The thing about wellness is, it requires effort! So how can we engage in ways that don’t make us nuts and jack up our nervous system whilst trying to be “well!”
The health & wellness industry is gigantic and powerful. On a daily basis you can hear their loud voices saying, THIS is what you need to care for yourself for optimal health! Naming what supplements we should take, what ways to get the best sleep, what foods to avoid and include, which exercise routine is best and on and on and on.
Unfortunately one of the toxicities of these relentless campaigns and messages, in our ‘get ahead and be beautiful’ culture, is that we often end up feeling less than. We’re behind the game and “if only” we could buy this or make time for that or get the right mattress or gym membership, “I could be…” what exactly, healthy & well?
There’s such a deep psychological nature to marketing and no I am not trained in marketing, but I am, in psychology. And as a “wellness” health educator and mindfulness coach, yes, I am loosely in this club. (Ugh) So bear with me here as I offer another perspective on what it means to be positively engaged with your own health & wellness.
Here’s the down and dirty deal friends.
We think primarily about wellness as the pursuit or the action part of achieving a “look good and feel good” state of health. That state of health includes EVERYTHING—your bodies health and your minds, as well as emotionally and if your spiritual, then that too.
No doubt we need to be healthy and thinking about good health, to continue to live the life we want to be living. (And of course to continue the species although that’s a debatable good idea!)
But it can be ridiculously easy to feel like our wellness goals and efforts are just one more column for self-improvement or achievement on our weekly productivity spreadsheet. However, for some spreadsheet loving, highly structured and organized people, it works. If you fall into that category please keep reading—we need you in this conversation!
But what if we strip wellness of it’s “ness” (which heartily implies the action or effort) and work with the word, well. What if we reframed our wellness efforts as the act of living well and feeling well. Asking ourselves each day, how can I live well today?
