Do you wake up on the right side or the wrong side of the bed each morning?  Do you wake up excited about the day or are you just putting one foot in front of the other? Are you tired of everyone telling you should be happy or upbeat?  Do the massive amount of tips for feeling good and healthy leave you high and dry? 

There’s an answer to that!  Be yourself, know thyself and accept yourself.  You are a unique and wonderfully made individual with your own path to greatness. This simply means, get to know who you are and what you want to be and do.   Take an overall inventory of yourself and find the magic inside.  Be patient with the process. 

The Wellness Inventory process allows you to explore the many wonders of you as a whole person.  You can take a spin around the wheel of wellness and find a deeper understanding of what works for you and what motivates you to improve.  Improving your overall wellbeing, can help you stay healthy or if you are challenged with a chronic illness, it can help you manage it better.

There can be so many factors to deal with when one has a chronic disease such as diabetes and heart disease, to name a few. Oftentimes, patients can find themselves overloaded with information from their physician, from Internet searches and from family and friends. This can be overwhelming and can stop a patient in their tracks. Which way should they turn and whom do they listen to? Primarily, it is essential to first listen to your physician, who is the expert on the chronic disease and is focused on helping manage the illness with needed treatments and medications. 

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.