Physical Wellness
Your physical health is reflected by how you relate to the earth, to the elements, to biology, and the other pillars of health. These components of the physical involve nourishing your body, engaging in activities, getting adequate sleep, and getting regular physicals and labs to know what’s happening on the inside of your body. Please note that physical health is far more than just diet and exercise.
Sedentary and fast paced lifestyles and poor nutrition and inadequate sleep can negatively impact the other pillars. Such effects include diminished immune functioning, difficulty focusing, being easily irritated, feeling on-edge, relationship issues, low self-esteem, anxiety, and depression.
Mental Wellness
According to the CDC, the most common mental health issues among American adults are depression and anxiety. That’s right, most people experience them more so than the severe mental illnesses shown on the news. Life and intrapersonal stressors coupled with inadequate coping skills can lead to anxiousness and depressed mood. And by the way, depression and anxiety contribute to or trigger health conditions like high blood pressure and weaken your immune system, leaving you vulnerable to viruses and other pathogens.
Seeking help from professional mental health providers, your medical doctor, or your primary healthcare provider can help you learn how to cope better with stress, grief, trauma, and other matters that hinder you from achieving your best mental health.
Emotional Wellness
Emotion regulation is critical to total health. Managing life’s emotional ups and downs in a way that enables you to maintain a healthy balance and learn from the experience that triggered the emotions is emotional wellness. It may seem that the easiest thing to do is to wait for the ‘negative feelings’ to pass or to ignore them. However, ignoring your emotions, allowing them to fester, or lashing out at others does not enhance your emotional health. Either one of those actions, in fact, makes things worse–the situation that triggered your reaction remains unresolved and problematic.
The goal is to manage and control your emotions, to regulate them. Allowing them to control you damages the other pillars—sleep and appetite disturbance, unstable relationships, excessive worry, loneliness, disconnection from your Personal Truth.
Spiritual Wellness
How well connected you are to your Personal Truth, to your family, to your community, and to your Creator defines your spiritual health. Living mindfully in the present moment enables your intuition, your innate Knowing, to guide you to profound understandings and to the best choices available to you at any given moment. This deepens your experience of joy and your relationship to self and others.
The absence of joy and authentic love will most certainly lead to depression, anxiety, illness, anger, and/or aggressiveness which negatively impact the physical, mental, and emotional pillars of health.
Healthy Boundaries
Healthy boundaries are the foundation of health and happiness. Without them, achieving health in the other 4 pillars is improbable. You see, boundaries are your innate alarm system designed to protect you from harmful forces and boundaries are necessary for you to properly develop into your own unique self. You will not receive warning signals from your intuition when you’re in danger and you will be enmeshed with others if your boundaries are unhealthy.
Every aspect of health is heavily influenced by boundaries. They protect the integrity of your person by alerting you when physical/mental/emotional/spiritual danger is near, when your agreements are broken, when your expectations are unrealistic, when you lose yourself in another person, and when you are not living your Personal Truth.