What is Wellbeing?
Wellbeing is an abstract concept that many of us strive to achieve, but few of us can truly explain. It is an all-encompassing phrase to describe how you feel about all the different aspects of your life. When you feel positive about all your most important values, you can be confident that you have succeeded in attaining a higher state of wellbeing.
How Do We Measure Wellbeing?
Since wellbeing is such an emotive subject, it can be very difficult to accurately measure it. That has not stopped various academics from trying, however! The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale (WEMWBS) is one useful tool that can attempt to assess your satisfaction with life. It uses 14 different phrases to assess how you might feel about different parts of your life, with the user scoring those phrases on a scale of 1-10. The idea is to find out how your wellbeing is overall, but to also pinpoint areas that might need a little help. It is a great scale to come back to on a regular basis, since circumstances are always changing, allowing us to quickly and easy identify what may have caused a dip in wellbeing. Other mental health practitioners use a range of indicators to determine a person’s wellbeing. These include factors within personal wellbeing, relationships, health, employment and leisure, our environment and finances. These are considered to be things that are important to enough people as to effect wellbeing.
How to Improve Wellbeing
Poor wellbeing is linked to many mental issues, such as depression, anxiety and an inability to cope with everyday challenges, as well as physical issues such as heart disease and cancer. So, if you are worried that your wellbeing is starting to suffer, it is important to take action quickly. There are many things you can do, but one of the very best is to seek out those relationships that are most important to you and attempt to talk to them about how you are feeling. If you don’t have someone who you feel comfortable sharing your feelings with, there are many helplines, including the Samaritans, Mind and Calm. Their phone numbers are easily found online. On an ongoing basis, however, it is important to make time for social contact as regularly as possible and look for a job and hobbies that you find fulfilling. Eat healthily and exercise regularly to keep your body in tip-top condition and indulge yourself in activities that you enjoy, making time for self-care as well as social activities. Finally, set yourself some goals that you can achieve on a daily basis, so that you always feel you have a purpose in each day.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to improving wellbeing, since we all have a very different outlook to our lives. Finding what works for you is the biggest challenge, so make it a priority to put your own wellbeing first.
