What is with all of the "hoopla" surrounding health-wellness these days? Employers are providing health-wellness programs for their employees, doctors are creating health-wellness plans for their patients, school menus and physical education classes have changed to incorporate health-wellness into the children’s school day. What is health-wellness anyway and why has it become so important.
Health-wellness is a comprehensive and proactive approach to the health of the mind, body, and spirit. This approach recognizes that these three-healths (mind, body, spirit) are inter-twined and overall health suffers if even one of these isn’t healthy. This approach also recognizes the importance of starting a health-wellness plan as early in life as possible in order to extract the full benefits of a health-wellness program.
Ideally, the moment a baby is born, they should be put on a health-wellness plan because starting them out this way puts them on track for better health throughout their life time. But everyone can benefit from a health-wellness program without regard to what age they begin using a health-wellness plan.
Gone are the days when we just sat around, waiting for age and disease to take us from this earth, thinking there was nothing we could do to help make all of our years the healthiest and best they could be. We can live long, and also live well by getting involved in and acting to improve and protect our own health. As part of your health-wellness plan you will have the links to all of the resources you need for the health of your mind, body, and spirit. Think of these as health-maps. Each map charts out a course for you to follow in order to find complete health.
Some of these maps contain the various people who can help you in being proactive, about your health. Some of these helpful people include: your family doctor, exercise instructors, spiritual advisors, and mental health coaches, all working in conjunction with you, to help you have the complete health-wellness you desire.
Other maps contain the tools you need to ensure that all three of your healths (mind, body, and spirit) are at their best, and allows you to keep an eye out for potential threats to any of your healths and to act to intervene on behalf of your health before these threats can do potentially long-term damage to your health.
Health-wellness has become important to schools, companies, the government, and citizens because of the drain that a sick population puts on our country as a whole. Treating diseases and providing nursing care to those who cannot care for themselves and cannot themselves afford to pay for nursing care is expensive The deteriorating health of our nation’s people have driven up the costs of health care and health insurance rates so much that many people can no longer afford medical insurance for themselves and their families. Schools in which many students are often sick and out of school, lose the funding needed for after-school sports and other educational programs. Our workforce suffers with high-absenteeism and loss of productivity as the health of workers deteriorates. We will become less able to compete on a global-scale if we don’t all become more involved in the state of our health, and finding the funding needed to help those who cannot afford such preventative health measures such as yearly medical exams.
The time to become concerned about the health of your mind, body, and spirit is now! We each have a responsibility to become proactive not only about our own health, but also for the health of our country today and in the future.
