No matter a person’s age, it is crucial to focus on health and wellness. Everything you do each day impacts your health in some way. Keeping that in mind, ask yourself what you are doing to meet the five dimensions of wellness on a routine basis and how you’re creating a life filled with opportunity and happiness as a result.
How to Focus on Health and Wellness
What goes into living a life of health and wellness? At Wickshire Senior Living, we believe five dimensions of wellness impact a person’s life in multiple ways. Those five areas include:
- Physical health
- Emotional health
- Social health
- Spiritual health
- Intellectual health
In each area, you should be focusing on ways to be healthy. For example, with physical health, you may know the importance of eating a balanced diet full of nutrients, maintaining a healthy weight, and heading in to see your doctor once a year for a checkup. Emotional health focuses on the importance of maintaining your mental health, which means expressing your thoughts and feelings and communicating your needs openly.
Social health relates to your engagement with other people and how much time you spend socializing with friends or family. Do you meet new people who can further stimulate your brain and bring interest into your life? Spiritual health can be about religion, but it doesn’t always have to be. In all cases, it is about being satisfied with your place in the world as a whole. Finally, intellectual health is the way you constantly feed your brain new experiences and material so it can continuously learn and grow.
Building a Healthy Lifestyle as Older Adults
All of those health and wellness factors sound good, but putting them into practice can be much more challenging and may even seem impossible to some older adults. How can you manage it all? Here are a few strategies to help you.
- Interact with friends each day in some way. That could be a phone call, meeting someone in a grocery store, or engaging with others in a community program.
- Stimulate your mind by engaging in educational opportunities for adults or diving into books that interest you. Learn the other perspective of a topic you’re passionate about exploring.
- Get outdoors and go for a walk each day. That’s good for physical health, and if you bring a friend with you, that’s a good step towards social health as well.
- Always focus on opening up and talking to others about the way you feel. If you don’t have a friend to do this with, turn to a counselor to ensure your mental health is maintained.
- Seek out new enlightenment in religion or meditate to learn more about your spirituality and belief system.