health?

When I went to college, our health classes also included areas such as occupational health, financial health.

These are all areas of our lives, that each have an impact on the others. However, sometimes we may choose to be spending more time in one area than the other. This is where context and tradeoffs come in.

Perhaps you enjoy training, training is your passion, so other areas of health may not be as thriving as that area. Perhaps you enjoy being social and building relationships so physical health isn’t as full.

Also, within each of those areas, there could be subareas. Under physical health, maybe you train regularly, however, your sleep hygiene is poor so there is a lack of balance and recovery in your physical health.

Within each area, we are also all going to be different in the ways that we cultivate physical health, and even mental, emotional, and relational health. Each of us will enjoy working out in different ways. Each of us will prefer different ways to cultivate mental and emotional health, perhaps some of us enjoy journaling, or taking walks or other forms of self-care that contribute to positive mental and emotional health. Even relationally we may all be different, some of us may enjoy being more social, and others who are introverts are happy being a homebody!

I could continue to list scenarios and tradeoffs, however, the point is to think about health and wellness in a multifaceted way, encompassing various aspects of our lives, not just physical health, and not just training.

If you go and listen to the first season of our podcast, we discuss the different areas of health that are important to us.

Physical health, spiritual health, relational health, emotional health, and mental health.

When it comes to health, wellness, even fitness, are you looking at your health from a 1000ft view and considering all the other areas that will help you feel your best and thrive?

Assess and ask yourself how you are doing in each of the areas:

How are you doing physically?
How are you feeling emotionally?
How are you handling everything in life right now?
How is your support system?
How are your surroundings?

Look at the big picture, and if there are areas you want to zoom in on, identify those and some things you might like to take away to improve that area or add to improve that area. Making small beneficial improvements to one area can make improvements to other areas.

For me, if I am magnifying one small part of one aspect of my life I can start to lose proper perspective, and zooming out helps me to feel better and better assess everything as a whole.

I hope this helps you start to think about your health and wellness in a multifaceted way and helps you develop healthy habits across all areas of your life!

-Charissa

Charissa is a Performance Coach, Certified Nutrition Coach, Certified Fitness Specialist, Certified Personal Trainer, and holds a B.S. in Kinesiology. She also holds an M.A. in Higher Education Administration. She is a follower of Jesus, passionate about faith, fitness, nutrition, a lifestyle of total health, meditating, learning and growing!