Launching My Wellness Framework
The current perspective is “There is no single "best" ideology for organizing your life, as the ideal approach depends entirely on your personal values, priorities, and goals.” For some, an organized life means having a meticulously scheduled calendar and a decluttered home. For others, it means pursuing meaningful experiences over possessions or cultivating inner peace through mindfulness.
Below is list of some common ideologies focused on self-organization and productivity.
Getting Things Done (GTD): This method, created by David Allen, is a framework for managing tasks and commitments by breaking them down into actionable steps. Its core idea is to free your mind from needing to remember everything by writing it down, allowing you to focus on the task at hand.
Core principles: Capture everything that has your attention, clarify what needs to be done, organize information into lists, reflect on your goals, and engage with your tasks effectively.
The Pomodoro Technique: For those who feel overwhelmed, this time-management method can help. You break down your work into 25-minute intervals, separated by short breaks. This can boost focus and prevent burnout.
Simplifying and decluttering: Many people find that organizing their physical and digital space is the first step to organizing their life. The "one in, one out" rule is a popular strategy to prevent clutter buildup.
These ideologies and tools have been helpful through my personal and professional life but only address how to complete the tasks set before you (often by other people). What is the end-game? What is the ultimate goal and how does it benefit you or your family? Do you sometimes feel in life that you are just surviving with the responsibility that has been set before you with no big picture in view?
Wellness science goes way back. Ancient people saw health as a balance of mind, body, and spirit. Old practices in China, India, and Greece focused on keeping things in harmony and preventing problems. Think of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, and the Greek idea of eudaimonia, which means living well. During the Industrial Revolution, wellness started to become more about medicine, focusing on treating diseases instead of overall well-being. But in the 20th century, people started to bring back those earlier ideas of prevention and balance. Halbert Dunn even came up with the term high-level wellness in the 1950s.
Since then, wellness science has become a mix of a lot of different fields, like psychology, nutrition, exercise, and how we act. It looks at how our lifestyle, environment, and the way we think all play a role in staying healthy and living a long life. People have come up with nine areas of wellness that make up what it means to be well.
What philosophers thought about has really shaped wellness science. Both try to figure out what it means to live a good and happy life. Philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle talked about being good, staying balanced, and reaching eudaemonia—living well through being reasonable and doing the right thing. Eastern philosophies, like Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, also pushed being mindful, staying in harmony, and improving yourself to find inner peace and well-being. These ideas set the stage for wellness science today. It mixes thinking about what's right, knowing yourself, and using proven methods to help you be healthy in every way.
Today, wellness science still uses philosophical ideas about meaning, purpose, and doing what's right. It knows that being well isn't just about your body or your mind. It's also strongly tied to what you believe, how you see the world, and how connected you feel to others and the world around you.
Below is a list of some common philosophies focused on meaning and mindset.
Stoicism: This ancient Greek philosophy teaches that you should focus your energy on what you can control—your own actions and attitudes—and accept what you cannot. This approach helps reduce anxiety and cultivates inner peace by focusing on virtue, reason, and resilience in the face of adversity.
Minimalism: This movement focuses on intentionally living with less to maximize what you value most. The goal is to declutter your life of excess material possessions, distractions, and commitments that do not bring you joy or purpose.
Epicureanism: Often misunderstood as simply pursuing pleasure, the Epicurean philosophy advocates for seeking a calm and happy life by maximizing simple pleasures, cultivating friendships, and limiting desires. This approach emphasizes contentment and peacefulness.
Mindfulness: This practice involves being fully present in the current moment without judgment. Through techniques like meditation and paying attention to your senses, you can reduce stress, increase mental clarity, and appreciate daily life.
For me personally, I find myself practicing all of these philosophies at different degrees and at different points in my life. We all know people in our lives that have maybe taken these philosophies to the extreme often alienating themselves from society as a whole. Does practicing one or all of these philosophies output the most well-rounded person? If wellness science has identified multiple dimension of wellness, can they all be addressed through philosophy alone? How can I apply the philosophical traditions into my daily life?
The nine dimensions of wellness are not a philosophy, but a model or framework based on a holistic philosophy of well-being that uses evidence-based tactics to optimize health. It is a practical model that views wellness as the interconnected result of multiple dimensions.
So what do you do with that model then? My proposition is to achieve optimal well-being in your life, you organize your life’s goals using the nine dimensions of wellness as your framework. Just knowing the nine dimension of wellness exist is not enough, you have to integrate them into your life. Your planner or to-do list has to ultimately point to the nine dimensions to achieve gains in your overall well-being.
Every short-term and long-term goal in your life should fall into one of the nine dimensions of wellness. Every dimension of wellness should be tracked in your life for current state and future state. By doing so, you create a holistic roadmap for personal growth that ensures balance, accountability, and sustained well-being across all aspects of your life.
This is why I created My Wellness FrameWork digital templates. Use of the digital templates will help organize your entire life around the nine dimensions of wellness including discovery, short-term goals, long-term goals, current state and desired future state for your well-being.
It is time to center our lives around sustainable well-being.
