The Wellness Wheel Miniseries Intro

When I first learned about the concept of whole health, it stopped me in my tracks. I’d spent years thinking wellness was something you handled in pieces — a skincare routine here, a walk there, maybe a meditation app you opened twice and then forgot about. But according to SAMHSA, wellness isn’t a single habit or a single choice. It’s a wheel, and every spoke matters.

And when you think about it, that makes perfect sense.

Have you ever felt emotionally steady when your money was a mess? No one does. No one can.

If your homelife is stressful or dangerous, it makes you feel physically ill.

Despite what the commercials and gurus might tell you, wellness isn’t a candle and a bath. I mean, those help, but it's so much more than that.

Wellness is the balanced structure of your life.

Once I understood that, something clicked. It actually clicked. I felt a sudden kind of epiphany moment that, okay, so maybe this is the key to all of it making sense. The problem being a lot of the time many of these spokes are out of my control. There isn't much I can do to to where everything works for me. 

Not much, oh but there was some.

So I started small.

I began setting Monthly Wellness Goals — one tiny, doable goal for each spoke of the Wellness Wheel. Nothing dramatic. Nothing overwhelming. Just one small action that nudged me toward feeling better, steadier, and more in control.

At the end of each month, I sit cross-legged in front of my computer with a bottle of flavored water and look over how things went. Not with judgment, but with curiosity. What helped? What didn’t? What surprised me? What needs more attention next month?

It’s become significant in my journey toward having a better life. 

If you’d like to try it too — especially if you enjoy physically writing things out — I’ve created a simple printable you can use. It’s yours. Use it as often as you want, decorate it, scribble on it, spill coffee on it. Make it part of your own wellness journey.

Over the next several posts, I’ll be exploring each spoke of the Wellness Wheel in more depth — emotional, physical, financial, social, environmental, occupational, intellectual, and spiritual wellness — and sharing what I’ve learned (and am still learning) along the way.

At the end of the day, we deserve to be as healthy as possible, in as many ways as we can make that happen.