Wellness is not only the absence of disease but also feeling good and enjoying your life!
How you feel mentally (mind), physically (body) and emotionally (spirit) determines the state of your overall health and well-being. You could say that your health is your greatest asset since it affects how you think, move and interact with others, your level of prosperity and how much you achieve. When you don’t feel well, every other aspect of your life is impacted.
The book the Essential Life states that excessively poor lifestyle habits can put people at high risk for virtually every physical and mental illness there are. According to the USA National Institute of Mental health, 75 to 90% of all doctor visits in the USA are from stress related illness and complaints.
Stress can easily trigger in the body; for example, sometimes major life events such as the death of a loved one or financial problems can combine with a genetic predisposition to prompt a stress-related health crisis. Western medical practitioners are that busy that they often prescribe drugs to fix emotional ailments and don’t have time to look at behaviours and lifestyle choices such as poor stress management, inadequate nutrition, unhealthy relationships, physical inactivity and insufficient sleep as major contributors to illness and disease.
Modern medicine tends to fixate on diagnosis and treatment whereas a wellness lifestyle focuses on education, self-awareness and prevention instead of merely treating the disease. In aiming for a wellness lifestyle you can start to addresses the cause of your ailment by looking at what lies beneath illness and it’s symptoms. Learning that thought patterns and feelings create the choices we make, and the habits we form those decisions create disease in our bodies, is all part of the journey into a wellness lifestyle.
Through changing habits and choices instead of fuelling the fires of inflammation, pain, toxicity and illness in the body and by addressing the root causes of disease, rather than merely treating the symptoms, we can assist the body to heal itself.
The wave of the future is Integrative Medicine; wherein traditional allopathic treatments work in conjunction with alternative, non-traditional practices to treat the whole person instead of just the disease. In this way, patients and practitioners form a partnership whose goal is to treat the mind body and spirit all at the same time. – The Essential Life