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"You are very powerfull. Provided you know how powerful you are. -Yogi Bhajan

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"Life has no remote, Get up and change it yourself" -Mark A. Cooper

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"A healthy outside starts from the inside" -Robert Urich

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"Health is a state of body, Wellness is a state of being" -J. Stanford

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People often think about wellness in terms of physical health - nutrition, exercise, weight management, etc., but it is so much more. Wellness is a holistic integration of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being, fueling the body, engaging the mind, and nurturing the spirit ( 1). Although it always includes striving for health, it's more about living life fully ( 1), and is "a lifestyle and a personalized approach to living life in a way that... allows you to become the best kind of person that your potentials, circumstances, and fate will allow" ( 2).

Wellness necessitates good self-stewardship, for ourselves and for those we care about and who care about us. For those in the helping professions, such as ourselves in veterinary medicine, wellness is a professional as well as personal responsibility. In order to ensure high-quality patient and client services, we have an ethical obligation to attend to our own health and well-being ( 3). Sufficient self-care prevents us from harming those we serve, and according to Green Cross Standards of Self Care Guidelines, no situation or person can justify neglecting it ( 3).

Wellness encompasses 8 mutually interdependent dimensions: physical, intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual, vocational, financial, and environmental ( Table 1 ) ( 1). Attention must be given to all the dimensions, as neglect of any one over time will adversely affect the others, and ultimately one's health, well-being, and quality of life. They do not, however, have to be equally balanced ( 1). We should aim, instead, to strive for a "personal harmony" that feels most authentic to us ( 1). We naturally have our own priorities, approaches, and aspirations, including our own views of what it means to live life fully.

Table 1

Physical Dimension

Caring for your body to stay healthy now and in the future

Intellectual Dimension

Growing intellectually, maintaining curiosity about all there is to learn, valuing lifelong learning, and responding positively to intellectual challenges

Expanding knowledge and skills while discovering the potential for sharing your gifts with others

Emotional Dimension

Understanding and respecting your feelings, values, and attitudes

Appreciating the feelings of others

Managing your emotions in a constructive way

Feeling positive and enthusiastic about your life

Social Dimension

Maintaining healthy relationships, enjoying being with others, developing friendships and intimate relations, caring about others, and letting others care about you

Contributing to your community

Spiritual Dimension

Finding purpose, value, and meaning in your life with or without organized religion

Participating in activities that are consistent with your beliefs and values

Vocational Dimension

Preparing for and participating in work that provides personal satisfaction and life enrichment that is consistent with your values, goals, and lifestyle

Contributing your unique gifts, skills, and talents to work that is personally meaningful and rewarding

Financial Dimension

Managing your resources to live within your means, making informed financial decisions and investments, setting realistic goals, and preparing for short-term and long-term needs or emergencies

Being aware that everyone's financial values, needs, and circumstances are unique

Environmental Dimension

Understanding how your social, natural, and built environments affect your health and well-being

Being aware of the unstable state of the earth and the effects of your daily habits on the physical environment

Demonstrating commitment to a healthy planet

Making the right choices for health and well-being can be challenging. Although we know what is good for us and how we can do - and be - better, we may not act on it, or if we do, we may, in due course, slide back to familiar ways. Human behavior - what we do, how we do it, and whether we will succeed - is influenced by many factors, 2 of which are of particular relevance when it comes to wellness: self-regulation and habits.

Self-regulation

Self-regulation is central to effective human functioning ( 4). It is "our ability to direct our behavior and control our impulses so that we meet certain standards, achieve certain goals, or reach certain ideals" ( 5). It allows us to act in our short- and long-term best interests, consistent with our deepest values ( 6). There's just one limitation: self-regulation requires mental energy, and the brain is always looking for ways to conserve energy (i.e., save effort) ( 7, 8).

Habits

Habits, in contrast, require very little energy ( 7, 8). As Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business says, "Any behavior that can be reduced to a routine is one less behavior that we must spend time and energy consciously thinking about and deciding upon" ( 7). With the cognitive economy and performance efficiency of habits ( 9), the brain can conserve self-regulatory strength to focus on the important decisions in life ( 9), and free us to engage in thoughtful activities, such as reflecting on the past and planning for the future.

Habits are powerful. With about 40% of our everyday behavior repeated in the form of habits, they shape our very existence, and ultimately, our future ( 8). Habits, in fact, are key to wellness. For better or worse, habits very much influence health, well-being, and quality of life. If you are striving to improve these, you need to think about habits, because if you change your habits for the better, you change your life for the better ( 8).

Technically, a habit is "a behavior that is recurrent, is cued by a specific context, often happens without much awareness or conscious intent, and is acquired through frequent repetition" ( 8). It can be regarded as a formula (or "habit loop") that the brain automatically follows: "When I see cue, I will do routine in order to get a reward" ( 7). Studies indicate that once formed, habits become encoded in brain structures and can never truly be eradicated - only replaced with stronger habits ( 7). That's why they are so difficult to change. It's not just a matter of will-power (i.e., self-regulation); it's a matter of rewiring the brain. To change a habit, you need to create new routines: Keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine ( 7).

Inserting new routines is not easy. Despite knowing what's good for us and best intentions, habits tend to keep us doing what we always do ( 10). They are difficult to change - any of us can attest to this. But we can maximize the probabilities for success with 2 essentials: self-awareness and strategies. Both are indispensable to successful habit formation ( 8).

Self-awareness

Change becomes much more achievable if you pay attention to who you are and insert routines that take advantage of your strengths, tendencies, and aptitudes. With self-awareness, you can cultivate the habits that work for you. Consider, for instance, differences in circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythms reflect our natural tendencies for sleeping and waking and influence our energy and productivity at different times in the day ( 11). The odds of success to improve your fitness won't increase if, for example, you decide to rise an hour earlier to exercise each day when you happen to be a "night owl" rather than "morning lark." Self-awareness includes knowledge about other aspects of self as well, such as whether you are a marathoner, sprinter, or procrastinator; under- or over-buyer; simplicity or abundance lover; finisher or opener; and familiarity or novelty lover ( 8). It also includes whether you are promotion- or prevention-focused, and whether you like taking small or big steps ( 8).

Strategies

Change also becomes more achievable if you choose strategies that enhance your chance for success. Such strategies include monitoring; scheduling; investing in systems of accountability; abstaining; increasing or decreasing convenience; planning safeguards; detecting rationalizations and false assumptions; using distractions, rewards, and treats; pairing activities; and beginning with habits that directly strengthen self-control ( 8). Most successful habit change requires the coordination of multiple strategies to establish a single new behavior ( 8), and new habits, on average, take 66 days to form ( 12), so the more strategies used, the better.

Change your habits, change your life

Sometimes change takes a long time. Sometimes it requires repeated experiments and failures. But for ongoing betterment, the attempts are unquestionably worthwhile and one success often leads to another. When thinking about habits, wellness, and the health, well-being, and quality of life to which you aspire, consider the following: "Are you going to accept yourself or expect more from yourself?" "Are you going to embrace the present or consider the future?" and "Are you going to care about yourself or overlook yourself?"

Wellness is a dynamic, ever-changing, fluctuating process ( 13). It is a lifestyle, a personalized approach to living life in a way that allows you to become the best kind of person that your potentials, circumstances, and fate will allow. The past is history; the present and future lie in the choices you make today. Don't worry about getting it perfect; just get it going, and become the best kind of person you can be.

Footnotes

Use of this article is limited to a single copy for personal study. Anyone interested in obtaining reprints should contact the CVMA office ( gro.vmca-amvc@nothguorbh) for additional copies or permission to use this material elsewhere.

References

7. Duhigg C. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. New York, New York: Random House; 2012. [ Google Scholar]

8. Rubin G. Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives. Toronto, Ontario: Penguin Random House, Doubleday Canada; 2015. [ Google Scholar]

9. Wood W, Quinn JM, Kashy DA. Habits in everyday life: Thought, emotion, and action. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2002;83:1281-1297. [[ PubMed] Google Scholar]

11. Hamada T, LeSauter J, Venuti JM, Silver R. Expression of period genes: Rhythmic and nonrhythmic compartments of the suprachiasmatic nucleus pacemaker. J Neurosci. 2001;21:7742-7750. [[ PMC free article] [ PubMed] Google Scholar]

Articles from The Canadian Veterinary Journal are provided here courtesy of Canadian Veterinary Medical Association

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Dimensions of wellness: Change your habits, change your life

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People often think about wellness in terms of physical health - nutrition, exercise, weight management, etc., but it is so much more. Wellness is a holistic integration of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being, fueling the body, engaging the mind, and nurturing the spirit ( 1).

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Environmental Wellness is Important and Inspires us to live a lifestyle by being respective to our surroundings

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Eating Healthy is important to our bodies of course and ensures that your body stays as healthy as possible to live a better life.

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By Carolyn Suerth Hudson, RDN, LD
July 17, 2018

Who wouldn't want to know about a "revolutionary way of being more clever, more attractive, slimmer, happier, healthier, and a way to ward off cancer?" The secret? SLEEP! This is the way a British newspaper described the book Why We Sleep by Dr. Matthew Walker. Startlingly, two thirds of adults fail to get the recommended eight hours of sleep. Even more startling is that a lack of sleep weakens your immune system, more than doubles your risk of cancer, and increases your risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, obesity and depression. The statistics that Dr. Walker shared in his book are astounding. For instance, sleep can slow the onset of Alzheimer's by 5 to 10 years. A group of male workers sleeping six hours or less were followed for 14 years, and the findings showed that these men were 400 - 500 % more likely to suffer one or more cardiac arrests than those who slept more than six hours. Even our immune system is weakened. Those who sleep less than five hours a night on average caught 50% more infections.

Another finding was that a lack of sleep slows your metabolism and causes your body to lose muscle mass rather than fat. Maybe we should be rethinking our 6:00 AM workouts and stay in bed for an extra hour or two?

How to Get More Sleep

Those are pretty convincing statistics, but getting that much sleep can be hard, due to busyness or problems getting to sleep or staying asleep. If you aren't getting good quality 7 ½ - 9 hours of sleep every night, here are the tips we share with nutrition counseling clients that could help.

Try adding a small healthy bedtime snack to help maintain your blood sugar throughout the night. Without it, l unbeknownst to you, low blood sugar could cause you to wake up. A small apple and natural peanut butter could help you sleep through the night.

Add 400 - 600 mg of magnesium glycinate before bed. Taking magnesium at bedtime relaxes your entire body and can help you fall and stay asleep.

Decrease or eliminate caffeine in all forms.

Create better sleep habits:
- Have a consistent sleep schedule
- Go to bed early enough to get 7-9 hours of sleep
- Turn down the thermostat
- Take a bath
- Turn off electronics at least an hour prior to bed

Getting a good night's sleep may not sound revolutionary, but given the risks of being chronically sleep deprived, carving out time for sleep may be the single most important thing you can do for your health.

To learn more about sleep, listen to recent Dishing Up Nutrition podcasts entitled Why We Sleep Book Reviewor Why Am I Tired All The Time? For more help, consider making an appointment in-person or by phone with one of our nutritionists to learn how you can get a good night's sleep. To hear Dr. Walker himself, here's a great segment from WHYY's Fresh Air program, Sleep Scientist Warms Against Walking Through Life 'In An Underslept State.'

About the author
View all posts by Carolyn Suerth Hudson, RDN, LD
Carolyn understands the impact nutrition has on health and well-being both professionally and personally. Working in a remote town in northern Canada, she saw the impact poor nutrition had on the health of people there. She then became committed to learning more and decided to pursue a degree in nutrition. Carolyn is a registered and licensed dietitian through the Minnesota Board of Nutrition and Dietetics. She received her BASc in Nutrition from Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and completed her internship at Toronto General Hospital. Carolyn is a past president of the Minnesota Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and past director on the board of the Dietitians of Canada.

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By Carolyn Suerth Hudson, RDN, LD July 17, 2018 Who wouldn't want to know about a "revolutionary way of being more clever, more attractive, slimmer, happier, healthier, and a way to ward off cancer?" The secret? SLEEP! This is the way a British newspaper described the book Why We Sleep by Dr. Matthew Walker.

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Spiritual wellness involves our values and beliefs that provide purpose in our lives.

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Physical Wellness promotes proper care of our bodies for optimal health and functioning.

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Your spirit, mind, body and entertainment are big factors to keep you healthy

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Teen Wellness can relate to us

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A healthy life for you means a healthy community overall.