Assessing Your Health Holistically

What is your current personal health story?

How do you assess your health conditions? Do you determine your overall holistic status? Do you track the details of an illness, a diagnosis, a disorder, a disease? Do you note when you feel afflicted by something? Do you note what makes you feel vital? Do you have optimal health conditions for physical, mental, and emotional aspects of your well-being? Do you factor spirituality or energetics into your state of well-being?

Just a few simple questions, right?! On the contrary, the answers to these questions can run deep and wide. It can be overwhelming to assess all these areas of your holistic health, yet it’s valuable to do so. You want to get the ‘big picture’ perspective of how each aspect of your well-being works within the broader system that is you.

When you assess your holistic health, you’ll have conditions that you feel run the gamut from optimal to insufficient. With some conditions you’ll have routine awareness, with other conditions, you will need to take deliberate effort to have clear understanding of what’s happening and how it’s affecting you.

— —

It’s probable that most individuals deal with some type of affliction or condition that needs management or improvement. For instance someone may have physical conditions like high blood pressure or diabetes. You can add behaviors that improve these condition. Someone may have mental and emotional conditions like depression or anxiety about her career. These conditions can also be improved with specified changed behaviors.

Each individual must ask: “Does I accept these conditions and live with them, or do I find solutions to improve them?” If the choice is to improve or alleviate, then a good place to begin to resolution is within one’s mind. Do you believe that mindset and perspective can influence your progress with any condition you may have?

There’s growing research about how your thoughts regarding your condition have an effect on the degree to which your condition persists. Your mindset contributes to your progress for improvement or it can steer you toward the worsening or stagnation of your condition. What if you make the conscious effort to steer your focus in the direction to resolve the condition of concern?

— —

In modern day society, people are diagnosed or labeled with a disease or disorder by someone else — a doctor, a psychologist, a health practitioner. This helps clarify the condition. The terms used are most beneficial to the diagnoser. They use them to classify and treat accordingly. Do these terms provide the same benefit to those given the diagnosis?

I suggest anyone to simply ask themselves, “how does it feel to continually state I have an illness or disease?” My suggestion would be, if it feels good to state this, then continue to do so. If such statements do not feel good, and lead you to stress or worry, then would be alright to call it something different. Is there benefit in creating some space between you and the diagnosis?

This is not to undermine the importance of that the diagnosis indicates you’re experiencing. You can still classify what it is — diabetes, high blood pressure, depression, anxiety, etc. The consideration would be how to frame this information in a way that it doesn’t interfere with how you function in the world. Is there a way to look at your condition so that it would not hinder your future health and success? This way, as you address whatever physical symptoms you have, your thoughts can help propel your progress.

So can you do it? Can you think of a way to reframe your health concerns to match what your preferred outcome? Rather than narrate what you’ve been diagnosed, is there a way to using bringing language to engage the process? Try doing this and see if you begin to feel better over time. Also, try to find someone who you can discuss this outlook with to keep the momentum going!