A New Vision Of Wellness

old thread soon to be revised

A New Vision Of Wellness

• ** VOCATIONAL, SPIRITUAL, PHYSICAL, EMOTIONAL, SOCIAL, CULTURAL, INTELLECTUAL, ENVIRONMENTAL

 GLOSSARY OF WELLNESS AREAS
 WHAT IS WELLNESS AND 3 MAIN CONCEPTS COINED IN THE 1970’S
GLOSSARY of Wellness Areas
Glossary quoted from University of Miami

• ** Vocational Wellness is a fit between who you are called to be and what you are called to do. It is finding the place where your deep desires and gifts meet a need in the community. A “vocationally well” person expresses his or her values through paid and volunteer activities that are personally rewarding and that make a contribution to the well being of the community. Vocational wellness involves continually learning new skills and seeking challenges that lead to personal growth and a better world. Listening for and following your vocational calling is a lifelong process.
• Spiritual Wellness is the quest for meaning, value, and purpose resulting in hope, joy, courage and gratitude. It encourages one to develop a personal faith and to seek God in all things. It is the discovery and incorporation of a personal set of values and beliefs that defines the person, places the individual in relation to the larger community, and engages a faith that promotes justice.
• Physical Wellness -Physical Wellness means respecting and taking care of your body. It is applying your knowledge, motivation, and skills toward enhancing personal fitness and health. It is making healthy and positive choices regarding a variety of issues including nutrition, physical activity, sexuality, sleep, the use of alcohol and other drugs, self-care, and the appropriate use of health care systems.
• Emotional Wellness is striving to meet emotional needs constructively. It is the ability to respond resiliently to emotional states and the flow of life events. It is realistically dealing with a variety of situations and learning how your behaviors, thoughts, and feelings affect one another and your decisions. It is taking responsibility for your own behavior and responding to challenges as opportunities. An emotionally well person is self-aware and self-accepting while continuing to develop as a person. Emotional wellness is the ability to form interdependent relationships based on mutual commitment, trust, honesty, and respect.
• Social Wellness -It includes promoting a healthy living environment, encouraging effective communication and mutual respect among community members, and seeking positive interdependent relationships with others. It is being a person for others and allowing others to care for you. It is also recognizing the need for leisure and recreation and budgeting time for those activities.

• What is Wellness and 3 Main Concepts Coined in the 1970’s by John W. Travis, MD, MPH, _{www.wellpeople.com}

What is Wellness? – Looking at the Whole Person
Wellness is a choice—a decision you make to move toward optimal health.

Wellness is a way of life—a lifestyle you design to achieve your highest potential for wellbeing.

Wellness is a process—a developing awareness that there is no endpoint, but that health and happiness are possible in each moment, here and now.

Wellness is a balanced channeling of energy—energy received from the environment, transformed within you, and returned to affect the world around you.

Wellness is the integration of body, mind, and spirit—the appreciation that everything you do, and think, and feel, and believe has an impact on your state of health and the health of the world.

Wellness is the loving acceptance of yourself.
John W. Travis, MD, MPH

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The Unexamined Life Looking at our priorities and values is a much more immediate process. Values and priorities essentially show up in how we live, not in our concepts about how we wish we could live. This is a hard truth to face. If we say that spending quality time with our children is a priority, but we continually put dozens of other tasks ahead of spending time with them, then our priorities are skewed, and our values are questionable. While there are millions of good excuses about why we aren’t getting to do the things we say we want to do, excuses don’t build satisfying relationships. Acting in line with our values and priorities creates personal integrity and gives meaning to our lives.

• ** Illness Wellness Continuum
• ** Finding Meaning
• ** Self Responsibility & Love
• ** Begin to Be a Beginner
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  DEFINITIONS OF HEALTH & WELLNESS
• ** We are coming to understand health not as the absence of disease, but rather as the process by which individuals maintain their sense of coherence (i.e. sense that life is comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful) and ability to function in the face of changes in themselves and their relationships with their environment. _{Aaron Antonovsky}

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• ** Wellness is first and foremost a choice to assume responsibility for the quality of your life. It begins with a conscious decision to shape a healthy lifestyle. Wellness is a mind set, a predisposition to adopt a series of key principles in varied life areas that lead to high levels of well-being and life satisfaction.

A consequence of this focus is that a wellness mind set will protect you against temptations to blame someone else, make excuses, shirk accountability, whine or wet your pants in the face of adversity. (I threw that in to help you remember this explanation.)

_{Don Ardell, Ph.D., Living Well Center, University at Buffalo}

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• ** What is wellness?

It’s a word that’s used a lot these days, and I’m sure you hear it all the time.
It’s a buzz word almost, and traditionally, health and wellness have been thought of as the mere absence of disease and disability. This is known as the medical model, and the problem with it is that it promotes the idea that one cannot be well while living with a disability.

In recent years there has been new thinking in this area and it has led to the development of newer models of health and there are numerous different models.

Basically, the wellness model that people adhere to today moves beyond that traditional notion of health and wellness as being the mere absence of disease to the optional functioning of each individual regardless of current health status or disability.

So, wellness exists on a continuum and is unique to each individual person. Each of us defines our own wellness. It’s hard to say, you know, you’re well or you’re not well. That’s not the way it works. It’s a unique thing based on our individual circumstances. And wellness in this view is also seen as a holistic concept. It’s looking at the whole person and not just at your blood pressure level or how much you weigh, or how well you manage your stress.

It’s not one thing; it’s all of these things connected. Wellness involves the spiritual, the body, the mind, and the concept dimensions.

_{Carla Culley, Research & Training Center on Health, Wellness,& Disability Oregon Health Sciences University}

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• “Almost half of all premature deaths in the United States and other developed countries are caused by lifestyle related problems. We can prevent many of these deaths and enhance quality of life for millions of people if we can help them exercise regularly, eat nutritious foods, avoid tobacco and excess alcohol, learn to manage stress, enhance social networks and economic conditions, clarify lifestyle values, and achieve a sense of fulfillment in their intellectual pursuits” American Journal of Health Promotion | 248-682-0707
  
  
  
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• John W. Travis, MD, MPH _{www.wellpeople.com/johntravis.asp}
  Statements below quoted from above link that once existed
  He completed his medical degree at Tufts University and his preventive medicine residency at Johns Hopkins University. He began his career in wellness by developing one of the first computerized health risk appraisals while serving with the U.S. Public Health Service’s Division of Health Services Research
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Brief Background of Some of Dr. Travis’s accomplishments
John W. Travis, MD, MPH – Physician and author. A leading figure in the wellness movement. Physician in the U.S. Public Health Service, 1969 – 1975. In 1975, founded the first wellness center in the United States, the Wellness Resource Center. Co-founder of the Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children. Retired pilot. Author of Wellness Inventory (1975); and co-author: Wellness Workbook (1981, 1988, 2004), Simply Well: Choices for a Healthy Life (1990, 2001), Wellness for Helping Professionals (1990), A Change of Heart: A Global Wellness Inventory (1993), The Society of Prospective Medicine’s Handbook of Health Assessment Tools (1999).

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• [] The New Paradigm This paragraph entitled New Paradigm quoted from The WellSpring
  Psychoneuroimmunology reveals that the body’s resistance to disease is primarily the result of the state of the immune system, which is affected by many factors, especially the stresses of conflicting beliefs (both conscious and unconscious), past conditioning, and habitual (and often irrational) behaviors. Concomitant with this premise is the awareness that the dis-ease itself is not the real problem, but an attempt on the part of the body to solve the problem. Dis-ease is the means by which our bodies give feedback to our minds that something about our lifestyle is not working and that new choices are called for.
  Fully comprehending the Illness/Wellness Continuum requires a change in the commonly held perception of who is responsible for our wellness. It requires letting go of the belief that we are at the random effect of forces “out there,” and that disease is something that simply “happens” to us. The Wellness Paradigm differs markedly from the Treatment Paradigm in that it encourages individuals to accept responsibility
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• [] What is The Wellspring?
  [The workbook has been around for a few decades -the bible for whole-person wellness]
  “John Travis opened the world’s first wellness center, the Wellness Resource Center, in Mill Valley, California. His work attracted national attention, leading to an appearance on 60 Minutes with Dan Rather in 1979, and launching the hitherto unknown word “wellness” into the public domain.
  In 1978 John teamed up with Regina Sara Ryan to expand his self-published Wellness Workbook iinto a trade paperback with Ten Speed Press. The Wellness Workbook is now in its third edition, along with an abridged version, Simply Well. These books are now the basis of the Personal Wellness area of this website” (Simply Well is the “Lite” section).
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• ³ WELLNESS EDUCATION – A NEW MODEL FOR HEALTH
• ⁴ Wellness is a Way of Life-
• ⁵ Simply Well
• ⁶ Personal Wellness Lite- -assists in using the links below
• ⁷ The Iceberg Model-Lite-To discern everything that creates and supports your current state of health, you have to look below the surface.
• ⁸ Wellness Definitions
• ⁹ Medical Paradigm versus Wellness Paradigm