Many discussions on holistic health and wellness have come up in the recent past, with many asking, ‘What is a holistic approach to health?’. A holistic approach to health views optimal health and wellness via a multi-faceted technique as an ideal mode of supporting and empowering the whole person. It accounts for the whole person, as it concentrates on treating the hidden causes of disease rather than just the symptoms. This article helps you uncover a holistic approach to health by explaining its importance, components, and the best practices for achieving holistic health.

Components of Holistic Wellness

To comprehend the question, ‘What is a holistic approach to health?’, Your focus should be on the components that make up a holistic approach to health. All the components must be taken care of equally so that none is left out if you achieve a completely integrated health system. The first five are the main components to achieving holistic health, and the additional two are worth exploring.

Mental Wellness

Mental wellness is essential to a person’s overall health. A mentally fit individual can communicate with others, think critically, and easily make decisions. A healthy mind can learn, grow, and be present in the moment. Individuals with diminished resilience and resistance to stress have poor mental well-being.

Physical Well-Being

Physical wellness answers the question, what is a holistic approach to health, and can sometimes be equated to being free from diseases. However, not being sick does not qualify one for a better and quality life. Many people are living with lifestyle and other pre-existing conditions and feel very okay and vital. Thus, physical health is far-reaching and encompasses energy, flexibility, nutrition, sleep, strength, and fitness.

Fitness involves exercising and tweaking the body to ensure that all the body joints and muscles are in good shape. It largely contributes to the total wellness of a person after nutrition. Currently, there are many ways you can achieve physical fitness. You can utilize the gym where you use gym paraphernalia to stretch your muscles like you would expect by visiting a chiropractic clinic.

Emotional Wellbeing

Emotional health is essential in nurturing good relations with not only yourself but with others as well. It determines your reaction to stressful circumstances and your ability to regulate emotions. Moreover, being healthy emotionally influences your ability to seek and ask for assistance when undergoing very uncomfortable emotions.

An emotionally well individual can make the right decisions by weighing all options available and do not rush into quick decision making. Mental and emotional health is critical to a healthy nation. Most emotionally and mentally unstable individuals make bad decisions like committing suicide when they cannot find quick solutions to their problems. Hence, emotional well-being is essential in achieving holistic health.

Spiritual Wellness

We are all spiritual beings because of our connection to a special being. Spiritually healthy people easily discover their purpose and meaning in life. They are motivated and resilient and understand and appreciate their place on earth because they know what is a holistic approach to health and recognize spirituality as a key aspect.

There are numerous ways one can nourish their spirits. For instance, having an attachment to a spiritual being, worshiping, and seeking guidance from the spiritual being helps to calm and settle one’s spirit.

If you are well spiritually, you become motivated, more resilient, and understand your place on earth. Meditation is great for achieving a calm spirit whenever you feel stressed or in a crisis.

Social Wellness

Social wellness contributes to a holistic approach to health by instilling a sense of belonging. Human beings are social and want to belong to a certain group or feel attached to others. You can participate in associations, catch up, and stay with family and friends.

Feeling connected gives you the satisfaction of belonging somewhere and knowing that you share a lot with another person. Research shows that socially networked people have longer mortality than those with no social connection.

Occupational Wellness

What is a holistic approach to health, and how does occupational wellness fit in? You may ask. Work takes up a great portion of a person’s life. How you feel while at work influences your whole life positively or negatively. Occupational health comprises deriving joy and contentment in our jobs.

Moreover, it encompasses having the feeling of growth and development within your career. It should include your safety at work such that your employer compensates you in case you suffer an injury in your line of duty, failure to which you can involve a personal injury lawyer to represent and get your rightful remuneration. The insurer supposed to compensate you may hire an insurance lawyer to battle out a personal injury claim in court. advocates representing you increase your chances of winning and receiving your rightful compensation.

Financial Wellbeing

Financial wellness is included as an aspect of the holistic approach to health because the lack of finances contributes to financial stress. Financially contributes to reduced productivity and morale and increases life stress, affecting a person’s overall well-being. Financially disempowered individuals have low self-esteem and feel they cannot work out for emergencies.

The Best Practices to a Holistic Approach to Health

To achieve a holistic approach to health, you must tune your mind to view and accept that your health comprises all the seven elements. Hence, you should consider and nature every aspect of holistic wellness to be able to function normally. The following best practices will aid you in understanding what is a holistic approach to health better and work towards achieving it.

Practice Holistic Eating

Many researchers have stated without a doubt that one’s overall health depends on gut health. The mind and body work function in sync. Hence, a healthy gastrointestinal tract is significant for the proper functioning of the mind and body.

You must also understand a holistic diet for you to practice it successfully. Holistically, food is considered medicine in addition to being a source of energy for the body. Therefore, as you plan your diet, you must be mindful of what you ingest and whether it will benefit your overall health or not.

Holistic diet concentrates on ingesting whole and unprocessed foods. Besides, holistic eating insists on consuming various fruits and vegetables, fiber-rich foods, and grains. Also, a holistic diet consists low fat and fat-free dairy foods. A holistic diet involves observing good nutrition to achieve great overall health. By avoiding processed and sugary foods, you encourage good oral health, which saves you from visits to dentistry practitioners.

Practice Intuitive Eating

Intuitive eating is probably the best answer to the question many ask, what is a holistic approach to health. Intuitive eating involves creating a healthy association with food by allowing your body to choose right instead of restricting yourself with diet fads. Through intuitive eating, you can respond positively to body cues by only eating when you feel hungry and stopping when you have had your fill. As an intuitive eater, you can differentiate physical hunger from emotional hunger.

With physical hunger, your body signals through a rumbling stomach, fatigue, and irritability, which tells you that you need to eat to replenish nutrients for an energy refill. However, emotional hunger arises from emotional needs because of boredom, loneliness, sadness, and food cravings. As a holistic means to health, intuitive eating facilitates weight loss, helps stabilize blood pressure, boosts self-esteem, and is a cure to eating disorders.

Sleep

Sleep is a way to rejuvenate both physically and mentally. A night of excellently high-quality sleep is essential to attain holistic wellness. You can achieve this by following a sleep schedule, not taking afternoon naps, and desisting from consuming alcohol and/or heavy meals in the evening.

You could suffer from temporary or chronic insomnia due to stress or underlying health conditions, such as aging, anxiety, and mental health disorders. Taking sleeping pills is a temporary solution to a problem that will keep recurring. A holistic approach may lead to discovering and resolving the issue’s root cause.

Try Meditation

You may ask, ‘What is a holistic approach to health and how does meditation fit in?’ Meditation is an excellent way to achieve overall health for body, mind, and spirit. You train your mind to attain long-lasting mental clearness, stability, and mindfulness through meditation. We experience stress, anxiety, and depression at some point in life. It could be a daily or once in a while occurrence.

The best and most effective way to manage such conditions would be by meditating. Set apart at least 15 minutes of your busy daily schedule for meditating. That way, you boost your emotional processing and assist you in gaining focus, peacefulness, and overall health.

Be Active

If you understand what is a holistic approach to health, you will realize that physical activity is a critical component. Being active is mostly about physical activity, which improves overall health. Some benefits of being active include reduced chances of heart conditions, type 2 diabetes, stroke, plus some cancers. Physical activity also boosts mental health where it enhances self-esteem, the quality of sleep, and moods, and minimizes probabilities of stress, depression, dementia, and Alzheimer’s condition.

The national health service recommends that the average individual achieves 150 minutes of physical exercise weekly. That said, you should know that people who perform physical exercise tend to have a positive outlook on themselves and experience wonderful night rest. Find an activity you enjoy doing to encourage you to be consistent and remain motivated.

Concentrate on Positive Relationships

Social health is also vital in a holistic approach to health because it influences one’s physical plus mental well-being, behavior, plus morality. Research shows that individuals whose social ties as minimal have doubled risk of death than those with social ties.

Positive relationships are worth nurturing and maintaining as they positively impact your health. For instance, positive and healthy relationships lower cardiovascular illnesses facilitate a healthy immune system and diminish physiological responses to foreseen and present stressors.

Why You Should Consider Holistic Approach to Wellness

A holistic approach to health is vital because of the benefits it brings to a person. Some of the benefits are as follows.

1. It Helps in Achieving and Sustaining Optimal Health

Understanding what is a holistic approach to health, will help you recognize it helps achieve optimal health. Attaining optimal health goes beyond treating the symptoms of disease and curing the underlying cause of disease. Holistic health focuses on the total wellness of a person rather than just the physical signs of disease. That way, you can experience long-lasting wellness where you experience a balance physically, mentally, emotionally, and even spiritually.

2. It Helps You Connect with Your Body and Its Natural Healing Capabilities

A holistic approach to health causes you to be self-aware with an understanding of what you like and what is good for your boy. You learn how to pay attention to your body’s signals and act on them accordingly, thus preventing and addressing health issues before they escalate. Daily meditation can help eliminate stress. You can utilize the services of a local med spa to benefit from anti-aging treatments.

The current healthcare system focuses on treating someone when they get sick. A holistic approach to health would mean fewer doctor visits. For instance, staying fit alleviates heart conditions, type 2 diabetes, and arthritis. If your spine needs a little tweaking, you can visit a chiropractor office to have it addressed, then combine the treatment with a holistic approach to health and heal quickly. That way, you prevent any illness and get a long-lasting solution to an underlying condition.

3. It’s Beneficial to People Battling Chronic Diseases

Individuals suffering from chronic lifestyle conditions such as cancer, diabetes, kidney failure, blood pressure, stroke, arthritis, anxiety, and depression, can benefit from a holistic approach to health. For instance, meditation and acupuncture effective address anxiety, depression, and chronic pain, respectively. You can always utilize telemedicine platforms to reach and receive help and guidance from a professional doctor.

4. It is Customizable

Holistic medicine is customizable since you can select the therapies that fit your needs. There are numerous therapies to choose from; if you do not like one, you can go for another. That makes it beneficial for individuals intending to involve themselves in their health journey.

5. It is Affordable and Accessible

Holistic approaches to health are easily accessible and affordable. For instance, you can get meditation guides on YouTube. Also, there are numerous applications you can download to your phone for customized workouts or meditations. Most are free or low cost.

Again, you must wonder, ‘What is a holistic approach to health.’ A holistic approach to health encompasses taking care of all the aspects that make you. You remain healthy and can make the most of your excellent health and wellness by adopting a more integrated lifestyle. Therefore, various health aspects should be interdependent for one to attain wellness.

If the holistic approach is something that intrigues you, you may also want to consider alternatives to traditional health insurance. Jericho Share health insurance is a health care sharing ministry based on a community of like-minded individuals, looking to help one another in a time of need. Alternatives such as this help you prioritize whatever approach to medicine and healthy living you want, without worrying about what your insurance will cover!