Wellness 5.0: Is it in you?

The robots are upon us, and in this “Age of Stress”, wellness is all the rage.

Wellness has taken on a new meaning for me. I have never lived an unhealthy life: I’ve maintained the same weight for the past 30 years and I can still wear the same clothes I wore 30 years ago, if and when I want to! Wellness, to me, used to be that simple. But it's much, much more than that.

The life of a headhunter is full of pressure, as a key part of our job is to take the worries away from our clients. I often preach to my colleagues that the best way to manage pressure is to keep a simple life, e.g. have only one boyfriend at one time and live an honest life. Honesty means we do not need to remember what we said and did to whom. An honest life means a simple life. I practice what I preach.

We know there are 7 aspects to wellness...

• Physical
• Emotional
• Intellectual 
• Social 
• Spiritual
• Environmental
• Occupational 

Most people find physical wellness to be the easiest to attain as it is measurable and actionable. The incentives to looking and feeling good are obvious, and there are tons of self-learning and readily available information on “how to keep fit.”

Emotional wellness can also be measured, but it is much harder for us to confront the issues head on and therefore seek straightforward solutions. It is a complex subject, but I find that two things help a lot: emptying your mind and learning to let go.

This is easy to say but hard to do, and it takes practice. This is where mindfulness/meditation helps, as it helps you stay focused on the moment.  Even a hot bath helps, or any activity that needs our full attention, such as yoga, running, horseback riding, scuba diving or even golf.   These all help us get into a habit of living in the moment, rather than inside our heads. We can also try simple gestures, such as raising both our hands as a sign of letting go, not unlike setting a bird free.

Forgiveness is also important to emotional wellness. I find it hardest to forgive myself. Learning to accept our destiny, and the things we cannot change, is one of the most serene feelings you can experience.

Spiritual wellness is very popular these days and there are even tours organised to “cleanse your soul”.  

Keeping a simple and honest life, I find, helps to pave the way for spirituality. Of course, a lot of our daily stress is related to not being able to fulfil our basic needs. It’s not easy to be spiritual if you’re too busy trying to just survive. 

To paraphrase Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs…

Needs --> Wellness --> Happiness 

Needs tend to be simple and concrete at the most basic level, and it’s something we all have in common. We all need to eat, sleep, take shelter and feel secure. However, as you move up the ladder of wellness, it becomes a bit more complicated. Happiness? Thomas Jefferson’s concept of the “Pursuit of Happiness” suggests that it could be just that – a pursuit. We can pursue it, but it’s something we can never really have. I don’t know. 

What I do know is that it is hard to address our need for “self-actualisation” (i.e. finding meaning and purpose in life and fulfilling our potential) when you cannot even meet your daily needs and that of your family.

Religious belief helps to free our “spirit”, but religious wellness is different from spiritual wellness. One is a means to the other, and vice versa. Religion is more extrinsic and outward looking, as it counts on the support of a community of like-minded people, while spirituality is more intrinsic and inward-looking.

Intellectual wellness is a more acute need, especially for those facing questions of whether to retire or not yet retire. Today, we are deluged by an abundance of information, everywhere and everyday – this, I believe, does not lead to intellectual wellness. Our intellectual wellness is also being challenged by the rise of AI and smart machines, which at some point will be smarter than us. Is the goal to beat the robot?

Intellectual wellness is difficult to achieve as our intellect can be insatiable, and our appetite to learn is unlimited. So to feel well intellectually, we must not stop learning. Yet, it also seems to be an endlessly moving target: the more we know, the more we do not know. 

To feel “well” intellectually, one must understand the challenge and be able to “connect the dots”. That takes wisdom (something we will still do better than AI). Otherwise, all that information will just drown you in a sea of dots.

Wellness is also about saving the planet! Environmental wellness is becoming a huge topic these days. “The ocean does not need us; we need the ocean,” so the saying goes. It is ironic that for us to feel well, we must feel that our environment is also well. So how come we do not put environmental wellness ahead of personal wellness?

Pursuing social wellness can become a source of tension as tension in society sometimes makes us feel detached. Social media helps and also hurts. It helps to connect, but it does not help us to always feel good about connecting. “Friends with better lives” causes us to constantly compare and keep up with others, and that leads to stress.

Ultimately, the goal of wellness is not about beating the robot or even becoming the robot ourselves, but knowing that, whatever comes our way, what’s in us is something even robots can never take away – our freedom to choose wellness of being and our pursuit of happiness.

Lots of Love,

Louisa

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