Living with a mental health condition often feels like you are constantly stuck in your head. Your mental health treatment might involve much thought-based work, including talk therapy and group counseling. You might also find yourself constantly dealing with ruminations that occupy your mind. While focusing on your mind and emotions is important for healing, you’ll also find that taking a whole wellness approach can help you to enjoy a greater overall sense of well-being.
What Is Whole Body Wellness
If you look at your overall wellness from a 360-degree view, you can quickly see how your mind isn’t the only thing you should focus on when you have a mental health condition. Health and wellness essentials also include taking care of your physical body and your social, intellectual, and spiritual needs. Each element of your wellness impacts the other, and this approach helps ensure that none of your needs are overlooked as you build better mental health.
What Is the Difference Between Mental Health and Whole Body Wellness?
Most forms of mental health treatment focus on exactly what the name suggests. You might use talk therapy to work through past trauma, or your therapist might recommend alternative approaches, such as ketamine therapy, that impact your brain. These forms of mental health care are effective and incredibly important for your recovery. Yet, they shouldn’t be the only things that are included in your wellness plan.
The wellness model also includes taking steps to improve the other aspects of your life that impact your mental health. For instance, you might need to learn how to eat more nutritious meals to give your brain the energy needed to process life events. Or, you might use yoga or other forms of recreational exercise to ease chronic pain that weighs down your mental health. Recognizing how your body and health influence your mental and emotional state of mind is the primary component that sets whole-body wellness apart from programs that only address mental symptoms.
Why Is Whole Body Health Important for Recovery?
People with addictions or other mental health conditions often neglect other aspects of their wellness, which can hinder progress in recovery. Going through recovery requires physical and mental stamina. You might also need to rely upon your spiritual beliefs, social support network, and intellectual abilities to enjoy the best possible recovery. Nurturing these core parts of your life helps you move through the recovery faster and more likely to enjoy long-term healing.
What Are the Elements of Whole Body Living?
Prioritizing health and wellness essentials involves paying attention to all healthy habits that people tend to forget or neglect over time. Whole-body health isn’t hard to achieve, but it will take some effort to drum up your motivation to get started. Everyone needs a healthy diet, proper rest, and exercise to feel their best. You also need to have strong social connections that include feeling supported by your family and friends. Having hobbies, a career, and other sources of personal fulfillment are also important.
How Is the Whole Wellness Approach Integrated Into Mental Health Treatment?
Effective mental health programs include components that help you to improve your body and health. For instance, you might find that your addiction treatment provider recommends finding types of exercise you can engage in to keep your mind off drugs and alcohol. Nutritional planning makes it possible to eliminate possible substances in your diet that stimulate negative mental health symptoms. Some people might need to avoid caffeine to reduce their feelings of anxiety. Other people might need to learn how to build stronger social connections by using the strategies that they learn in therapy. Each positive change you make with the help of your therapist helps you to achieve whole-body living.
Is It Possible to Maintain the Wellness Model At Home?
The wellness approach is also designed to be incorporated into your home life. After all, you spend more of your time at home than you do in your mental health care program. Plus, you need to use the things you learn in therapy at home to enjoy long-term healing.
In an outpatient therapy program, you might talk about your home challenges. Then, you can work with your therapist to develop strategies that use the whole-body living approach. You might work on creating good sleep habits along with following an exercise routine. Over time, you’ll be able to quickly recognize when an aspect of your life is veering off track so that you can make changes to restore your balance.
Learning how to use the wellness approach to infuse every aspect of your life with healing is easier when you have professional support. At Mind Body Healing in Franklin, TN, you have access to an amazing amount of support that nurtures your physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Bringing your body and mind together gives you the strength to stand up to mental health conditions such as depression and addiction, and we’re here to support you with every step you take on your wellness journey.
