What is comprehensive wellness? We throw around terms like optimal wellness, holistic and integrative care, wholeness of body, mind and spirit and human optimization, but what does comprehensive wellness really entail? It is now well-established in the scientific community that mental health, relationship health and physical health are linked in important ways. It is difficult to optimize our bodies and fitness if depression is eating away at our brain cells. It is hard to optimize our minds if our relationship stress is producing anxiety on a daily basis. And our relationships depend in significant ways on our individual physical and mental health. Comprehensive wellness, therefore, means that we respect and pursue the complete integration of health and optimization: healthy mind, healthy body and healthy relationships.
For the skeptics in the audience, let’s begin with the science. Mental health issues, like depression and anxiety, were long-thought to be psychological disorders with minor physical components. Through modern neuroscience research, we now understand that these disorders are highly physiological, affecting both the body and the mind in important ways. Depression is cytotoxic, meaning that it degrades living cells, especially in the brain. It also starts to groove in neural pathway patterns that become more difficult to reverse the longer an individual’s depression continues.
Read the rest of this article in Austin Fit Magazine by clicking here: What is Comprehensive Wellness?
