What Does Wellness Mean and 7 Ways to Incorporate It Into Your Life

What does wellness mean? You’ll hear people mention it in any setting, whether at work or home. With mental health awareness at the forefront of organizations’ employee programs, it has become a health necessity many want to integrate into their life. 

Learn what wellness means, its importance and the domains of health it covers.

What Does Wellness Really Mean?

People generally define wellness as placing their health on priority, and it means a different thing from one person to another. It’s often influenced by our habits and how these behaviors shape our health and life. For instance, waking up well-rested and happy in the morning is a form of lifestyle wellness.

Health consists of different tenets, such as mental, physical, emotional and other domains. Wellness is about creating and building positive habits around these health facets to thrive as an individual and live a happy life. 

Importance of Wellness

It’s a subset of overall well-being essential to living a fulfilling life. Its main benefit is to increase your quality of life, which others find hard to do as it entails letting go of unhealthy habits they’ve become familiar with for years. 

Wellness is committing to actions that make you happy and enhance your quality of life. For instance, if exercising at the gym every day makes you feel good, this habit fuels your physical health.

Six Dimensions of Wellness

Achieving a positive lifestyle seems easy, but it requires intentional effort to transform yourself one step at a time. The environment you live in and current circumstances can impact your wellness. You must look at areas of your life to gauge whether you have a lifestyle supporting it. 

• Physical: It focuses on enhancing physical health through proper nutrition, sleep and exercise.

• Mental: You can achieve mental soundness through creativity, reducing stress and engaging in activities that stimulate your mind.

• Emotional: It equips you with the ability to express yourself through various avenues in a healthy manner and acknowledge and understand others’ feelings. 

• Spiritual: Most people believe in a higher purpose and spiritual wellness involves finding meaning in human existence.

• Social: It’s about your connection with others and how interactions can nurture your life. 

• Environmental: You’re conscious of your choices and how these can affect the environment. Positive actions lead to enhanced ecological benefit.

The wellness wheel isn’t limited to these six dimensions, as it’s unique for each individual and what’s essential to them. Others may find their financial status or occupational situation contributors to their wellness and want to focus on them. 

Is Wellness the Same as Well-being?

Wellness is a subset of well-being and only a single component of a joyful and thriving life. When you have the right lifestyle to propel it, the outcome contributes to overall well-being. 

Workplaces are settings where it’s broadly discussed and physical health is closely associated with mental welfare. Employee situations, like heavy workloads and longer work hours, can result in stress and impact the employees’ mental health. The negative outcome ascends to the business in the form of poor productivity and burnout. 

That’s why leaders strive to create and launch wellness benefits, such as flexible work hours, free meals and many others, to promote employee work-life balance.

How to Integrate Wellness Into Your Daily Life

The good news is you can take control of your health by implementing and following habits that will inch you closer to happiness and a better quality of life. Here are some general tips to try.

1. Enjoy the Outdoors

Sunlight and fresh air are two little things people take for granted, but they have excellent benefits for your mood and health. According to experts, being near green spaces can reduce stress and muscle tension and help you relax. It can also lower your risk for heart disease. When outdoors, you often get motivated to engage in physical activities. 

2. Exercise

Make the morning visit to the park a fitness activity and you’ll enjoy it more. Whether you walk, jog or run around any green space, you can gain wellness benefits from any form of movement.

3. Practice Gratitude

Being thankful for what you have puts your mindset in a good state. Gratitude is a powerful emotion you want to cultivate in your life. Studies found people who express their gratitude have a higher gray matter volume in the right inferior temporal gyrus. It also is a natural antidepressant.

4. Get Good Quality Sleep

Many people developed poor sleeping habits when technology became accessible to everyone. One of the reasons is they can’t disconnect from their screens, which impacts sleep and sleep quality.

Examine your sleep habits and environment and determine what factors lead to poor sleep quality or deprivation. If you use your phone before bedtime, set a no-screen policy at a certain time at night. 

5. Unplug From Devices

Besides sleep, being glued to your phone also affects your mental health. Most of the content you consume is from your phone. If you often find yourself slipping into a spiral of unhelpful videos on social media, unplugging from the screen can greatly benefit your mental welfare. 

5. Practice Mindfulness

Like practicing gratitude, mindfulness also has incredible merits to mental wellness. If you sometimes have toxic thoughts that make you stressed and sad, try meditation or breathing techniques to control your mind.

6. Stay Hydrated

Hydration is essential to physical health as the body is mainly made up of water. Women have about 55% of fluids in their bodies, while men have 60%. Every time you move, sweat or pee, the body releases water. To support the body’s function, you must replenish the lost fluids in the body by drinking water. 

Leverage Good Habits to Improve Wellness

Positive habits are the foundation for a vibrant and better quality of life. Start building them to support your wellness. Examine your lifestyle and behaviors and find which areas can be improved. 

What does wellness mean to you? Is it emotional stability? Is it a more active lifestyle and a healthier diet? By asking yourself these questions, you can zoom in on one aspect of your life and make the optimistic changes necessary to turn it in the right direction.