Why Wellness is Critical Now
“When the sea was calm, all boats alike; showed mastership in floating.”
-William Shakespeare
When times are calm, it’s easier to practice wellness. When you aren’t feeling so stressed or pressed for time, or worried, you can make time for self-care. It’s when you do not have the time, patience, or mental capacity for self-care that you need it the most.
When we need wellness the most, we are less likely to pursue it.
This is both ironic and unfortunate. I wish it were different. I wish that the moment we needed to employ all our wellness tools we would be on autopilot to do so. But that is not how the stress response works. From a biological perspective, we are just wired different than that.
When we sense danger, and there is plenty of it around all of us these days, we go into a typical response pattern. This response exists for a reason. It helps us outrun saber tooth tigers, and prevents starvation when the food supply dries up. We hide or run from danger, and we overeat when we think there is a famine coming.
We pull inward instead of being focused outward and we hoard our own resources. In other words, we become very self-focused, and not in a “wellness” kind of way.
What do I mean by wellness?
- Treating People Well (Including ourselves): civility, respect, feeling psychological protection, thinking about our culture(s).
- Building People Skills: growing, developing, recognizing contributions of others, rewarding positive and helpful behaviors, supporting others, supporting ourselves
- Managing our lives: work & life balance, how much work we take on, thinking about how much influence we have over our work, being really involved and not just going through the motions, and managing expectations — of ourselves and others.
- Creating a healthy environment: at home, at work (right now the same place for many people), in our communities.
How to shift to wellness when it’s not our default state?
To me wellness is first of all awareness. Tuning into what is happening right this moment. How are you coping? What emotions are at play with you right now? Are you anxious, content, restless, tired, overwhelmed, stressed, balanced, bored or more than one at the same time? If you don’t know what is going on inside your own mind, and in your skin suit, then you are in danger of “leaking” your emotions, and causing an explosion you don’t intend. Every emotion will demand an expression. If your emotions are unconscious, they will still find a way to express themselves whether or not you approve of the vehicle of delivery. Become aware of what is happening within you, including your thoughts and how things feel in your body (tightness, pain, discomfort, and ease).
So Rule #1 Awareness is Key
A second strategy to shift into wellness, after awareness, is to make a plan. What will you do TODAY to create more wellness than you did yesterday? It can be ONE THING you do such as eat fruit today, or walk for 20 minutes outside, or call a good friend just to connect. Wellness is not about a major overhaul of your life. That kind of change doesn’t usually stick because it’s too big, and too much outside of our comfort zones.
Rule #2 Make a Plan, Keep it Simple
It takes anywhere from 6–10 weeks to build a habit according to the research on habit formation. But we have all done something for that amount of time, then months later found ourselves “sliding back” into an old pattern of behavior. The grooves we cut with original habits do NOT disappear just because we got used to doing something else for awhile. Think of it this way: you just laid down new tracks, but the old train tracks are still there. So we can, and do, jump tracks to our old ones unless we are intentional about staying with a new pattern of behavior.
Rule #3 Make Small Changes You Can Sustain
This is why I recommend engaging in small changes, ones that don’t seem so intimating. Don’t pick wellness activities that are super hard either. If you are not into extreme exercise, now is not the time to take up a “bootcamp” style of class. If your diet is primarily brown (fried foods are a staple), then becoming a vegan in one day is too much. When we decide to change, most of us want the result NOW and we will do something extreme to get it.
Real change is more like a seed than fireworks.
These three simple rules are what I recommend:
- Become Aware
- Make a Plan
- Start Simple
You can get more complex later. But for now, given all the challenges that face you every day, these three things are plenty. And they will make a huge difference in your self-care. Good luck.
