Health may be the most valuable thing that one can own.
Yet, even for the most healthy of us out there, there is still more that can be done to ensure our mental and physical health and wellness is optimized.
As a society, we have to ensure that we encourage those in our communities to take their health seriously through health promotion. Promoting health and wellbeing as a society through community wellness programs and workplace wellness programs will have far-reaching impacts not only on our healthcare costs but also on our daily lives.
Keep reading to find out how you can start promoting a healthier society!
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How Can You Promote Physical Health and Wellbeing?
Promoting physical health and wellbeing should start with you and your health. It only makes sense that people should be creating practices that promote their own personal health and wellbeing before trying to get others to do the same.
The health field is a complex world with many competing ideologies about how an individual can optimize their health and even what healthiness looks like. However, the good news is that there are aspects of health on which most experts agree. When taken together, these aspects are sometimes referred to as the foundation or backbone of health and wellbeing. This backbone consists of sleep, diet, exercise, and stress reduction.
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Let’s start by briefly talking about the importance of sleep. Unsurprisingly, sleep is a critical aspect of one’s health, with chronic sleep deprivation being linked to diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and depression, among many others. So, don’t take your sleep for granted, and ensure that you’re getting seven to nine hours each night.
Additionally, your body gets its energy from the food you eat, so make sure you eat a diet high in vegetables while limiting simple and refined sugars. Diet is an extremely complex subject, but by increasing vegetable intake and decreasing the amount of junk food you’re consuming, you’ll start taking large strides toward improving your health and wellbeing.
Let’s not forget about exercise.
Are you moving your body at least thirty minutes per day? If not, you should start working toward this goal, as movement is essential for burning excess calories and maintaining good cardiovascular health.
Finally, stress is often called the “silent killer,” as stress has been linked to many of the chronic diseases and leading causes of death in the United States. In the technology-filled and achievement-oriented world we live, many of us feel underlying daily stress, which we often don’t even realize because it has become a normal part of how we feel. This is why chronic stress is called the silent killer and why we need to have daily activities that help us de-stress and relax, hopefully, multiple times throughout the day.
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How Can You Promote Health in Your Community?
Many of the things that you focus on to ensure you’re healthy can also be applied to your communities. This can start by ensuring that your community is educated about the backbone or foundations of health. Knowledge is power, and educating your community about healthy practices can give people what they need to make the changes in their lives for wellness.
Another way you can directly contribute to your community’s health and wellbeing is to volunteer at your local social services organization. Often these individuals rely on volunteers to effectively run their programs. These opportunities also allow you to interact with community members directly so that you can impact their health firsthand. Volunteering has also been shown to be beneficial for the health and wellbeing of the person volunteering.
Other ways in which you can help your community become healthier is to organize community walks or other programs in which community participation and physical health are coupled. The bottom line is that there are many ways in which you can impact your communities’ health; you just have to be creative and determined enough to get out there and get involved.
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How Can You Improve Employee Health and Wellness?
There are many ways in which you can improve employee health and wellness, ranging from creating a health seminar for your employees to promoting health through smoke-free work environments. Employee wellness programs are great venues and opportunities for health topics to be discussed in detail by knowledgeable professionals and for your employees to get simple health screenings.
Since there are so many ways to promote employee health in your business and work environment, it’s a good idea to check out what a health and wellness program entails, as these workplace wellness programs are specifically designed to teach wellness concepts designed for promoting the health of employees in their work environment.
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