Wellness is the optimal state of health of individuals and groups. This shows when you live your life responsibly and take proactive steps for your wellbeing.
Wellness is largely associated with pursuing activities, making choices that impact your life, and reducing risk factors through focusing on nutrition and having a balanced diet.
What makes wellness succeed is that it stands on certain pillars which I will be explaining in this article.
The 5 Pillars of Wellness
Wellness is way more than your physical health; it is holistic. It comprises majorly of five dimensions that include exercise, stress, sleep, nutrition, and mental wellbeing.
1. Exercise
Exercising involves engaging in physical activities which helps to preserve our physical and mental health. As humans, we need some form of activity or our mind and body will slowly decline. We are built to move and when we don’t the consequences can be disastrous.

Whether you engage in light exercises, such as going for a walk, jogging, and dancing around the kitchen, or high-intensity activities, which involves you going to the gym and pulling weights, regular exercise provides a huge range of benefits for the body and mind, some of which includes:
- Improving brain performance
- Reducing stress
- Alleviating anxiety
- Enhancing creativity
- Improve sleep hygiene
Want to fit exercise into your daily routine?
2. Rest
Rest can be difficult to define because it looks different to everyone. In simple terms, rest is any behavior aimed at increasing your physical and mental health. It can be in two forms – active, such as going for a walk, and passive, such as taking time to sit and breathe deeply.

Irrespective of how you choose to rest, these daily behaviors help you recover and recharge your physical and mental effort. Rest is important in the pillar of wellness because as humans we are always burning ourselves out.
Rest helps to reduce anxiety and stress, improve mood, and decrease blood pressure among others. Prioritizing rest in your daily routine is very important, to do this:
- Find little ways to incorporate rest in your daily routine
- Find a technique that works for you. It could be meditating, yoga, walking, reading a book or a combination of these things
- Always find a consistent time to rest in your daily routine.
3. Nutrition
What you put in your body matters a lot as there is no substitute for good health and proper nutrition. A combination of all the classes of food is key for well-rounded nutrition. Your body will only function optimally when all these components are present.

One thing to understand is that your daily food choices make a big difference to your health. Good nutrition has a lot of benefits to the body; click this to find out more.
4. Stress Management
Stress is part of being human, you can hardly escape it and sometimes, it motivates you into getting things done. Effective stress management helps you reduce the stress in your life, so you can be happier, active, healthy, and productive.

Some stress management techniques include:
- Identify the source of stress in your life
- When you feel stressed, exercise
- Do an appraisal at the end of each day of the things you did
- Have a positive attitude at all times
- Accept that you can’t control everything
- Learn to say ‘’no’’
5. Mental wellbeing
Your mental wellbeing speaks to your thoughts, feelings, and how you handle the ups and downs of everyday life. Good mental wellbeing is characterized by how you navigate and understand negative thoughts and feelings so you can feel confident, productive, build and maintain relationships, cope with normal stress and manage to change situations.

Having an understanding of these pillars of wellness helps you make more informed decisions and be intentional about how you treat yourself and the things you allow inside your body.
Check out other pillars of wellness.
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