Why You Should Concentrate on Wellness...Not Just Health

Wellness is a topic that many may not think of in total, but it encompasses the big picture. While health focuses on certain and rather specific aspects of how you live your life and what you can do to feel better, wellness is the whole enchilada. Wellness incorporates your physical and mental health, your emotional well being, and how you look, feel and perceive yourself and the world around you. Here we look at why concentrating on your wellness is more important than simply looking at your health as one step in the process.

7 Reasons Wellness Should Be Your Focus

1. Wellness encompasses everything. While health focuses on prevention of conditions or how you eat and exercise, wellness takes on everything. This brings elements such as mental and emotional well being, rather than just the physical and more obvious aspects. This is important to your longevity and how much you enjoy your overall life now and in the future.
2. Wellness goes above and beyond the minimal to get by. With health it is often about what you can do to get by or prevent certain conditions. For example, you are told to exercise at least three times a week as a minimum to ensure that you don’t gain undesirable weight and prevent the onset of health conditions. With wellness it is really more about how good exercise can make you feel and what it can do for you mentally and physically to ensure that you don’t get sick in the process.
3. Wellness doesn’t focus on restrictions, but rather what works best for you. Many times in health the focus is on eliminating things such as fat or sodium to ensure you don’t develop conditions such as high blood pressure or obesity. Wellness focuses in on foods or food groups that will allow you to look and feel better such as garlic or leafy greens. This is a more comprehensive approach that doesn’t deal so much with restrictions as recommendations.
4. Wellness looks at what you do in your life and weighs how it can benefit you. This means that you look at the big picture in terms of what you do for a living for example rather than simply saying reduce your stress. Wellness is about finding what you are passionate about and pouring your positive energy into it.
5. Wellness focuses on the positive rather than the negative. As wellness is about your overall well being and what your life means to your health and other factors, it looks at what will make you happy and bring you joy and a better quality of life rather than what you have to do to get there. Eliminating stress is important, but doing something that makes you truly happy makes more sense.
6. Wellness recognizes some alternative sources of well being. So things such as being outside or laughing daily come into play as a measure of how great your life is and how that can contribute to your well being. This means that measuring these things becomes equally as important as simply diet and exercise.
7. Wellness as a focus can lead to a better quality of life. Health is important, but if you have good health but aren’t happy then are you achieving the very best quality of life? If you focus your time and efforts on only what you need to do to be at an optimal weight or prevent disease, but not how happy your life makes you then are you really getting everything you want?

Being truly well and content requires more than just maintaining a good health and fitness routine. It requires attending to the whole self, and all aspects of it. When you do that, you will feel much bigger benefits than just the physical, and will be well positioned to live your best, true life. And that is the best reason of all!


A big thanks to Mary Ward for this post. It really makes you think huh? Mary blogs about various health care job issues, including how to study to obtain an online MHA.