Wellness Continued

This is part two of Wellness. To recap;

Wellness is the pursuit of the best health possible through fit body, balanced mind and peaceful spirit.

• Increase self esteem, self worth, optimism and confidence
• Help forget your own physical or emotional pain
• Help decrease stress and acts as a stress release
• Improve immune response
• Decrease feelings of depression and self doubt
• Increase sense of balance and over all well being

Step 4 follows on from number 3.
Increase self esteem, self worth, optimism and confidence. As we decrease depression & self doubt we also increase self worth and optimism.
What is self Esteem?
Your self-esteem is the way you look at yourself. If you have good self-esteem it means that you like yourself and you believe that you are as 'OK' as everyone else.


A good article on this is http://au.reachout.com/find/articles/self-esteem-feeling-ok-about-who-you-are

Basically you need to make friends with yourself, think about the things you say to yourself, would you say that to one of your friends?
Then you need to challenge any negative or limiting beliefs, research them, talk to others, see what is actually true & what are actually illogical beliefs.

Optimism is about choosing to see the glass half full instead of half empty. It is as much a habit as anything else.

Number Five: This is another big one, help forget your own emotional and physical pain.A lot easier to say than to do!!!

Unfortunately pain can be all consuming. The way I have found to deal with this is to find something healing to completely immerse myself in. I find that immersing myself in nature and doing photography completely absorbs me and takes my mind off the pain.

We need to face our pain and do what we can to deal with it, both physically and emotionally but after we have done that what do we do.
Studies have found that nature has a wonderful healing effect see details here http://juliaharwood.blogspot.com/2010/11/spending-time-in-naturestudy.html

Being outside in nature for just 20 minutes in a day is enough to significantly boost vitality levels, according to new University of Rochester psychology research. Credit: University of Rochester

"Nature is fuel for the soul, " says Richard Ryan, lead author and a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. "Often when we feel depleted we reach for a cup of coffee, but research suggests a better way to get energized is to connect with nature," he says.

How can we do this in our busy schedule...one way I have found is when I reach for that coffee...yes I do have a few cups a day, I use this time to actually look at an image of nature and let it work it's magic.
If you are at work ask them to put up a nature image where you can see it from your desk or even put a nature image on your computer as your desktop and take time to look at this and really imagine yourself there. I have a range of images that I call "Healing Art" Photography. You can click on the links to see these but if you sign up for my newsletter at http://go4sites.com/juliaharwood/ I will give you a new image each month for FREE to put on your computer.

I personally have found myself much more able to deal with all types of pain after spending time with nature, so I would recommend you give it a try.

Number Six: Increase sense of balance and over all well being.

Guess what you should already be there! If we put into place the other five this will naturally come about, but we must be vigilant as it is easy for us to slip back into old habits and find ourselves unwell and out of balance again.

One of the great tools that I have learnt along the way is time management. It is only as we manage our time effectively that we can put all these things in place. Remember if you don't look after yourself, you won't have anything to give to others. http://www.mindtools.com/pages/main/newMN_HTE.htm

Finally I wish to say that each of these topics warrants an article in itself, which is why I have added links to other sites to cover them in more detail. Bookmark this page so you can return to it often and so you have the links to the other sites.

I will leave you with an image for you to start with as you have your next cuppa.