Why is Wellness Important to You?

Since January everyone has been talking about their wellness-related goals, healthy resolutions, and weight loss habits they are putting in place. It is now the first of February, so let’s check in with ourselves and see how many of those wellness goals, resolutions, and habits are still in progress? One? None? One way to improve the chance that you will achieve your wellness goals, resolutions, and habits are to identify why is wellness important to you. 

By identifying your personal “wellness why” and lining up your goals, resolutions, and habits with that motivation, you can drastically increase the chances of being successful with your lifestyle changes to improve your wellness. Identifying our “why” can help us to be more successful and targeted in reaching our goals for the year.

By specifically identifying why we feel it is important to do things like work out, eat healthily, and care for our mental health, we can use that information to stick to our positive habits even when we struggle or are not feeling like it. 

Public service reminder! There is no room for guilt, blame, or shame in this exercise. We are looking at this from a curious perspective to see if we can learn more about our motivations and desires in a way to help our wellness and health improve. So, check the negative self-talk at the door and take this opportunity to practice self-kindness. 

What is Wellness?

Wellness is more than simply physical health. It is the unique combination of mental health, physical health, spiritual health, and daily choices that all make up what wellness is to you. Maintaining our own unique level of wellness allows us to live the best life we can as individuals. 

Wellness matters to us because the action we perform and every emotion we have directly relates to our overall well-being. Additionally, our well-being directly affects our actions and emotions. It is a never-ending cycle of daily life. If your wellness is poor, it will show up negatively in every area of your life, including your financial life. 

Wellness in Different Areas of Life

Wellness can look different in the main areas of your life. As you are thinking about why wellness is important to you, consider what wellness looks like in different areas of your life. Consider how you feel, look, think, believe about each of these areas. Commonly, these are the main different areas of life, but feel free to add or subtract any depending on your unique life. 

• Mental
• Physical
• Family/relationships
• Spiritual
• Work

Take a moment to identify what ideal wellness looks like for you in these different areas of life. There are some great insights to be had here!

Just a quick reminder that wellness does not mean “always doing things”. An important part of wellness is downtime, unscheduled time where we are free to choose what we do or choose not to do anything. Make sure you factor that into your ideal wellness plan!

Here are some exercises to consider to help you identify why wellness is important to you. Feel free to do one, all, or none! They are just suggestions to get ideas flowing!

Identify your priorities 

Do you have wellness or one of its components like fitness, mental health, or healthy eating as a priority in your life? Take a few moments and review your priority list that we worked on in this post and see if your priorities help you identify why and how wellness is important to you. 

Look at your spending 

Often our priorities and values are reflected in our spending choices. By reviewing your spending for a period of time (which you are already doing in your monthly money meeting right?!), you can see where your spending priorities are.

If one of your goals is to eat healthier, but you are seeing fast food spending a dozen times a week, then maybe that goal is not in line with what you value or you need to set some firmer restrictions in place to ensure you are meeting that goal. 

Write down your dream life

Free write or journal about your dream life, focusing on wellness and how you want to feel. This is a free, nonjudgemental, time so dream big! Remember to consider all of the different areas of life that we talked about above.

Once you have some ideas written down take time to identify how wellness fits into this life and if there are things you can do today or now that would move you closer to this dream life. 

From these exercises, can you write down a few of your “wellness why” ideas or statements? 

Allow room for your “wellness why” reasons to change and evolve as you do. You are a unique human who is navigating a complex life right now. As your life changes, and you change the why behind your wellness will also change. 

Looking back to my younger years, my why behind working out has changed drastically. It used to be to lose pounds and inches, but now my why behind working out is to feel better/stronger in my body.

Your goals and dreams for your life will look different as your life evolves, so make a plan to come back and check on your “whys” occasionally so you can ensure they are lining up with your life.

How does this impact goals, habits, and resolutions?

Bringing this back to increasing your success with wellness-related goals, habits, and resolutions let’s take a look at the New Year changes you wanted to make. Now, comparing them to your “why” that you wrote down earlier, how closely do they align?

If there are differences, take some time to see if you can determine why. Then rework your goals, habits, and resolutions so that they line up with your “why’s”.

The last step is probably the most important part. Post those “wellness why’s” for you to see frequently. Save them as a background on your phone. Post them on your bathroom mirror. Magnet them to the fridge. Or do it all! Being absolutely clear on your reasons why is the best motivation out there to accomplish those goals, habits, and resolutions. 

So, what did you learn from this exercise?  Share with me one reason down in the comments or over on Instagram. I already started the thread with my why, so I hope you join in! 

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