Wellness or Illness: Which Will You Choose?

My favorite counseling quote: “Make time for your wellness, or you’ll be forced to make time for your illness”.

There’s a ton of truth to that. For example, if you don’t sleep for a few days. The first night or two might be okay, but by day three you’re draggin’. Keep that up and you compromise your immune system — your body won’t be able to effectively fight disease, process food, remove waste, and you’ll start not to feel so hot.

You might even get sick and need to take off a couple days from life. Because you didn’t make time for yourself to get what you needed, your body forced you into a position in which you could. When you’re sick all you can do pretty much is rest.

That’s just one aspect of it. I like to think of self-care like a starfish — five parts to the five legs of a starfish, and also starfish reproduce asexually, which means they detach a leg anytime they want to make a new one of themselves. The leg grows back, and there’s a new starfish. I’ve always wondered if that’s a very painful process, neutral, or if it maybe feels good for them?

When we do it, it feels bad. We do that to our own self-care sometimes, detaching parts of it. The good news is that we can grow the legs back, too.

The five parts of self-care: spiritual (not necessarily religion but can be, it means how you connect with the world), physical, mental, emotional, relational.

There are different aspects to each of these parts, and they all affect each other. For example, if you don’t get enough sleep (physical), then emotional self-care will be negatively affected.

It’s important to know what is included in each part for you. Physical sounds simple but can be a lot — eating well, exercising, sleeping, making doctors appointments, taking your medication, and more. It can be a good idea take inventory of each part and identify strengths and growth areas every once in a while. We get busy sometimes, so it can be easy for this stuff to fall by the wayside.

Here is a link to a self-assessment which can guide you through doing that.

One more thing to point out is that overcompensating in one area will not improve the others. For example, if your physical self-care is at 130%, it’s not going to improve relational no matter how hard you work out or how well you eat. We need consistency and, as always, balance is key.

Cheers to choosing wellness and improving self-care. Hope you can choose to carve out some time for you today.

As always, have a mindful day, and be well!