Foundational Elements of Wellness.
By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)
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Since the beginning of January I have been writing on 8 ways to experience deep wellbeing in the new year. I've written about the importance of living from a vision, renunciation, mindfulness and healing. Today I move into way number 5. The foundational elements of wellbeing.
If you are living life deliberately (executing a vision/intention for living), there are 4 things that should be tended to on a daily basis. Most people do not have these 4 things in balance. These 4 things create a foundation for everything else you do in the course of a day. They support, energy, focus, emotional well-being, resilience, capacity and a lot more.
The foundational elements of wellness are sleep, physical activity, water consumption and food in balance for you as an individual. If you engage these elements in the appropriate way on a daily basis, your life will be very different. This is particularly true for people who manage trauma, anxiety, depression or are in recovery.
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To put together a deliberate and well lived life is to make these 4 elements central every day. If you want to establish a wellness program for the first time, you can start here and if everything has fallen apart because of some event that threw you off track, start with these elements and you can put yourself back together in just a couple of days. These 4 elements exist in a kind of hierarchy with one thing conditioning the next. So put them together in order. Begin with sleep.
Sleep.
I believe your day begins the night before when you go to bed. Sleep is the most foundational element of well-being, everything else follows from it. Sleep makes the other three elements possible.
Exercise.
If you don’t sleep well, you won’t move your body. Whether you do yoga, go hiking, lift weights or ride a bike, physical activity is a game changer. If you got up right now and ran around the block you would feel totally different when you got back. That’s how immediate the impact is. Exercise combats anxiety and depression, some say as effectively as pharmaceuticals.
Water consumption.
Most people are dehydrated. Humans do not drink enough water. How much water is enough? According to the people who study this stuff the average woman needs 2.5 liters of water while the average man needs 3.7 liters. That’s like almost 2 of those large soda bottles. Nobody I know consumes that much water. Water improves sleep, emotional wellbeing, aids digestion, relieves fatigue, supports weight loss and more. It also influences how we eat as many people eat in response to signs of dehydration. For one day just drink tons of water and sense the difference. It’s really a profound thing.
Food.
The 4th element is food. I’m going write about this in detail tomorrow. “You are what you eat” is a famous saying. It’s true. What we consume becomes us. And it has deep implications for how healthy and happy we are. Food supports disease AND healing. It regulates mood. It influences weight gain and weight loss. It’s correlated with major health issues including heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Food is a monumental variable in our lives. It’s in the running for the most powerful variable In our lives along side relationships.
Putting it together.
Think of sleep as the beginning of the next day. Wake and move your body before you do anything else. Exercise promotes water consumption and all 3 of these together will change the way you eat. When we don’t eat because we’re tired, dehydrated, anxious or depressed, we eat healthier.