As a Spiritual Crossing Guard and Certified Coach, I want to share what key components make for a holistic lifestyle
What are the 5 Key Components of a Holistic Lifestyle?
Unlike conventional medicine, which often approaches health care by reacting to problems of the body, holistic health looks at the whole self, including the mind, body, and spirit while looking for ways to prevent health problems from occurring. A holistic lifestyle is one that cares for all five of the critical components of health to create habits and actions that will lead to wellness and happiness.
What are the five key components of this lifestyle, then? And how do you focus on all these in your daily life? Let’s take a look.
Physical Wellness
This is the aspect of health and well-being that most of us think about when you look for ways to lead a healthier lifestyle. We look for ways to improve the physical indicators of our body’s health, like blood pressure, weight, and hormone levels. Your body’s health depends mainly on eating a healthy, well-portioned, nutritious diet, getting plenty of exercise every day, sleeping enough, and engaging in other healthy habits that help your cells, tissues, and organs work effectively.
Physical wellness is vital to a holistic lifestyle, and everything you do to take care of your physical self will also have profound influences on the other key areas of holistic living.
Mental Wellness
Your mental health is connected to and influenced by the other aspects of your wellness, including your physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Mental wellness includes your ability to think and process, reason, learn, solve problems, and stay mentally active throughout your life.
There are many aspects of your lifestyle that influence your mental health, including your career, your environment, your beliefs about continued learning, and your relationships with others. And, your diet and exercise habits will play a significant role in the physical workings of your brain, too.
Emotional Wellness
Being in control of your emotions and how they influence your behavior is another critical aspect of holistic living. Emotional wellness gives you the tools to be aware of your feelings, to accept your thoughts and emotions, to learn to express how you feel healthily and to be in control of your outlook in life. Emotional wellness is heavily influenced by your mental health, your social connections, and your physical well-being, too.
Spiritual Wellness
This is often the most overlooked aspect of wellness but is extremely important. While spirituality has different meanings for each of us, what is essential is that your life includes a set of morals, values, and ethics and that these are what guide your behavior and choices. Spiritual wellness is about engaging in activities that connect your inner self and soul to the broader world around you and connecting with something bigger than yourself. Your emotional and mental well-being will heavily influence your spiritual self.
Environmental Wellness
This factor is also often overlooked but is an all-important component we need to be aware of. Environmental holistic wellness is an approach to wellness that considers the interconnectedness of individuals and their environment, emphasizing the importance of maintaining balance and harmony between the two for optimal health and well-being.
This approach recognizes that individuals are not separate from their surroundings but are deeply influenced by the quality of their environment, including factors such as air and water quality, access to green spaces, exposure to toxins, and the overall state of the ecosystems in which they live.
Environmental holistic wellness seeks to address wellness from a broader perspective, taking into account not only physical health but also mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being, all of which are influenced by the environment.
Other Components of a Holistic Lifestyle
All the dimensions of wellness are interdependent. They influence each other and can't exist without the others. There are more components to living a complete, happy, healthy life, too. For example, your holistic lifestyle should also include a focus on your intellectual, financial, social, and occupational (if relevant), well-being. These are aspects of your life that play a crucial role in your overall happiness and have a considerable influence on your well-being.
Once you adopt a holistic view of wellness and living, you can see that there are so many areas in your life that help to determine how well you are and allow you to thrive. By paying attention to only one or a few of these components, you are neglecting all the others, which means your life is out of balance, and you are not truly whole. Only through an integrated approach that includes all these crucial areas will your holistic life be complete.
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Wishing You Wholeness