What is Wellness?

When you think of wellness, maybe your mind forms an instant picture. You’re on the beach, taking in the crashing waves and salty breeze with a pair of sliced cucumbers cooling your eyes. Beside you is a frosty, tropical drink, sweating in the sunshine. Maybe you’re even meditating.

Free of cares. Healthy.  Happy. Optimistic. Unhurried. But almost as instantly as the image arrives, it dissolves, taken over by reality.

A sink overflowing with dishes. Toys strewn around the house. Perpetually lukewarm coffee. Interrupted sleep. A chaotic schedule… It’s not just me, is it?

Wellness, we might come to believe, is for somebody else with the luxury of more time or more money or more energy.

But that’s not true.

Right now, I want you to know that true wellness is achievable, for you and for your whole

family, right at home in your crazy, daily life. You can incorporate wellness into your family’s routines and patterns, starting right now.

So… What is wellness, anyway?

These days, wellness is a hot topic, and it seems like everybody has their own definition that includes a variety of dimensions, or focus areas.

The Global Wellness Institute (GWI), for example, lists six dimensions (“What is Wellness?” 2025):

• Physical

• Mental

• Emotional

• Spiritual

• Social

• Environmental

The National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) lists intellectual wellness instead of mental wellness and adds two more (“Celebrate National Wellness”):

• Occupational

• Financial

Duke University describes wellness using the image of a tree: the roots are values, identity, and choices; self-care is the trunk; and the branches include intellectual, social, mind-body, environmental, spiritual, and financial wellness. (“Wellness Model,” 2025).

And yet, despite the variations, the hope for overall wellbeing has been a consistent focus for decades. As far back as 1948, the World Health Organization described an idea of holistic health that very closely matches our idea of wellness today:

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity (Schramme, 2023).

When I try to describe wellness, I like the succinct definition of wellness provided by the Global Wellness Institute today:

Wellness is the active pursuit of activities, choices and lifestyles that lead to a state of holistic health (“What is Wellness?” 2025).

Let’s take it little by little.

First, “active pursuit.” What does that mean?

“Active pursuit” means pursuing wellness is an ongoing activity—it’s not an end state you’re trying to reach. Before you get discouraged (wait, there’s no finish line??), think of it this way: wellness includes small daily habits, activities, and choices that lead to an overall better quality of life and more joy.

Choices and lifestyles.

Once you make that first small movement or choice towards wellness, you’re in! You’re doing “wellness!” Now you just have to keep going. (But don’t worry—that first step will give you momentum for the second step, which eases you into the third, and so on—until your small choice from day one turns into a habit and then a lifestyle.)

Often, finding one teeny tiny success will open the door for even more success in the same area. For example, lacing up your shoes and walking one time around the block could lead to walking longer distances in the future.

OR, it could lead to other positive choices in entirely different areas, like choosing to minimize screen time distractions before bed to support a well-rested body for tomorrow’s walk. Often these small shifts occur naturally, as part of an upward spiral.

Holistic health.

Holistic health (the state we’re striving toward) is where we find our domains of wellness (I like to use GWI’s): physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social, and environmental (“What is Wellness?” 2025).

Being in a “state of holistic health” doesn’t mean you’re winning in all six domains or that you’ve achieved “wellness” and now you get to stand on top of the wellness mountain. It doesn’t mean that you’re perpetually happy or never experience stress.

Instead, wellness is a lifelong pursuit. Stress will come. Grief will come. Struggle will come. Injuries will happen. Sleep will elude you. These are normal parts of life.

Seeking wellness doesn’t mean you’re finding ways to be completely immune to any of these things. It means you’re equipping yourself with tools that build resilience, allow you to cope, to get back up when you fail or when the hard things in life happen.

Seeking wellness through a lifelong series of small choices, habits, and lifestyles takes work, but it’s all good work. Each step you toward wellness—even if it’s an uphill step or a challenge—can bring a dose of joy or peace or togetherness, simply as an end of the step itself.

Taken together, the hundreds or thousands of tiny steps you take toward wellness help make you stronger to weather the inevitable storms of daily life.

And, if you decide to take this journey as a family, you’ll be giving your family the gift of choices and habits and a lifestyle filled with wellness that has the potential to stick with them—for life.

Wellness Activity for This Month

As you look at a list of all the dimensions of wellness, it’s easy to allow your eyes to make a beeline for the areas where you need the most work. It’s normal for us to scan for our weaknesses, especially when we want to make an improvement in our lives.

But I invite you to do the opposite.

Take another look at the dimensions of wellness, but this time, focus in on an area where you know you and your family are relatively strong.

• Physical

• Mental

• Emotional

• Spiritual

• Social

• Environmental

Do you go on a regular walk or participate in sports? Do you have a rich social life? Do you look for ways to offer nourishing meals for your family? Do you spend time outside in nature, or even… do you recycle? You might find that you’ve already begun on a journey to a healthier, happier life, without even knowing it!

Catch an upward spiral.

Even if you look at that list and you think, “Boy, we are struggling in every single dimension,” that’s okay. Because I know of one thing you’re doing right: you’re here. You identified the desire to improve, you searched for an answer, and now you’re reading this article.

That is a strength in the dimension of mental wellness, and catching an upward spiral in any dimension, no matter how small, can help fuel improvement in many different dimensions. You just need one teeny-tiny foothold.

How did you do it?

Now that you’ve identified your focus strength, take note of how you got there. Did you create a habit of moving every day? Do you commit to thoughtful or collaborative meal planning each week? What actions did you and/or your family take to create strength in one of these dimensions?

Share an affirmation.

Schedule a time together with your family to call out this success—whether it’s briefly in the car on the way to practice, or in celebration at a meal, or in a state of contemplation on your way home from weekly worship—and verbalize the identified strength using an affirmation.

Affirmations are a super important part of fueling an upward spiral because:

• They provide a roadmap for making more change.

• And they can be an anchor when you inevitably stumble in the future.

Affirmations are a way to say, “We’ve done something like this before. We are capable.”

What is an affirmation?

An affirmation is more than a compliment. A compliment might sound like, “Hey, family, we’re doing an awesome job with being physically fit!” But an affirmation, instead, directs attention to the effort along the way.

It might sound like, “Hey, family, I’ve noticed that several times every week for the past year, we’ve made a choice to go outside for a walk together—even on days when at first we felt like we were too busy or the weather wasn’t perfect—and now we have established a habit of being physically active. We’re walkers now! It feels good to move, and now we’re a physically fit family!”

A general formula for an affirmation is: You did ______, and that shows you are/have______. With an affirmation, we’re looking for and providing evidence for action that demonstrates a particular quality, rather than congratulating a result.

Affirmations, especially if done regularly, can have a positive effect in the immediate, short-term on that particular activity or attribute that we’ve affirmed, and it can also have long-term positive effects on stress and overall wellbeing (Zhang et al., 2025).

Affirmations work because we’re highlighting actions, no matter how small, that lead us toward an end state—a step that’s absolutely critical when beginning to work toward a new goal.

Make it a habit.

To make affirmations themselves a regular habit, make a note to yourself to provide affirmations once a week—or even once a month—to each person in your family. Kids are great at picking up on affirmations and mimicking the practice, and you might be surprised at the affirmations you get back!

References

Celebrate National Wellness Month: NASM. National Academy of Sports Medicine. (n.d.). https://www.nasm.org/resource-center/blog/celebrate-national-wellness-month

Schramme, T. (2023). Health as complete well-being: The who definition and beyond. Public Health Ethics, 16(3), 210–218. https://doi.org/10.1093/phe/phad017

Wellness Model. Duke Student Affairs. (2025, June 11). https://students.duke.edu/wellness/duwell/wellness-model/

What is Wellness?. Global Wellness Institute. (2025, July 16). https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/what-is-wellness

Zhang, Y., Chen, B., Hu, X., & Wang, M. (2025). The impact of self-affirmation interventions on well-being: A meta-analysis. American Psychologist. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001591