Minds on.

The following video looks at how all the dimensions of wellness relate to each other and what you can do to improve your personal health.

This is the dropbox icon. Assignment: Health and Wellness Factors

After watching the video above, or doing your own online search, make a connection between health and wellness and at least three other factors.

Understanding what health and wellness are - along with factors that affect it - will be key to understanding many concepts throughout this course.

Action.

What is Wellness?

Wellness is an active process of becoming aware of and making choices toward a healthy and fulfilling life. Wellness is more than being free from illness, it is a dyamic process of change and growth. [It is] ...a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

Health and Wellness (as defined by the World Health Organization) is "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."

Health is a state of body. Wellness is a state of being.

J. Stanford

Wellness Wheel

Wellness is made up of different components. A wellness wheel has seven main components which blend together to make up the parts of total wellness. Most behaviorists agree that all components of the wheel are interconnected. If one part of your wheel is neglected, it can have a domino effect on the other parts of your wheel.

How Well do You Balance All Seven Parts of Your Own Wellness Wheel?

To gain a better understanding of each of the components of the wellness wheel, hover your cursor over each section of the wheel to learn about it.

Long Description

This is the dropbox icon. Assignment: Is Your Wellness Wheel in Balance?

  1. Take this quiz and see how your seven components compare to an average Canadian student.
  2. Review your results from the wellness wheel quiz and identify the component that you think you might need to address to enhance your wellness.
  3. Look at this wellness guide from Simon Frasier University in British Columbia to read about strategies to enhance your wellness.
  4. Identify two strategies you can use to enhance your wellness.

Inquiry - What’s It All About?

?


As you read
Think about which components/skills you can do well and which component/skills you struggle with the most.

In Activity 1, we introduced the idea of inquiry and formulating questions. There are six components of Inquiry-Based Learning. Throughout the course, you may focus on part or all of the components.

The inquiry process isn’t always a straight path. As you develop your inquiry skills, you may need to go back to a previous component before moving on. For example, you may have gathered resources but, as you begin to evaluate and draw conclusions, you find you don’t have enough evidence to support your stance. You need to go back and gather more information. Also, you can reflect at all points in the process, not only at the end.

Let’s get familiar with the components. Hover over the different parts to find out what they mean. We’ll come back to your thoughts about them later in the activity.

Long Description

Inquiry may be more structured at first, where you are provided with a question to investigate or directing you to certain websites to gather information as you develop the skills needed. Eventually, with practice, you will be able to create your own questions, find reliable information to draw a conclusion, and present your findings to an appropriate audience.

Inquiry - Exploring and Formulating Questions about Wellness

Rich, open-ended questioning is the starting point for effective inquiry or for addressing a problem.

Simple questions are often "closed" or have one right answer. They are factual or confirm knowledge.

Here are some examples of simple questions:

Complex questions are "open" and encourage a variety of approaches or responses. They are thought provoking and will often lead to further discussions. Open-ended questions use higher order thinking skills that require one to analyse, synthesize, predict, infer, decide, or evaluate based on information.

Here are some examples of complex questions:

This is the dropbox icon. Assignment: Creating Questions Using a Topic or an Image

Take a look back at the descriptors of the seven dimensions of the wellness wheel and the image above. Create seven questions using the Question Builder Chart that follows.

Question Builder Chart

Use one word from the left hand column and one word from the top row to create a question. Note: the farther down and to the right you go, the more complex and higher level thinking the question you will create. Create at least one question per row.

Adapted from Koechlin, C. & Zwaan, S. (2014).
Q Tasks, 2nd Edition: How to empower students to ask questions and care about answers. Ontario: Pembroke Publishers.
Long Description

You can download and complete this question builder chart in order to make the process a little easier.

Do One Thing: Small Changes Can Enhance Your Wellness

?


Extend your thinking...
Watch this Ted Talk video to learn how Dr. Wendy Suzuki’s life revolved around increasing exercise in her day. Her overall wellness increased so dramatically that she started to change her research focus. She now looks into the effects of movement on brain health.

In the Minds On activity, we looked at the difference between health and wellness. Making one small change can often have a large impact on the other dimensions of wellness. One example might be observing the positive effects of starting your day with exercise.

Not only does it reduce stress, but it also allows you to improve your physical and emotional wellness.

What type of activity could you do first thing in the morning that would challenge you to grow and change to a more wellness-focused life?

Could you start tomorrow?

Changing your life to be more focused on wellness requires a paradigm shift. A paradigm shift happens when you change the usual or routine way you do things to a new way or routine.

One mistake that people often make when looking to improve their personal lives is believing that these changes have to be big. In 2014, the Northwestern Health Unit started a community wellness project called: "Do One Thing".

The campaign has many tactics to improve wellness and to begin tackling issues like the rising rates of obesity and chronic disease, including the 21 Day Challenge. The biggest message of the program is to think about making one healthy change - and sticking with it to see a positive result. This campaign is based on the idea that it takes 21 days to make a habit stick. Scientists have tried to prove that habits form when a person completes the same task over and over again, until it becomes part of her or his natural behaviour.

This is the dropbox icon. Assignment: Do One Thing Challenge

Watch the following video of Dr. Adams choosing one thing to help him get healthier:

What is one thing that you might consider changing as a "Do One Thing Challenge?" Consider one activity that you could begin doing today.

Write a descriptive paragraph or record a short video, demonstrating how you could do one thing differently to improve your health and wellness.

Be sure to include:

  • the activity you will add to your day to enhance your wellness;
  • how adding this activity will benefit your overall health;
  • the time of day that you will fit your activity into your life; and
  • explain why you have chosen that particular time.
Consolidation

This is the dropbox icon. Assignment: Assessing My Personal Wellness

  1. Find three pictures that show at least three of the seven components of wellness. You may use a site such as pixabay to find pictures. You may also use pictures from your own life.
  2. Assemble the three pictures in order from the component that is strongest in your life to the component that you believe you might focus on to enhance your personal wellness.
  3. Answer the following questions.
    • Which component do you have the most influence on and why?
    • Which component do you have the least influence on and why?
    • How are all of these components interconnected in your life?

Finally, just to reiterate...

Wellness is not just the absence of illness. It involves several components. They are all interrelated and can be used to enhance personal health. Being healthy means you make decisions that support all seven components of wellness throughout your lifetime.

test text.