What Is Wellness?

We define wellness as, “the active, or intentional state of choosing habits and behaviors that align to your values, support good mental and physical health, and help you find joy, community, and purpose in your everyday experiences, for long-term happiness and fulfillment.”

Why Wellness Is Important

Adopting key wellness practices not only improves your physical health, but drastically improves the quality of all aspects of your life — mentally, physically, financially, socially, and spiritually.

Research shows that health and happiness are much more intertwined that what was previously realized. Paying attention to your personal wellbeing leads to better outcomes in your personal and professional life.

In fact, research shows that when you’re happy and living more closely aligned with your personal values, you actually have more capacity to deal with stressful situations with ease, are more creative, and more productive than you are at negative neutral or stressed. This insight is often referred to as the happiness advantage.

Unfortunately, it can be easy to get caught up in following society’s narrow road to success.

Constant striving to have more, feelings of not being, having, or doing enough, can lead to workaholism, high levels of stress, anxiety, depression, the hyper-consumption of material goods, or other self-sabotaging behaviors that can be damaging to your physical or emotional wellbeing. These are often referred to as maladaptive behaviors and include: not getting enough sleep or exercise, or overindulging in food, alcohol, smoking, or drugs.

Unskillful, or stress-based, decisions in the short-term can lead to long-term diseases. These chronic diseases are often referred to as lifestyle diseases because of their ability to be prevented through healthier lifestyle choices. They’re also the leading causes of death in the US and include: heart disease, lung disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, stroke, diabetes, and kidney disease.

Chronic diseases also have a significant impact to your professional productivity. Across the US, it costs the economy nearly 1 trillion dollars each year.

Finding a balanced approach to your personal wellness improves your happiness, your longevity, your relationship with others, and can positively impact traditional measures of financial and career success.

Seek United's Wellness Components

Seek United focuses on the key components of wellness and stress resiliency that have been proven to make a substantial difference in your personal and professional wellbeing. Similar to the research shared by Gallup, we’ve found that the key elements of wellness are intricately intertwined.

The good news is, that whatever component you decide to shift first, can have a positive impact in other key wellness components. This is especially true when you focus your initial behavior change on keystone habits — the two-for-one’s of successful behavior change.

Incorporating wellness practices — or wellness tips — can be achieved by making small, simple, changes in your everyday habits like: getting more quality sleep, starting a mindfulness practice, practicing the grateful-eight, eating healthy plant-based diets, getting plenty of physical movement and making sure you’ve integrated other stress-resiliency tools.

To put it simply, what you do everyday is much more important than what you do once in awhile.

These key wellness components are all integrated into Seek United’s wellness workshops, stress resiliency crash course, and personal wellness coaching.

Sleep

Sleep is the best kept secret in thriving in work and life. Quality sleep improves every single cell in your body. It improves your ability to retain information, meaning you can learn more, faster. It resets your connection to your logical and emotional brain so you can respond instead of react to life’s stressors. Sleep also clears your brain of a sticky substance known to cause Alzheimer’s, and decreases your cravings for sugary treats — decreasing your chances of weight-gain, early onset diabetes, and heart disease. Experts recommend at least seven hours of quality sleep every-night, with the majority of adults needing between between eight and nine hours. Learn more.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is the ability to be in the present moment, without judgement, attachment, or concern of the future. You can be mindful about your physical experiences, your mental state, your feelings, and how you choose to interact in the world. Practicing mindfulness, requires a sort of switching out of auto-pilot and paying attention to yourself and others in a different way. This helps to relieve stress and live more aligned to your personal values. It leads to increased feelings of happiness and contentment. One of the best ways to build mindfulness is through a meditation practice. Learn more.

Meditation

Meditation helps you build mindfulness, increase your focus and can have powerful effects on your ability to respond rather than react to stress. Research shows that a daily meditation practice is also linked to better mental and physical health outcomes. There are many different types of meditation. A few of the most common practices include: mindfulness meditation, mantra meditation, breathing meditation, loving kindness meditation, noting meditation, visualization meditation, resting meditation and moving meditation. Learn more.

Exercise

Movement is essential for living well. It improves your mood, reduces the chances of succumbing to lifestyle diseases, and is a healthy way to reduce stress. Research shows that every minute of movement matters, so even if you can’t get the recommended thirty minutes of movement in each day, incorporating a ten-minute walk, or five-minute seated yoga practice can have a significant impact.

Decluttering

Physical clutter leads to decision fatigue, which can take it’s toll on willpower and your ability to make good decisions. Decluttering your space helps relieve stress, increases your stress capacity, and leaves you with more time and energy to spend on the people and things that are actually important to you. Learn more.

Diet

Research shows that what you eat — and your overall gut health — can have a huge impact on how you feel both mentally and physically. Fueling your body with the right foods helps to counter the impact of less active lifestyles, lower your chances of developing cancer, and improves your heart and brain health. It can also improve your energy levels and decrease symptoms of depression.

Stress Resilience

Stress is a part of life — and not all stress is bad. How you react to stress is what makes all the difference. Learning basic stress resiliency tools, which often look a lot like self-care, helps you to mitigate the impact that stress has on your mental and physical wellbeing and encourages you to make more space for preventive stress care. Learn more.

Morning Routine

Creating a daily wellness routine that starts in the morning can positively impact your entire day. Using tips from behavioral science, you’ll learn how to successfully shift your habits, and create a streamlined morning routine that allows you to feel your best from sunrise to sunset.

BENEFITS OF PRIORITIZING WELLNESS

It’s not what we do once in awhile that matters, but what we do everyday.

Happiness experts and wellness experts agree that the most meaningful moments in your life have to do with experiences, having a sense of community, and a call to a greater purpose. Yet, research shows that 50% your day is spent on auto-pilot. That’s why it’s so important to become aware of how you’re spending your time and energy and intentionally work to incorporate these elements of wellness, so you can live better in all areas of your life.

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