Todd Shrub

Increasing Life's Quantity & Quality With Health & Wellness

Definition of Comprehensive Wellness

Comprehensive wellness is defined as a positive state of all wellness components that simultaneously include both a lack of negative states of disease or dysfunction, and the enablement of an individual to pursue goals leading to an enjoyable, satisfying, and purposeful life.

Definition of Health vs Wellness

I define ‘wellness’ more specifically than most sources you might be aware of- specifically my comprehensive view of wellness includes 5 levels and 12 components (see the figure below). To get to that view, however, I started out with the common definition of wellness you might find in a dictionary. For example, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines wellness as:

Wellness: “the quality or state of being in good health, especially as an actively sought goal

I like that definition, but it doesn’t exactly help me do anything to get ‘well’, or more accurately to increase my wellness. So if you keep reading and digging you’ll likely find the same additional sites I did that include six dimensions or eight components of wellness. These definitions are better since they include areas that you can think about, focus on and improve, but they still don’t quite hit everything in life for me. So after a lot of thought and reading, I made a model that includes all the information from the above definitions AND some additional things that they don’t hit.

Comparing my model to the Berkley Well Being model, which has eight components, I split Physical, Social, and Environmental well-being into three components each, and combine occupational and financial wellness into one category (because if you work for free that effort falls into either a social-friend category or a Spirit-purpose category).

So that’s where my comprehensive model comes from- but what about the meaning of wellness compared to healthy? If you noticed, the definition of wellness from the dictionary above includes “good health” in the definition. Doesn’t good health play a part?

Yes, in one way, but it falls short in a lot of ways too. To see where it falls short, let’s see the definition of health:

the condition of being sound in body, mind, or spirit; especially: freedom from physical disease or pain

The first issue is the “or” in the definition- based on that or (and yes, I’m splitting hairs) you can be healthy if you are just of sound body, but not mind or spirit. It’s a nuance, but an important one for me. But really, it’s that last part about disease and pain that differentiates health from wellness in my definition. Health, on this site, is more focused on disease and pain states, so being in good health means I’m lacking a negative (disease and pain), but it doesn’t necessarily address what I’m after- the lack of a negative doesn’t mean a positive. Since I’m after the positive aspects of living, and not just to have ‘nothing wrong with me’, that’s where my definition of wellness comes into play. The following figure gets the point across about the lack of negatives not being positives and where wellness is different from health.

Unlike Health, Wellness is more than the lack of negative disease states- wellness is about realizing positive states of being..

The Spectrum of Health vs Wellness. Health generally is defined as the lack of disease/dysfunction or pain states (the lack of a negative), while wellness skews more to the positive side of the spectrum.

But there are so many parts and pieces to my life (and I’m sure yours as well) that I needed more to start meaningfully beginning to improve my overall wellness than a linear spectrum ranging from unhealthy, to healthy/neutral, to well.

And that’s where my model came to be. I literally spent time each day for weeks looking at various parts of my day, what I was doing, who I was with, what I was thinking, feeling, and dreaming about, and kept trying to bucket those things into the eight-component model. Most of them did fit pretty well, but some needed more detail, like the difference between family, friends, and the many unknown people you meet in public- all are certainly under the “Social” component, but they are all very different from a wellness perspective. For the record, the “Social” component in the Berkley Wellbeing model became a level in the pyramid below. It’s still there, it’s just structured differently.

Why Being “In-shape” and “Fit” Aren’t Enough Either

Firstly, both the terms, “In-shape” and “Fit”, are very body-centric in the common vernacular. That means they are already inadequate for defining wellness because they just don’t readily apply to things like intellectual wellness, local environmental wellness, or finances. Imagine telling your friends that you are financially in shape- they would probably get the point, but it would surely sound funny. But there are some useful concepts we can draw from what these terms are doing, so let’s take a closer look.

In-shape, in a literal sense, refers to the physical form of your body- its shape. Certainly having a shape that conforms with your view of healthy and well, along with externally accepted standards, can be a good thing. No one, myself included, wants to have a physical shape that is generally associated with bad states of being. And so I take in-shape to refer to more desirable forms of my body as whole or individual parts and pieces of my body. Desirable forms can be a very slippery slope however and lead to unhealthy mental states, but we’ll come back to that in future posts in the Emotional section of this site.

Fit is a bit better in my mind. It’s not tied to my body as directly as the term “in-shape” is, mainly because fit implies that there is an intended purpose- as in “fit for purpose”. For example, if I wanted to be a competitive cyclist I would have to train my body to be fit for cycling. If I wanted to more actively rock-climb however I would need to train very differently so that my body would be fit for rock climbing but no longer as fit for cycling.  In short, fitness should require some intended activity (even if the goal is to be generally ready for activities in life) and hence is a very functional perspective.

From those two common terms associated with health it because obvious to me that form and function also need to be factored into the definition of comprehensive wellness. More specifically, for each wellness component, how will it function in my life and what form do I choose it to have? The following figure adds form and function to the above definition of wellness.

Wellness Includes Functional and Formic Components. Functional components of wellness directly translate into some utility in your life, while other components may be embodied by a form that represents a particular style or appeal for an individual.

It’s important to note that I see form and function being largely independent of the overall state of wellness- these two factors only help to describe how a given wellness state shows up in my life. An example might be helpful to show what I’m driving at here: I’m a pretty big fan of secular Buddhism and use the “eight-fold path” as a model often. Relative to form and function, secular Buddhism is the form of spiritual practice that I undertake, and it also includes a great deal of function from each of the components of the eight-fold path (i.e. right profession, right effort, etc.).

This definition is conceptual anyhow, so don’t get too bogged down by the representations in the figures- the figures are only intended to be representational of the concept of comprehensive wellness in a manner that enables me to take action to improve my life.

Comprehensive Wellness Model

Ok, that’s a lot of talk about what wellness is, so what is this comprehensive wellness model? Putting it all together, I came up with the following, a pyramid that starts with the most fundamental (and straightforward) and then builds progressively to the ultimate wellness concept- your Spirit for life.

***Pyramid figure***

Figure of the Levels and Components of Comprehensive Wellness. Comprehensive wellness includes five levels that build upon lower levels and 12 components.

The levels in the comprehensive wellness model are structured to represent a general progression from things that I have direct control over (i.e. what I eat) and are directly parts of me (my mind) and then progress to external components beyond my body and mind to social and environmental components. These two contexts show that being well requires a focus on both internal components AND external components. The final level, my Spirit, represents the non-religious term of spirit- as in the opposite of having my spirit broken. This includes all the things I do in life that result in true and deep satisfaction, enjoyment, and a feeling of purpose. The following table provides more details about each level and the contents that I cover.

Note however that the levels are not sequential- we are all alive and for the most part, are working at all levels each day to some degree. The reason I laid it out this way was to make sure that I’m focusing on the right parts first (i.e. Level 1) before increasingly focusing on ‘higher’ level things because, if my body is not well it is difficult to have a mental state that is well, which continues to trickle up the pyramid.

Level
Page Link
Description
Level 1
Taking a deep look at how to best maintain the only true thing I own in this world- my body. I break this down into four parts: physical, nutrition, and circadian rhythm (sleep, but a LOT more than just that). Without this base level, Level 1, it’s hard to really achieve a high-quality life with a greater quantity, but as implied, this is just the necessary foundation- achieving a high level of wellness with my body alone isn’t sufficient to achieve my overall wellness goals.
Level 2
Once I’m got everything covered in Level 1 (i.e. taking care of my body) I can really start hitting Level 2, my mind. At this level, I’m working to enhance my emotional state and continue to learn new things, and stimulate my intellectual abilities. Specifically, I talk about meditation, being mindful, reading books, various projects that I might be researching, various therapy techniques, and more. Level 1 and Level 2 collectively represent the entire inner-self in my model- that is they have everything you have direct control over. For that reason, most of the topics are about self-improvement and self-help topics.
Level 3
After internal wellness is completed in Level 1 and Level 2 the external components of wellness are appropriate focuses for improvement. My thought is once I have built a strong foundation for my mind and body, I should be in a great place to increasingly focus on external factors, starting with relationships. I break those relationships into three groups: family, friends, and professional engagements. It might seem a little strange to have professional relationships split out this way, but from my perspective, my profession is really just a different way of characterizing my relationship with my society, with a heavy economic twist.  Because of that economic twist, I also include finances at the social level of the pyramid (money isn’t any good if there aren’t any other people around in the world, right?).
Level 4
It’s hard to have a high degree of wellness in your life in a war zone. Level 4, Environment, talks about how you structure and engage with the environment from the air in front of your face that you breathe to the most charged global topics about climate change. It’s the external equivalent of Level 1 about your body- the physical stuff around you on this planet.
Level 5
My spirit is really what all the other levels are for. Basically, this component of comprehensive wellness addresses that age-old pontification about what I’ll think of my life on my deathbed. I want to be able to get the most out of life, enjoy my one-time-pass and die ecstatic, knowing I did ‘it’ well. I’m likely to share a lot of fun stuff here ranging from international travel to amazing adventures (which I can do because I hit Level 1), share success stories of family and friends, hobbies, and other things that bring me joy.

To get to an overall state of wellness