How do you define wellness? Is wellness as simple as eating right and getting active? Is it the balance you find between working and relaxing? Is it the general pursuit of happiness? Wellness is all of the above, and then some. Wellness is not a monolith, it is not a singular agreed-upon experience. Wellness is a conscious and deliberate set of actions from a person to maintain a satisfying and harmonious life, as they desire it. It sounds simple, but if it was, we wouldn’t be in the middle of a mental health crisis right now. 45% of Gen Z has been diagnosed with a form of anxiety or depression. Society is becoming harder to navigate and the pursuit of individual happiness is necessary now more than ever.
The ongoing global mental health crisis can be linked to a myriad of factors. Inflation, war, poverty, injustice, all of that coupled with the overwhelming waves of information that we receive from the computers in our pockets that we call phones. To be “well” is to be in a state of living where you generally feel good or safe. Therefore, to be unwell is to be the opposite. If more and more people and our emerging global society are feeling unsafe and unwell, then we’re doomed to collapse before ever forming a platform to stand on. Wellness is an obligation that we owe to ourselves and each other as members of society. We are all equally responsible for creating a “well” world. For that to happen, we must pursue wellness in our own lives.
Consider yourself at your best and your worst. You’re not your best when you're overstressed. You might be prone to snapping at people or being harsher on yourself than necessary. Have you ever volunteered to do something and then not accomplish it at the level you intended or promised? It makes you and the people you want to help feel worse in the long run. Many of us have responsibilities that force us to consider the needs of others before ourselves, such as our children or the communities that we lead. To properly consider others, we have to be capable of properly considering ourselves and maintaining our dimensions of health and wellness.
With that in mind, how do we define wellness as a collective goal for us to pursue? The truth is that wellness is closely linked with happiness, and happiness is subjective. Our individual definitions of wellness are bound to be different. The principles that define wellness are the same, and those principles are what we need to operate around as individuals and members of society. As individuals, wellness is the set of behaviors we associate with our identity. Within society and as members of a group, wellness is how closely we adhere to our group identity. For us all to peacefully co-exist, we have to create a group identity as human beings that is inclusive of the diverse nature of humanity itself.
The difference between “health” and “wellness” is that health is your ability to survive and wellness is your happiness about the quality of your survival. You can be “healthy” and not happy, and vice-versa. The abstract nature of happiness makes it much harder to conceptualize a consistent method of wellness assessment unless you utilize frameworks and theories like the 8 Dimensions of Wellness to make sense of the human experience. We are all being assessed by the same scale when physical health is the focus, but physical health is just one dimension of many. The Moment of Clarity Method is to define wellness based on what each dimension means to YOU as an individual.
So I ask again, how do we define wellness as a collective goal for us to individually pursue? I propose that we take a step back and embrace introspection to address that question as individuals before projecting it onto others. Introspection is the examination of self. We have to be able to define ourselves to empathize with others and their individual differences. We associate self-care with wellness, but are we taking care of ourselves by distracting ourselves from our responsibilities and problems? We need to redefine self-care to associate it with acts that cultivate moments of clarity in our lives so that we can do what we need to do as individuals to make us happy, regardless of how it might differ from others. Then we build from there to adapt our definition of happiness to our neighboring human beings.
Your Wellness Identity is whatever you choose to define yourself through your values and behavior. Think about the differences between a bodybuilder and a gymnast. One trains to lift plates of iron twice their own weight, whereas the other has trained to soar through the air as if they weighed nothing. As individuals, they’re both pursuing their ideal Physical Wellness Identity, they just define it differently. Extend this idea to the other 7 Dimensions of Wellness and you can begin to understand why the human experience and the pursuit of wellness will look different for everyone. Health gives us an idea of what set of behaviors are necessary to survive, but wellness is defined by the differences in how we pursue health to be our fully authentic selves
Wellness is a human right, not a luxury or a privilege that should be restricted by social constructs and institutionalized marginalization. Moment of Clarity Wellness was founded to help establish our namesake, a moment of clarity in your individual life and for the emerging global society. Wellness is the result of an individual being empowered to pursue their highest potential. Our society is well when everyone is given an equal and equitable chance in this pursuit. Visit mocwellness.com for our Wellness Offerings designed to merge the actual self with the ideal self, like the Moment of Clarity Wellness Journal and our related services and workshops. Follow us @mocwellness on all social media platforms for free Wellness content. Welcome to the Wellness Revolution