6 1.5 Personal Wellness
Personal wellness means being physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually healthy. A healthy lifestyle helps balance all these aspects to achieve wellness. Your decisions and choices will impact both your short-term and long-term wellness. It is important to take into account your overall personal wellness in order to increase the potential for academic success in your educational program and get the greatest benefit out of it. In this section you will learn about some of the various aspects affecting your wellness, such as nutrition, fitness and lifestyle choices. You will assess your personal wellness and identify goals for improvement.
Physical Health
There are many lifestyle choices that we make that impact our personal wellness; negative choices can become vices and cause addictions that can impede wellness for a few hours or lifelong, as well as positive choices which can promote health and help form healthy habits. Some of the most rudimentary lifestyle choices are choosing to nurture and protect your body.
- Get enough sleep every night and try to be consistent about your sleeping routine. Studies show this helps your brain function more effectively.
- Keep hydrated. Drink plenty of water throughout the day. Avoid pop, alcohol, and sugary drinks.
- Eat a balanced, nutritious diet. Good nutritious food and a well-balanced diet will fuel your body. Avoid junk food and processed food.
- Exercise regularly and stay fit.
- Keep alcohol intake reasonable. Over-consumption of alcohol reduces the ability to function efficiently or think clearly. It can cause devastating accidents. It can lead to alcoholism, which can destroy families and relationships, and can eventually lead to liver failure and death.
- Don’t smoke! It causes lung cancer, emphysema, chronic cough, shortness of breath, and dull skin, and it causes you to smell bad.
- Be cautious about vaping. New information is coming out connecting vaping with serious lung diseases. It is also causing nicotine addictions in young people. Be cautious until more information is known about the causes.
- Don’t do non-pharmaceutical drugs. They mess with your body’s ability to do its job, and can cause addiction.
- Avoid harmful habits that can take over your life. Gambling can ruin a family’s finances. Sexual addictions can ruin relationships, and unguarded promiscuity can result in unwanted sexually transmitted infections (STI’s) or unwanted pregnancies.
- Follow safety rules. Buckle up. Wear your helmet. Use ladders carefully. Wear safety googles, gloves and other protective equipment when required. These choices will help prevent unnecessary accidents that can have serious long-term effects.
- Spend time outdoors and get fresh air and sunshine. Fresh air and sunshine help give the body vitality and vitamin D, which provides numerous benefits.
- Stay active. Keep moving. Go for walks. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Ride your bike.
- Stay home when you are