SELF-HEALTH EVALUATIONS (Including Mental & Emotional well-being), Part II

Holistic Health

Dec 3

Welcome back! I hope you have gained some useful practices or tools from Part I of this article and feel more equipped to monitor and improve your health in any physical areas needing quality time and attention.

After reviewing all the incredible body systems discussed in Part I, we are ready to examine a suggested guide for evaluating our mental and emotional health.

What if we draw a big heart representing our feelings in our Wellness or Health journal? Inside that heart, we could write keywords or phrases indicating how we are doing. Or we could copy the following questions onto a blank page and answer them honestly with the intent of becoming our healthiest, happiest, and well-balanced selves:

How is my mood?
How is my stress level?
How is my sleep?
How is my romantic relationship (or lack thereof)? Do I want any aspect of my relationship to change?
How are my family relationships? If I have no relationship with my family, do I want to try growing a satisfactory relationship with them?
If someone I'm related to reaches out to me, how do I feel about that?
If the above familial relationship questions don't apply, do I have wonderful people in my circle whom I consider my tribe, my chosen family?
Do I have someone to talk to? Do I have someone who will listen?
Do I have someone to listen to so I feel needed and valued as a friend?
How is my social life? If I don't have one, would I like one?
How is my alone time? Am I content, and do I feel safe being alone?
How is my pet’s health? Do I get to spend enough time with my pet?
How is my financial situation? (This relates to stress and mood, sleep, ability to eat, anxiety or depression tendencies)
How are my living conditions? Is there anything I can do in my living space to improve my comfort, satisfaction, or happiness?
Do I make the effort to spend time outside?
Do I have any goals? Am I making progress from where I felt I was a month ago?

Looking at our entire physical body and emotional/mental awareness is a great opportunity to be honest and vulnerable. It's an opportunity to ask questions we may have kept from our doctor or therapist.

Doing this evaluation may work well for many of us once a month. Spending energy on it weekly may be too much for some. However, various specific health conditions often need daily monitoring and evaluation. I haven’t even mentioned gland health (such as thyroid, adrenal, thymus, pituitary, pineal, and more), hormone health, stress levels, blood sugar, blood pressure, and other areas that make up our beautiful bodies! We each live in our own amazing body, so we may as well make it the best since there's no way to order a new one!

The way to develop a ‘new’ body is to target any areas that currently need help. What signs or symptoms have you noticed that let you know your body/mind/heart/spirit cries for help?

In our evaluation notebook, as we are fleshing out (pun intended) how we’d like to keep track of your various systems and areas, we could even draw some shapes that represent our major organs, or we could use a blue or red pencil to indicate veins or areas of weaker oxygen we’d like to improve. We actually hold (and trap) emotions in our organs and glands. Our bodies hold it all. Another idea is to make a pie chart or other type of wheel to estimate where our time and energy are going every week. If very little or no piece of that pie is sectioned off for our health, it is time for a significant change!

Utilizing this next resource may seem tedious, but there are digital apps available to track specific aspects of our emotional and physical health, such as Female menstrual cycle, menopause progress, water consumption, nutrition, elimination (yes, there are apps to track our daily poops), fevers, the duration we are sick each time, skin health, and much more. If you don’t prefer to use a smart device for tracking, various PDF or other health trackers are available online to print. Many ideas exist on Pinterest, Google Images, Etsy shops, etc. If you don’t see a tracker that covers all your needs, you could download and print off several, design a tracker kit for yourself, make several copies, and keep your kit in a binder near your first aid inventory. Include the date and even the time of day on each page as you document your details. You could also purchase a thermometer, flexible tape measure, and a few pens/pencils (including colored) to keep with your binder.

Self-care is a concept that is becoming more popular (for lack of a better word). And it’s unfortunate if we are already at a more advanced age where self-care has not been part of our vocabulary or knowledge -- until Now. I was already a few decades old when I learned about it. I thought self-care, or ‘me time,’ was only for people who could afford frequent shopping sprees, regular massages or mani/pedicures. I didn’t realize the concept of self-care doesn’t just mean the extra fluff. It means caring for ourselves wholly and entirely with daily positive efforts.

If you choose a specific day of the week or month to perform the self-evaluation, you could create an extra-pampering experience. You could include such features as enjoying a cup of tea or smoothie, doing a foot soak or using a motorized foot massager, meditating or practicing breathwork before or after you fill out your tracker/s, a yoga flow or tai chi, face steaming with aromatherapy, self-foot massage or skin brushing, a brisk walk, a bath, or even reward yourself with a nap, some reading, or a favorite podcast afterward. And, if you pursue massages or other bodywork, you could consider carving out enough time to self-evaluate on the same day.

Focusing on our health is never going to be a foolish choice. We don't know how many people we could influence with our good health practices and attitudes about caring for our bodies. ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’ originated in Wales in the 1860s. The original writing said, ‘Eat an apple on going to bed to keep the doctor from earning his bread.’ While this world certainly needs doctors, we can reduce our fears and anxiety over extra appointments we may not need to attend because we perform varying checkups on ourselves. What a superb way to take charge of our health and advocate for our well-being! I highly recommend giving it a try and tweaking it to your liking and needs as you go.

If you are in a situation where you feel you don’t have a wide circle of loved ones to live for, please make all your best efforts to live well for yourself and anyone within your reach of influence so you can experience quite a beautiful and meaningful life. I can’t guarantee we will each have a life of perfect health, but I can promise it will never waste your time and effort to keep track of your health in these ways. You will do great! Be gentle to yourself and don’t compare your body or efforts to anyone else’s. This is about you and nobody else but you. I wish you all the best of success in this endeavor.