Last week we started a 7-day challenge to help you focus on a different area of wellness every day, that will hopefully help you start creating healthy habits that will kickstart lasting change. Here is Part 2 of that challenge:
Thursday (Emotional): The concept of emotional wellness includes your “thoughts, emotions, and ability to deal with life’s challenges.” Of particular importance is your ability to express and understand your thoughts and emotions, which leads to an ability to identify your needs and cope with challenges.
- The activity: First, you’ll want to identify current challenges you’re facing (not just stress, but stress about what?). Next, identify what you truly feel in response to these challenges. You may find that in addition to stress, you also feel fear, uncertainty, sadness, etc. Understanding your feelings is the first step towards taking action in your life and searching for solutions as you address those emotions. You can complete this activity through journaling, meditation, or just talking to a friend!
Friday (Social): Social wellness is your ability to form, nurture, and maintain healthy social relationships (which includes being able to have open and honest conversations,
honor differing opinions, and respect your own boundaries and those of others).
- The activity: Identify a relationship in your life you feel proud of, one you feel is both healthy and beneficial. Identify what you do well in this relationship and thank the other person for the specific ways in which they support you. Then, identify a relationship in your life that you feel could use some work. Identify 2-3 small steps you can take to improve the relationship over the next day/week/month, and start with one today! This can be as simple as, “I can call my mom today to catch up, and next week I can meet her for dinner.”
Saturday (Environmental): Google “environmental wellness” and you’ll see there are many conflicting (and many overlapping) definitions. We encourage you to use whatever definition resonates with you or needs the most attention from you. Your environmental wellness can deal with how you interact with nature/the world, or with your personal space (like your home). It can also have a much broader definition, like what is serving you in your life overall (thus making up your literal and figurative environment). However, one thing that harms all the different definitions of your environment is waste.
- The activity: focus on eliminating waste from your environment. Depending on what definition of environmental wellness you are using, this can mean identifying where you can cut back on wasting resources such as water or electricity. Focus on creating less waste (from harmful materials like plastic), or identify something that just drains the life out of you in your day to day environment and causes a waste in mental energy that can be eliminated or reduced. You could also get rid of things you don’t use; things that are a waste of space. You may find that you’ve outgrown certain aspects of your environment, and that’s okay.
Sunday (Financial): Financial wellness is not just about what you do with the money that you have and earn, but also about your relationship with money as a whole. Being truly financially well means knowing that money comes and goes, and that you can create a happy life with what you have.
- The activity: create a monthly and weekly budget for yourself. Simply subtract all of your fixed recurring expenses (things like rent, car payments, savings, etc are fixed; they don’t change on a month-to-month basis) from your income. What remains is your disposable income, and what you can use to budget for variable expenses like groceries, eating out, gas, etc.
The work doesn’t stop here, folks. You should be checking in on all the areas of your wellbeing every week.