Wellness Vectors

So I take no credit for defining these vectors, or dimensions if you will but I do like the enumeration. As you read through my posts you will find them mostly categorized this way.  Why are they important?  You can’t expect to feel complete fulfillment, or satisfaction, with how you live your life unless you are able to view the world through different lenses.  That means understanding and actively working on increasing your knowledge and awareness of these vectors and learning how to apply them in your actions and relationships with everything around you.

Here is what they mean to me…

• Intellectual Health: I believe, and science proves it (see my posts for details) that your brain is a “use it or lose it” resource.  If you want to get the most out of your life you have to continually challenge yourself intellectually.  That’s how you keep your brain running at peak performance and how you can rest assured that your personal CPU is constantly kept up to date with the latest technology!  This category is all about the science behind brain health and the things we can do to take care of this, our most important (well, arguably) organ.
• Physical Health:  This is the most obvious of the dimensions and arguably the foundation for all the others.  I’m not saying that you cannot enjoy wellness in other areas without perfect physical health but I am saying that you can increase your satisfaction in other areas dramatically by continuing to chase your personal potential in this area.  In this category you’ll find posts about everything from nutrition, the science of building muscle, the basics of cell respiration, to how the body’s energy systems work – and much more!  Enjoying good physical health requires an understanding of what is going on in your body – you wouldn’t start messing with stuff under the hood of your car to try and make it run better without any knowledge of auto mechanics would you? Well, I don’t know maybe you would…
• Social/Cultural Health:  Developing and maintaining solid interpersonal skills is critical in life.  This vector has deep ties to many of the others including Occupational Health and Emotional Health.  We are human beings and we are social, our interactions with others are what make us who we are and in many cases are responsible for both our successes and our failures in life.  My posts in this area are around the “soft skills” that sometimes people like us engineering types tend to either forget about or dismiss and when we do we end missing out on a lot of what life has to offer.
• Environmental Health:  When I first read about this one it sounded like someone with a solution looking for a problem, or with a chapter in a a textbook that had a word quota that they hadn’t quite met yet.  If you think about it though, for one to truly feel happy, or “well”, then one must consider not only their own state of mind and body and how they interact with other humans but how we interact with the environment as well.  I know, if you’re like me this category sounds kinda sucky but trust me you’ll find some interesting posts here that may just make you think twice about some of your personal habits…
• Occupational Health:  So most of us work for a living and we spend a considerable amount of our lives in this capacity.  So how do we define occupational health.  Well, I define it with just one word “satisfaction”.  I don’t care how much money you make or how much power you have or how many widgets you sold last year, if you’re not getting satisfaction for a job well done then you don’t have good occupational health and the rest of your vectors (thus your life) will suffer.  This category explores strategies for getting what you want out of work as “satisfaction” can, of course, mean different things to different people.  What does it mean to you?
• Spiritual Health:  Not to be confused with religion, this category is about how you feel about yourself, your connection to others and your very personal beliefs about the meaning of life.  This is a great category for discussion of values, morals, deep thoughts and here’s one you might not have heard of: spiritual intelligence.
• Emotional Health:  This category may seem pretty self-explanatory but I think you will be surprised at how far the study of emotion has come even just over the past decade.  Now I hadn’t heard of spiritual intelligence until recently but years ago I read a book on emotional intelligence and you’ll find some posts from that reason for sure!  If you haven’t spent time understanding what’s behind emotions, really studying the phenomenon from a scientific view, you’re in for a treat I think.  It’s fascinating stuff and there are a lot of topics and tools that you can use almost immediately to improve the quality of your life.