Does it seem impossible to live healthy always? How is it possible to live healthy if you have a chronic disease? Is healthy living possibly more than whether you have a disease or not?
Living healthy refers to how you manage your health in your mind, body, and spirit. As a nurse-patient advocate, I have witnessed people with serious illnesses live better and more meaningful lives than some that are extremely healthy and blessed with financial abundance. Why is this? It relates to the individual's overall level of wellness.
The World Health Organization defined health in 1948 as being “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. Later, Halbert Dunn, MD, head of U.S. Office of Vital Statistics, wrote a book called "High-Level Wellness". He writes about a definition of wellness to include the following core concepts:
Wellness is a continuum rather than a specific fixed state. All individuals, depending on their particular circumstances, are located somewhere along the continuum between death and wellness.
Wellness is a holistic approach to health, encompassing physical, mental, social, cultural and spiritual dimensions.
Mental wellness is the responsibility of the individual and cannot be delegated to someone else.
Wellness is about potential – it involves helping the individual move toward the highest state of wellbeing of which he or she is capable.
Self-knowledge and self-integration are the key to progress toward high-level wellness.”
Wellness has a history of being defined within a disease framework, meaning reducing health risks and preventing disease. Those are good goals, but it’s an outdated vision. A new vision has been articulated by a few innovators, including Wellness Inventory creator Dr. John Travis.
Even though people often lack physical symptoms, they may still be bored, depressed, tense, anxious, or simply unhappy with their lives. Such emotional states often set the stage for physical and mental disease.
For true whole person life-balance and wellbeing, you need to dive deeper. To understand all that creates and supports your current state of health, you have to look below the surface of your wellness state. Science has demonstrated that our conscious and unconscious states can impact our mental and physical health.
The goal of our Healthy Living...Always program is to inspire people to be well and achieve optimal quality of life, which goes beyond treatment for illnesses. There is a wellness inventory framework that we use as a foundation to facilitate you to identify areas you want to change and improve. It provides many tools to enhance your state of mind, body, and spirit. We believe everyone has more internal powers to achieve improved wellbeing and move towards Healthy Living ....Always.
The biggest struggle you can encounter in moving towards improved health and wellbeing is making changes to your lifestyle. Having a coach at your side, who has unconditional positive regard for you and a belief that you have the capacity to change, is key to moving forward. There are stages of change that one needs to go through to make a lasting change. A coach that doesn't "tell" you what to do but rather partners with you to elicit your choices in making the change that works for you is key.