The 3 Pillars of Holistic Health
How do you define good health? What are the practices and habits that foster health and well-being in your view? Are you boxing yourself into a limited and limiting framework of diet and exercise alone? Then perhaps you need to rethink your definition of what good health and well-being involve.
Holistic health is the essence of wellness and wellbeing. It’s an umbrella that considers the whole rather than the parts. This includes diet and exercise, as well as many other areas that work together to achieve lasting, optimal health and wellbeing.
There are three key pillars of holistic health. Here’s a brief rundown of each, along with suggested practices to help you begin developing a holistic health lifestyle.
- Physical health
Caring for your physical health means ensuring that all of your bodily processes are balanced, well-regulated, and working at their peak. This includes cardiovascular, immune, gastrointestinal, and even oral health.
Maintaining good physical health also means developing preventative habits and practices that help lower the risk of disease or promote faster healing.
Maintaining your physical health involves the following practices:
- Excellent nutrition, meaning a varied and balanced diet low in fats, high in fresh fruits and vegetables, and regular mealtimes.
- Regular exercise and maintaining a healthy weight.
- Cleanliness and good personal hygiene.
- Getting quality sleep.
- Regular dental and physical checkups.
With these key steps in place, you can be sure you have the first pillar of holistic health firmly established.
- Mental wellbeing
‘Sound body, sound mind’ is a familiar saying that we all agree is perfectly valid. But turning it around to ‘sound mind, sound body’ is equally valid. In fact, poor brain health and low mental well-being can sabotage your efforts to maintain good physical health.
Holistic health understands the close relationship between mental and physical well-being and, therefore, focuses on building strong brain health and fostering mental clarity and tranquility. Some crucial practices include:
- Releasing repressed emotions.
- Getting out of toxic relationships and fostering strong, healthy ones.
- Exercising the brain with stimulating activities like reading and solving puzzles.
- Fostering cognitive health with creative activities, exercise, and a diet rich in ‘brain foods’.
- Addressing unresolved emotional trauma and finding closure.
- Addressing chronic sleep issues.
- De-stressing and managing stress daily.
- Adopting a mindset of lifelong learning.
With physical and mental health working together at their peak, the wheels of holistic health are not in motion!
- Spiritual resilience
Many of us mistakenly equate spirituality with religion or meditation, which we don’t see as something vital to our overall health. Spiritual health is much more than that.
Strong spiritual health fosters emotional resilience, social intelligence, self-acceptance, and positivity, all of which directly impact our mental and physical health.
The following practices are the best way to promote spiritual wellbeing and emotional healing:
- Mindfulness practice.
- Prayer
- Getting in touch with nature.
- Practicing gratitude.
We often lump spiritual and mental well-being together, but they’re actually two distinct areas. Spiritual health is more closely related to your inner peace and tranquility, your ability to accept yourself and others as they are, and your ability to recover and bounce back from setbacks. Strong emotional health helps keep stress levels down, and, naturally, this positively impacts both physical and mental well-being.