Corporate wellness has been growing in popularity steadily over the last few years. Wellness is becoming a buzz word. Personal development is trending. But what do these words mean?
Most of us know generally what we need to do to improve our health and wellness; the problem is that we don't know how.
How do we know if we are falling short in an area of our wellness? Once we figure that out, how do we fix it?
Wellness is multi-faceted, and busy professionals are THE WORST at self care. So let's talk about how we can improve our wellness habits to be more energetic, more productive, and more pain-free.
What is wellness, really?
I like to think of wellness as an amalgamation of our stress, sleep, exercise, nutrition, and mental health habits. When one or more areas are lacking, the positive effects of the others can be diminished. For example: the positive effects of a good workout can be greatly diminished if I've only gotten two hours of sleep and eaten a potato-chip diet for the last 48 hours.
Most of the time (because some of the time life goes to hell in a hand basket and there's not a whole lot we can do), we need to try to balance all areas of wellness to the best of our ability and make an effort to identify the areas in which we regularly fall short. You can't fix an issue without first identifying the issue. Do you find yourself regularly stressing out about things you can't control? Figure out how to stop doing that. Do you suck at sleeping? Look into solutions. Haven't done any physical activity in a while? Start going for daily walks.
Figure out where you're falling short and take small steps to improve.
What is corporate wellness (and how do I implement it)?
Corporate wellness is, in a nutshell, wellness at work. Up until recently, much of corporate wellness was focused solely on employees getting exercise and maybe a little bit of nutrition assistance, but the corporate environment with ALL of its stressors MUST hold itself accountable for the other areas and facets of wellness. Stress management, financial wellness, workload management, and work-life integration are all pieces of the corporate wellness puzzle (along with many others). The best way to begin down the road to corporate wellness is to implement daily habits that help us improve in one or more of these areas. It doesn't take much - start with ten-minute increments.
Not sure where to start improving on your corporate wellness practices? Try this: every 90 minutes, get up from your desk and do ONE stretch, take a lap around the building (no phone), take 10 deep belly breaths, and drink a big glass of water. Want to be an overachiever? Say a fun mantra to yourself (like "I am super cool and life is great, even though I have 8 million pages of emails to respond to").
Also try things like, you know, sleeping.
Corporate wellness routines have some surprising benefits, including increased productivity, increased work satisfaction, improved rapport with peers, fewer sick days, and generally feeling more awesome all the time.
Remember: habits aren't habits unless you do them consistently, so find something that works for you and stick with it. Be deliberate.