While reading chapter 1, the section titled wellness and the dimensions of health really struck me as something I should work to better understand and implicate into my own life. In this section the book explains that in order to achieve wellness, you must try to achieve your potential in being physically, socially, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and environmentally healthy(Donatelle, 2019, p.3). A balance in all six dimensions is optimal, meaning someone who goes to the gym every day and is super strong and has perfect muscle tone may look healthy, but that only covers one of the six aspects, and they might not be healthy in other aspects such as emotional health. I have been trying to work on my emotional health over the past few months, unaware of how interrelated all six aspects are. I have noticed that since I have started working on my physical health, it is much easier to work on the other aspects of my health.
Another thing that I found really important in chapter one was the influence of mindfulness on your health. Mindfulness is being aware of yourself and your surroundings by using “your sensations, thoughts, and feelings-and your environment.” (Donatelle, 2019, p.8) without judgement. Being mindful can benefit your health by relieving pain and reducing stress and anxiety as well as improve sleep and memory and attention. I found it especially interesting that mindfulness can possibly help with addiction, seeing that people in a methadone treatment clinic had statistically significant improvements in depression , cravings and symptoms of trauma after the use of mindfulness-based relapse prevention programs (MBPP). This just goes to show that everyone, myself included can benefit from practicing mindful behavior.
I have had trouble getting out of the precontemplation and contemplation stages of the Transtheoretical model for quite a while now, which may be for a number of reasons, but the main reason is that had no accountability. Joining this class has made me have to be more accountable for my own health and moved me to the preparation phase, aswell as beginning the action phase. I plan to use shaping in my gym routine by increasing how many minutes I run by 5 minutes every week. Today I walked for 10 minutes and ran for 10 minutes, so I plan on doing about the same until Friday, where I will try to walk 10 minutes and run 15 minutes. By the third week I hope to only have to walk 5 minutes and run 15-20 minutes.
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