The wheel of wellness is a helpful tool when it comes to looking at the various parts of your life. When you think of your health, your happiness, and your work-life balance, do you think of them all being connected? We don’t always realize how the different areas in our life are interconnected, and when one area is thrown off, the other areas are affected. If your routine has ever been out of sync, you have probably seen how that has had an effect on something else. If your work routine is thrown off, that might affect your workout routine. Let’s say the environment around you feels cluttered and unorganized. The chaos in your kitchen may deter you from cooking a healthy meal and have you just picking up something from the drive thru instead. When we realize how much everything in our life is connected in some way, we start to be more mindful of our overall wellness when it comes to making life changes. The wheel of wellness is a great visual model that highlights seven key areas in your daily living. This model is here to help us learn how to be mindful in taking care of ourselves.
Our Emotional Wellness
One key sliver of the wheel of wellness is emotional wellness. This area highlights your emotional health by having you examine how you are feeling in your daily life. Some indicators of emotional unhealthiness are feelings of high stress, anxiety, and not much motivation to do your daily activities. However, if you feel happy and energized the majority of the time, that can be an indicator of having positive emotional wellness. Many times, we have a mixture of stress, happiness, anxiety, and energy. It’s helpful to examine what you feel like most of your days, and what might be causing you to feel the way that you do.
Our Intellectual Wellness
Our brains enjoy being stimulated. It’s important that our brain is engaging in challenging work, exciting activities, and feeling rewarded by productivity. When we are using our brain power to work towards something, our brain feels stimulated and contributes to intellectual wellness on the wheel of wellness.
Our Physical Wellness
It’s common to talk about how exercising is good for our bodies. However, it contributes to more than just tone muscles. Physical activity can help reduce stress by releasing endorphins after a good workout. Physical wellness is also more than just exercise. It is also about what you are eating, how well you are sleeping, and how well your physical body is functioning. If you have headaches often, or your immune system is weak, these could contribute to the overall wellness of your physical body. When your physical wellness is not at its best, it can affect the other areas on the wheel of wellness in your life.
Our Social Wellness
Although everyone’s level of social needs may vary, it is still necessary for our life to include socializing with other people. Having a support system of friends, family, and coworkers can help you from experiencing feelings of loneliness and isolation. Having people in your life that you can talk to, confide in, and laugh with can help keep your social wellness positive.
Our Environmental Wellness
Clutter and chaos can make us feel stressed and overwhelmed. What does your home look like? Is your desk at work a mess keeping you from being productive? It’s also important to spend some time outside breathing in fresh air and getting vitamin D from the sun. If your environment around you feels unorganized, it might make other areas of your life feel unorganized too.
Our Financial Wellness
Money isn’t everything, but it is necessary in order to pay bills, your rent, and a car payment. If you have debt from your student loans, that can feel like a weight on your shoulders. Not being able to pay for the necessary things in life can cause feelings of stress and anxiety in your daily life. It’s possible that you just have a job that pays your bills, but doesn’t bring you much fulfillment. Financial wellness can easily affect other areas on the wheel of wellness.
Our Spiritual Wellness
Spiritual wellness may look a little different for each person, but is still a necessary part of the wheel of wellness. If you are religious, do you feel connected with what you believe? If you aren’t religious, what does it look like to practice your morals and ethics? Some other ways to practice spiritual wellness might be prayer, meditation, rituals, and yoga.
Your Wellness Wheel
It’s important to take time and look at each area of your wheel of wellness. You can think about how you are feeling emotionally, intellectually, and financially, and how that may affect you physically, socially, and spiritually. You can also see how your environment might affect your intellectual productivity. The wheel of wellness is a great tool to help you understand more about you and your overall wellness.