dimensions of health dimensions of health

7 Dimensions of Health

How do you define health? It is not simply the state of being free from illness or injury. But it could be better described as a state of social, physical, and mental comfort and not merely the absence of disease or feebleness.1

Good health encourages you to achieve all the gold or silver or whatever it is that you aim for. Being familiar with the term “Health is Wealth,” good health is the real treasure that is to be maintained well, which is the primary thing after which everything else follows.

The 7 dimensions of health are Spiritual, Physical, Emotional, Career, Intellectual, Environmental, and Social, which could be shortened as SPECIES. Neglecting any of the 7 dimensions of health would cause adverse effects on overall health. So, equalization of all 7 dimensions of health is incredibly necessary for maintaining good health.2

7 Dimensions of Health

  • Spiritual
  • Physical
  • Emotional
  • Career
  • Intellectual
  • Environmental
  • Social

1. The Spiritual Dimension of Health

dimensions of health
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The spiritual dimension of health is the basis of all 7 dimensions of health that pave the way for you to obtain the direction of your life and guide you to develop knowledge, trust, and strength to live. Spirituality is stated to be in touch with the deeper self and exploration of the purpose of life.

Spirituality and religion are two different concepts that are naturally connected, whereas spirituality does not have a religious component. A person with spiritual wellness will have peace and harmony in his life as he finds the remedy for the search for purpose and meaning in human existence.

The spiritual dimension of health includes a collection of guiding theories, principles, or values directing your life.

1.1. Key Elements

By following the spiritual dimension of health, you discover a way out of all your thoughts of despair, fear, and disappointment as they add value to your life.

  • It is important to take some quick time each day by taking a few moments to breathe properly.
  • Meditate regularly and experience the feel of nature.
  • Participating in volunteering activities as serving others would help you acknowledge the true value of life.

1.2. Tips and Guidelines

Here are the ways to address and encourage the spiritual dimension of health in your life:

  • Spend some time alone, mirror your life, and analyze the direction you are going.
  • Be fully present and show full participation in everything you do.
  • Find opportunities for growth within the challenges that life brings you.
  • Be interested and inquisitive.
  • Listen to your heart and cherish your principles.
  • Allow yourself and the people around you the freedom to be who they are.
  • Integrate personal beliefs and values with actions.

As the spiritual dimension of health promotes human capability and provides meaning for a purposeful life, it balances human life’s physical, psychological, and social aspects.

2. The Physical Dimension of Health

This would probably be the first thing that comes to our mind when we think of health. It is one of the 7 dimensions of health expressed in a more traditional definition of health 3as the absence of disease or injury.

It is one of the 7 dimensions of health that takes proper care of your body by functioning each organ utterly and working in harmony with the utmost capacity. Maintaining good physical health improves nutrition, sleep, stress reduction, and providing appropriate health care.

Human bodies have an inborn ability to heal and manufacture enough nourishment for the body by removing obstacles.

2.1. Key Elements

The three elements that form the core of the physical dimension of health are:

  1. Working out regularly helps you to sharpen your thinking, learning, and judgment skills as you age. It also has psychological benefits by reducing depression.
  2. Feeding a balanced diet makes your body operate at its full potential. Sensible nutrition improves your ability to defend against unhealthiness. 
  3. Sleep is the most elusive element of the physical dimension. Adequate sleep sharpens your brain and provides clear thinking.

2.2. Tips and Guidelines

Here are some of the tips and guidelines for maintaining the right path of physical health:

  • Exercise regularly and be fit.
  • Make regular appointments for check-ups and follow medical recommendations.
  • Go on hikes and long walks.
  • Consume a variety of healthy foods and limit meal portions.
  • Get adequate sleep.
  • Sustain a healthy weight. 

Maintaining proper physical health helps you to succeed with the other dimensions of health.

3. The Emotional Dimension of Health

dimensions of health
Photo by Gearstd on Shutterstock

The emotional dimension of health is the foremost tough stepping stone toward fulfillment. It principally refers to mental health, which is the ability to feel and express human emotions like joy, hope, love, anger, and disappointment.

3.1. Key Elements

  • Capability to understand yourselves.
  • Test how the challenges and obstacles dealt with and coped successfully that life and work bring.
  • It encompasses optimism, self-esteem, and self-acceptance.

One must have to manage his/her emotions constructively and feel positive and enthusiastic about his/her life. Feelings are the lens through which you view this world. So, if you are emotionally weak or stressed, you would feel more hopeless, and life would seem darker than it is.

Among the 7 dimensions of health, it is the least managed by the folks as a survey reveals that 121 students among 217 students are in a state of depression and anxiety4, which causes mental imbalance.

3.2. Tips and Guidelines

Here are some guiding tips for developing optimal emotional health:

  • Learn to possess an optimistic attitude.
  • Control emotions that will lead you to have control over your life.
  • Follow the attitude of gratitude.
  • Practice stress-relieving and stress-managing activities.
  • Cultivate acceptance and forgiveness.
  • Relax with your friends gleefully.
  • Always try to have a happy face.
  • Sweep off all the negative emotions and stress that worry your mind.
  • Surround yourself with positive people.

Being emotionally well allows you to express your feelings cautiously and communicate with an outsized variety of individuals, confidently forming healthy relationships.5

4. The Career Dimension of Health

Do you feel fulfilled with your job career? The career dimension of health contributes to personal satisfaction through work. It is also known as the occupational or vocational dimension of health, which can achieve personal fulfillment through the chosen career fields while maintaining balance in life. It engages you in the contribution to society positively and usefully.

A person with good career health creates something new in his/her particular field of work through reinvention and applying new ideas, which pave the way to creative thinking.

People would usually have a drive too high, resulting in a lifetime of what’s known as “workaholics“. You become unhealthy once your workload is excessive which is a sign of disturbance and compensation. Therefore, remember these key points:

4.1. Key Elements

  • You should be expecting a lot of failures while learning a new skill.
  • Requiring an open mind and letting go of your fear of making mistakes assist you in becoming a master in that field.

4.2. Tips and Guidelines

You can be victorious in your job career by following some tips given below:

  • Plan realistic goals and be laborious in accomplishing them.
  • Build rapport with coworkers and create leadership choices.
  • Engage in work systematically and inspire yourselves in having a healthy work-life balance.
  • Undergo additional training in your job field, which enriches talent and knowledge.
  • Choose a career that suits your temperament, interests, and talents.
  • Examine a variety of career options.
  • Develop a unique skill that rewards you personally and professionally.

Accomplishing successful career health helps you to feel satisfied and maintain a positive perspective.

5. The Intellectual Dimension of Health

Thinking and creativity decrease as you age. Managing your mind is as vital as managing your physical body. The intellectual dimension of health helps in stimulating creative mental activities.

You become intellectually healthy by decoding problems related to critical thinking, problem-solving, and adapting to change. It can be done by exploring hobbies, following personal interests and reading books, magazines, and newspapers, and getting yourself updated with current events and issues. A person who is intellectually well always has the curiosity to learn with an energetic mind.

5.1. Key Elements

Here are the three things to be done to support your intellectual health:

  • Reading assists you to be mentally fit. Train your brain by reading as it works much like a muscle. Reading non-fiction books helps in reducing your stress by 68 percent.
  • Interacting with the world by traveling somewhere makes your mind relaxed and expands your knowledge by knowing new things.
  • Having deeper conversations with various people pushes your brain to figure out and delve deeper into your thoughts making you more creative.

5.2. Tips and Guidelines

Some of the recommendations for developing optimal intellectual health are shown below:

  • Start doodling.
  • Identify your bad habits and form new good habits.
  • Visit museums, theatres, libraries, and gatherings that make you curious about that subject.
  • Respond positively to intellectual challenges.
  • Pick up a new hobby.
  • Practice a new language thoroughly.
  • Learn how to play an instrument with an interest in music. 
  • Encourage imaginative mental activities.

Being intellectually well offers you the flexibility to develop your creativity and growth mentality and strengthens your concentration, memory, and critical thinking skills. Developing an intellectual dimension of health impacts all 7 dimensions of health as it decides how your life will be led.

6. The Environmental Dimension of Health

The environmental dimension of health encompasses the awareness of nature, your atmosphere, and your immediate surroundings. Respecting the environment means analyzing the unstable state of the earth and taking relevant measures to minimize environmental degradation.

6.1. Key Elements

The followings are the right choices for ideal environmental wellness.

  • Analyzing your daily habits that cause an impact on the physical environment.
  • Committing changes for the development of a healthy planet.
  • Getting engaged in socially responsible activities to protect the environment.
  • Maximizing harmony with the earth is the most required for the growth of environmental well-being.

6.2. Tips and Guidelines

Follow the given steps for the development of the environmental dimension of health:

  • Speak about the awareness of Earth’s limited natural resources.
  • Encourage yourself to perform small actions like turning off the lights when not in use, decreasing unwanted noise levels, avoiding plastic materials, minimizing chemical use, and talking with nature.
  • Promote good Feng Shui actions.
  • Enjoy and appreciate the time spent outdoors.
  • Eat less meat, as the meat industry alone accounts for nearly 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Following the above steps shows your involvement in promoting a safe and healthy environment.

7. The Social Dimension of Health

dimensions of health
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash Copyrights 2017

Humans are social by nature. The social dimension of health provides the maintenance of pleasant relationships with other members of the society in which you live. It strengthens positive relationships with friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers, which adds value to your life.

It focuses on building a supportive network, establishing trust, and developing communication skills. It is also very important to ignore negative relationships as it makes you feel insecure and bad about yourself.

Friends provide emotional support and boost you with happiness and conjointly cut back your stress. Finding friends who motivate you in your life make the good times better and the hard times easier.

7.1. Key Elements

A person with a good social dimension of health will do the following activities within a community:

  1.  Communication is the key to social wellness as it develops a robust community by sharing opinions, thoughts, and information.
  2. Give-and-take relationship develops good bonding as it offers the possibility to contribute to a community.
  3. Connection is the most important element of the social dimension of health that molds strong connections based on shared experiences and goals.

7.2. Tips and Guidelines

Here are some of the ways to be socially healthy:

  • Find common ground to form connections.
  • Join social teams like clubs and organizations.
  • Maintain current friendships by strengthening them, contacting an old friend, and discovering new friendships.
  • Flourish healthy relationships by caring about others and letting them care about you.
  • Spend your spare time with friends and family.
  • Contribute to your community.
  • Volunteer!

Developing the social dimension of health makes people happier and physically healthier, which increases motivation, collaboration, and productivity.

The End Note

Health is the greatest of human blessings. Maintenance of good health should be part of your overall lifestyle as it helps prevent chronic diseases and long-term illnesses. All the essentials mentioned above are needed to live a life that makes up for a healthy lifestyle; while it may seem like a challenge, making an effort to maintain overall wellness is. Among the given suggestions and tips on all 7 dimensions of health, would you rate the topmost priority for overall wellness?

Read more from us here.

Suggested reads:

The Importance of Acknowledgement in Relationships

Top 5 Wellness Activities To Practice In The Workplace
Icy Health
  1. Down, J. Langdon. “Lettsomian lectures on some of the mental affections of childhood and youth.” British medical journal 1.1362 (1887): 256. ↩︎
  2. Strawbridge, William J., et al. “Religious attendance increases survival by improving and maintaining good health behaviors, mental health, and social relationships.” Annals of Behavioral medicine 23.1 (2001): 68-74. ↩︎
  3. Bal, A. M., et al. “Genomic insights into the emergence and spread of international clones of healthcare-, community-and livestock-associated meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus: blurring of the traditional definitions.” Journal of Global Antimicrobial Resistance 6 (2016): 95-101. ↩︎
  4. Cohen, Beth E., Donald Edmondson, and Ian M. Kronish. “State of the art review: depression, stress, anxiety, and cardiovascular disease.” American journal of hypertension 28.11 (2015): 1295-1302. ↩︎
  5. Lopes, Manuel José. “Forming and maintaining interpersonal relationships.” European Psychiatric/Mental Health Nursing in the 21st Century: A Person-Centred Evidence-Based Approach (2018): 247-257. ↩︎

Last Updated on by Sathi Chakraborty, MSc Biology

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Baruni Priya T S

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