This is part 4 of our series where we try and define the words “health”, “wellness” and well-being”.
Part 1 – What is Health?
Part 2 – What is Wellness?
Part 3 – What is Well-Being?
Next we’re going to look at an overview of Dr. Theresa’s definitions of wellness. The following points are taken from episodes 27, 28, and 29 of The Ask Dr. Theresa podcast. Please listen to these podcasts if you’d like to learn more!
Health vs Wellness
(1) Most people will say that wellness means being healthy, and that being healthy means that you are not sick. This perspective comes from a medical model – diagnosis and treatment – “What is wrong with you and can we make it go away.” “Healthy” therefore means that there is nothing wrong with you.
(2) “Wellness” is our inborn resilience to stressors in our environment. The world presents many stressors, and our wellness ensures that we can deal with these stressors without becoming sick.
(3) In the modern world we say that we are under more stress than ever. That may be our perception, but it is only our perception because we are less able to deal with stressors due to our reduced wellness.
(4) Dr. Theresa looks at wellness and illness as “WE” vs “I”. Wellness is something that WE humans have in our DNA that helps us deal with challenges from the environment. When you have a lot of wellness then you are resilient. You are more resistant to becoming ill. Or you are able to recover quickly and completely if you do get sick.
(5) “Illness” is the “I”. Illness is individual and it happens when your wellness is not capable of making you resistant to disease/injury etc. Therefore the medical model is a more individual model – “What is wrong and how can we best fix it for YOU”. This puts is in a mindset of sickness and cure.
(6) We can think of health as “surviving” and wellness as “thriving”.
Medicine vs Wellness
(7) Medicine is a model of disease including preventive medicine and holistic medicine. For example, preventive medicine deals with interventions designed to prevent disease, i.e vaccination.
(8) The medical model is about fixing problems and symptoms. The wellness model is about activating our built in wellness so everything goes smoothly. Preventative medicine is about doing things that prevent you from getting sick. Wellness is about doing the things that make you function at your best.
Evolutionary Wellness
(9) Dr. Theresa became so interested in wellness from an evolutionary biology perspective and from the mindset of “what makes us human?”. From here we can look at the factors that make us human and how to strengthen those to make us more resilient mentally and physically.
(10) During her teenage years while working at a zoo, Dr. Theresa learned that when you recreated their natural environment, an animal would become more well. This is in contrast to imposing man made structures upon them which you would often find in zoos at that time. Doing this made the animals sick.
(11) Improving an animals wellness could be very simple, for example tigers – a tiger is a pure carnivore so you don’t feed them things that are not meat. Another change is to not feed them everyday and then they do better too. This is how tigers naturally eat. They eat a big meal like a snake and then they digest it over time.
(12) Primates are different. Their day is naturally filled with almost a grazing behaviour where they are chewing and swallowing and socialising, etc. Any or all these behaviours (grazing, socialising, etc.) could be important for wellness.
(13) In a similar way, the modern world is an environment we’ve created that’s like living in a zoo. For example there are no seasons for light or for food. There are some real benefits – protection from predators and abundant food – that’s survival; eat and don’t get eaten.
But nothing comes free. A lens you can look through is – “When we improved our life this way, what is the price we paid?”. If the price is not obvious then we don’t know what it is and we ignore it.
The Modern Zoo
(14) One of the main reasons that we’ve had an accelerated loss of wellness recently is that in our genetics, a lot of surviving and thriving is about adapting to the environment that we are in – how to find the right food, figuring out how to work together, how to be safe and warm. These are the basic needs of a human being of how to survive in a variety of environments all over the globe.
(15) However the big change came when we started to adapt the environment to us. We have made the world that we live in and that world is a ZOO. We are suffering from a lack of wellness that a lot of zoo animals have had for the past 100 years.
(16) Humans have not evolved. Humans are humans. If we evolved then we would be something else. What humans have done is adapt. Our evolution has made us adaptable. The changes that we see as humans are not evolution, they are adaptation. We adapted to the environments and now in just recent history, we have started to make the environment for ourselves.
In turns out that we are not great choosers of that. We don’t look at wellness because it is not obvious. We look at “health” and medicine comes out of that lens.
This is a starting point for thinking about wellness. Look at an animals (including humans) natural environment and find the HIGH PAY OFFS. What are their food needs, movement needs, sleep needs, social needs?
Then ask how do you recreate those if they are not being taken care of biologically/naturally by their current environment.
(17) In our modern zoo; food, movement, social, sleep, and light have all undergone profound change. Other changes have also taken place which may or may not be stressors including – environmental chemicals, neuroendocrine disruptors, antibiotics (anti-life), and electromagnetic technology (wired and wireless).
The Wellness Environment
(18) Human beings are designed to be well but we need the right environment for that wellness to develop.
(19) An example is children and normal development through play. In modern society children are exposed to early sports specialisation and therefore have completely bypassed things that would be essential to normal wellness.
We have our children do core exercises but that’s not how the core develops. You play to strengthen your core because it’s a coordination of your brain and your body that prepares your body for external stressors.
It’s activated by your visual system in anticipation to a stressor. Therefore you can’t “train” it in the way that we think of training. You can “train” and make yourself more resistant to injury… but that is more preventative medicine rather than wellness.
We stopped children playing to avoid injuries. But this has created injuries in other areas, not just physically but also mentally by having them miss out on something that was so essential to our humanity. It’s all done in the name of being “healthy” and preventing injuries.
(20) We need to move away from talking about wellness factors (food, sleep, play etc.) as interventions. This is the sick/medical/health model. We talk about things in terms of a “recommended daily allowance”.
This is not what Dr. Theresa considers to be a wellness approach. Instead we need to look at how humans have evolved within their environment and where natural wellness emerges from that.
(21) Another example is sleep. The current recommended daily allowance is around 8 hours per night. This is not a natural sleep pattern for humans. Instead we would have always slept SEASONALLY. Your sleep pattern during the winter will be much different than the summer as the day/night cycles are very different.
(22) Dr. Theresa then tells us about an example from her own life. As a child she had unidentified vision problems and she could not do what she wanted to do physically (i.e play, run, participate in sports, etc.) and she had given up hope that this would ever change. She always thought she was just very “clumsy”.
Then later in life she found vision therapy. It sent her on a journey to learn more about how the brain can change at any stage of life through neuro-plasticity. Through therapy her vision became completely normal. This was a huge turning point and was the biggest insight she ever had into wellness.
This is the power of wellness. It is making sure that your natural abilities unfold and are nurtured and developed through the course of your lifetime to help you be able to cope with the world around you.
How to Think about Wellness
(23) Humans are adaptable to so many different environments geographically. So we have to ask – “what about them was the same?”. A lot about them that was the same is how we work together. How we make communities, families, and pair bond. All these social interactions are extremely important and they are necessary no matter what environment you lived in.
Other animals don’t really have these same traits.
(24) We have run into trouble because we have strayed too far from our evolutionary biology. We know these factors are important but we keep trying to make shortcuts to compensate.
(25) Exercise is a perfect example of that. Exercise is not the same as movement. It’s like a movement “pill” thats designed to offset being sedentary. This is a normal human brain process. We know that we need to move, but we don’t have “time” to move so we create exercise.
Exercise is better than being sedentary, but it is not the same as movement. Sedentary is unhealthy. Introducing exercise so you are not sedentary is therefore a “healthy” choice.
Wellness is different. Wellness is setting up your environment so you can’t sit so much and setting up your life so you are walking and moving around.
(26) Wellness is an essential part of our DNA. Humans are a living organism. Humans are an animal. Humans live in an environment – the earth. Within that there are many sub-environments that we adapt to.
Most other animals adapt to one certain area – the temperatures, the food availability, the other flora and fauna that are going to be present. They stay within their environment and they develop with those circles of life.
(27) Humans are called “superpredetors” or top of the food chain because we can move into many of these sub-environments and adapt to them. We can bend to those environments to help us survive and thrive.
Language and culture help us thrive more over time however we are still bound to certain constraints. We have to survive and we have to reproduce. This gives us the same drives (instinctual or inborn) of any other living being (bacteria, plants, animals, etc.)
(28) Animals can’t make their own food (like a plant). They have to find appropriate food, eat it, and digest it to survive and then use it to thrive and reproduce. Humans are held to all of these biological standards.
Health is the absence of something that threatens those main survival factors. Wellness is a little different. Wellness is like a bank. It makes you resilient to the environment. The environment always has ups and downs and staying in balance with that (internally and externally) is called homeostasis.
(29) Depending on your level of wellness, you can take a lot of knocks and find your way back into balance pretty easily because the body is driven towards that. If you live on the edge with little wellness then you might do fine until you don’t do fine.
Then it can become very hard to get back into wellness, or you may not be able to get back into wellness at all. That’s when we start to talk about illness and health.
The 5 Pillars of Wellness
(30) These are things that Dr. Theresa thinks all animals need and particularly human beings. They are as follows:
(31) You can choose to increase your wellness in any one of these areas. However they are all necessary in some way.
(32) The best way to start is to ask, “How can I make changes to these wellness pillars that won’t create a big cost on my stress or situation”?
(33) Don’t stress too much about which wellness pillars are most important. Just figure out what is doable and start there.
Final Points
(34) Medicine is only concerned with illness, either treating it or preventing it.
(35) “Wellness” is our inborn resilience to stressors in the environment. If you have a lot of wellness you can stress yourself a lot without becoming ill.
(36) Human beings are designed to be well. We have within our DNA, everything we need to not only survive but also to thrive.
(37) Once you become ill, your priorities shift dramatically. You are not interested in wellness any more. You are interested in not being sick anymore. That’s the problem that a lot of us are in right now. Many of us are sick because we are overtaxed.
(38) We now live in a ‘pill for every ill” world. An Alice in Wonderland approach.
(39) Humans are a vulnerable species, therefore both medicine and wellness are important.
(40) The body intends to be well. Therefore Dr. Theresa is always looking for the things of how would the body want to be well.
(41) Dr. Theresa’s biggest wellness message right now is that we’ve strayed too far. We’ve altered our environment too much. We’re out of equilibrium and completely out of homeostasis.
The biggest part of that is social at this point. We need to find a way of melding current technology with our need for human contact and interaction.
We need to regain some of our biological wellness as we are overtaxed in terms of compensation right now. The main place we need to do that is 2 big forgeries – food and social.
(42) People can get well if you help the environment be an environment that would be easier for them to get well in.
(43) Wellness is WE. Wellness in general is more comfortable in the female psyche because it is community.