The Foundations of Wellness

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Dec 28, 2001

The end of the year is a good time to take stock, to sit down and revisit the year, for better or worse. Checking off completed goals can be the source of great satisfaction. And, nothing beats hindsight, the great clarifier. It is often a struggle to focus once the holiday season begins. My strong desire to start the New Year fresh and prepared sends me into long, quiet moments of reflection, journaling, and life planning. So, as I sit here, watching the hours tick away and draw my deadline nearer, I am thankful for my commitment to wellness.

It's interesting to me how my need to learn about wellness, health education, and health promotion coincided with the onset of my sarcoidosis in the early '80's, when I began working in an acute care hospital. While I developed a passion to educate consumers about their health conditions and what they could do to get better, I lived in denial of the chronicity of my sarcoidosis diagnosis. That first decade was a turbulent time in my life, with many changes and personal losses. Flare-ups were my constant companion. As I learned more about dealing with my chronic illness over time, my denial slowly gave way and I began to embrace wellness.

According to the National Wellness Institute (NWI), wellness is defined as, "an active process of becoming aware of and making choices toward a more successful existence." The words process, aware, choices, and success are important parts of the definition. The model NWI advocates, which was developed by Dr. Bill Hettler in 1976, is comprehensive and multidimensional. To help me remember the six dimensions, I created the acronym POSIES: physical, occupational, spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and social.

Over the next few months, each of the wellness dimensions will be explored in-depth. You are invited to take this journey with me. If you are new to wellness, this is a good time to learn more. If you have developed a lifestyle that is born of wellness, congratulations! Feel free to share your path to achieving optimum wellness with us, including your successes and failures, through our discussions. If you know of websites that address the dimension we are discussing, share that as well.

Depending on your source, you may get different responses to the question of how the wellness movement began. According to a wellness newsletter, Lester Breslow, a UCLA physician who spearheaded the "Alameda Study" in 1960, set the stage. The "Alameda Study" and several others that followed in the '60's and '70's proved, without a doubt, that changes in lifestyle resulted in longer, healthier lives. Important discoveries were made later about the nature and stages of health changes, and the challenges changing one's lifestyle presented.

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