The Eight Dimensions of Wellness: A Roadmap to a Balanced Life
Managing balance
Have you ever tried to navigate Google Maps with wet fingers in the rain? Moving the screen and shifting the perspective tends to be glitchy, unresponsive, and downright frustrating. Without zooming out for a bigger picture, you don’t get to see the alternate routes available, the more scenic ways to drive, or even understand anything but what’s in your immediate proximity.
Getting from A to B in the car can be frustrating enough, but to do that in your life can feel even more drastically unreachable.
Part of my role as a coach is to help my clients hold a mirror in front of themselves to reflect back what their life looks like to them. When we’re in it, and fully immersed in life all around us, it’s hard to know what to look for on the first steps of a self-improvement journey. Breaking apart our well-being into eight dimensions helps take our overall “self” and provide bite-sized chunks that are much more manageable.
The Eight Dimensions of Wellness
The Eight Dimensions of Wellness model looks at different areas of life that are often seen as separate, but the reality is that they exist in a world of push and pull, where they play, fight, and move together. By mapping out our own wellness, we can zoom out to see the direction we need to go. From above, we can look at the routes we can take to a healthier and happier life without hitting the surprise toll roads along the way.
With my clients, I encourage the drawing of a wellbeing baseline. This initial sketch of a map highlights areas in which we think we’re doing well, and the others where we may need to shift our attention. Once the map is drawn out, we can really start to understand how all the pieces come together to form the whole.
The thing is, this is your map. Every dimension of wellness can only represent you if it’s relative to your life experiences and the way you feel about each piece of the pie. Your physical wellbeing isn’t going up against a vegan ultrarunner unless you are that vegan ultrarunner. Wellness and wellbeing start at the individual level, and comparing our own wellbeing to others’ does nothing but damage exactly what we’re hoping to build up.
First things first, let’s gather an understanding of the different dimensions before we look at the ways in which they all intertwine.
Physical
The most glaringly obvious dimension of wellness tends to be our physical wellbeing. Mistreated bodies shout their sorrows through the creaks of unused joints or consistent headaches and we don’t usually make it through the day without hearing a complaint or two.
Nurturing your physical wellbeing means exercising regularly, eating the right stuff, and sleeping well. And sometimes, the right stuff for you is way different than the right stuff for Steve. Steve’s body has rejected dairy from birth, but your calcium comes mostly from the milk you consume daily. Steve also runs ten mile weeks while you prefer to bike closer to 100 on the weekends.
And unless you’ve been blessed with Short Sleeper Syndrome (yeh, it’s real), getting that 7-8 hours of sleep each night drastically affects your physical wellbeing.
How do you see your physical wellbeing? Where would you put yourself on a scale of 1-10?
Emotional
The favorite dimension of wellbeing by all those growing up in the 21st century is most likely the emotional sector. Here, we’re talking about how well you cope with emotional challenges, what tactics you have at your disposal for when things get rough, and how you form meaningful relationships with others (and yourself!).
The stigma that can exist around seeking out coaching or therapy will often claim that someone is lacking in their emotional wellbeing, but this is far from true. Someone can be doing incredibly well in their emotional selves while struggling to increase their external relationships, struggle with finances, or feel like they are completely stuck. I would argue that seeking out a coach is an indicator of a high emotional wellbeing, not a low one.
Reflect on how your brain experiences emotions throughout the day. How do you handle things as they come along? Try to place yourself on a 1-10 scale.
Spiritual
Too many people get hung up on the word spiritual when talking about themselves. Often, they fall straight to organized religion and can shut down quickly. Spirituality and spiritual wellbeing can absolutely come from organized religion, but that is only one of the countless ways you can be a spiritual person.
Your spiritual wellbeing is reflective of how well you can connect to your inner and outer worlds to live in alignment with your values. This can come in the form of a daily meditation practice, a weekly visit to the synagogue, or frequent jaunts out in the natural world. Spirituality is just about finding something bigger than yourself, and seeing how you relate to that. Where do your values align with the bigger picture and where do they need some shifting?
How often do you separate from the noise of the world and let yourself simply exist? How much time do you spend alone with yourself and the world to think about life as a whole? Find where you lie on your own map.
Occupational
On average we spend forty hours every single week at work, studying at a desk, or pursuing whatever purpose it is that has found us. How we spend our time isn’t just about how we make money or advance our education, it’s about each and every moment, because when it comes to wellbeing, every second counts.
When you get home from school or work, do you sit straight down on the couch and let the TV absorb you? Do you go out for a run? Do you invest in yourself and start to learn something new?
Again, I won’t claim that any of these are better than the other for you. That’s your job. How well do you think you spend your time?
Intellectual
One of the character strengths that Martin Seligman talks about in Authentic Happiness is the love of learning. Some people develop this innate desire to grow intellectually and it’s almost unstoppable how much they crave learning. To a certain point, this can point directly to a high score in their intellectual wellbeing.
How often are you letting your brain feel challenged to grow and learn? Are you taking care of your brain as a muscle like you do your quads on leg day?
Environmental
Whether you like getting out and dirty or not, people come from the earth and it’s still vital for us to spend time nourishing our relationship with the environment. Even though we came from the outside, the reality is that most of us spend our days inside, which means that the cubicle, the living room desk, or the gym weight room has become our environment.
The physical space we surround ourselves with every day can have major effects on our emotions throughout the entire day, and have an immense power to build up over time.
How intentional are you about spending time outside? How about protecting yourself from the different pollutants that come along with living in the modern age?
Financial
Some people are able to whip up a budget, stick to it, and save for retirement as easily as taking a walk to the corner store.
Some others, however, may not have an idea on what a budget looks like, and why would they? They spend on a whim and get whatever it is they want at the moment. They hold the classic “who knows if I’ll even make it to retirement?” point of view.
No matter where you are, examining how your financial status lines up with your values and your intentions helps to place it on the map. Are you comfortable with your finances, or does looking at your bank account freak you out every time?
Social
Study after study has shown that being social helps us live longer, sometimes even up to 50% longer.
That’s great and promising, but social wellbeing is a really difficult area to nail down for some. Having diverse healthy relationships looks different for everyone and finding those relationships can be more stressful than your wedding day for some.
Everyone’s social life can look a little bit different as well. In 2024, many social circles exist fully online, and meeting in person is a diminishing occasion. No matter your style, it’s important to find these relationships and reflect on how they impact your overall wellbeing.
The Interplay of Wellbeing Dimensions
Once you have a map laid out, it’s so much easier to see how moving one aspect of your life can have impacts all across the board, akin to the Butterfly Effect.
For example, Kari makes the choice to increase her financial wellness by managing a budget and sticking to it with more discipline than her current system. To achieve her new budget, she misses out more and more on those nights out at the club with her friends, slowly chipping away at her social wellbeing. Because of those nights alone, her physical and emotional wellbeing also start to dwindle, but she’s spending them diving into books on astronomy and learning the night sky, boosting her in her intellectual wellbeing.
A minor tweak over here can have major effects over there. Making change can be a great thing, but if we forget to zoom out, we can miss some of the consequences that could have been caught beforehand.
Playing with our eight dimensions of wellness, and ultimately our life experience, can be an artform in which it’s okay to mess up and try again. We change on the daily, so how we take care of ourselves and align our values to our actions also needs to change.
