Well-being is a state of high life satisfaction. It’s a visceral feeling. You instantly know when you’re experiencing it. It’s a wonderful blend of hope, health, and happiness. You feel eustress rather than distress, and a sense of well-being charges your life with meaning and purpose.
While well-being often shows up accidentally, a perfect storm when the right things show up at the right time, it’s also possible to engineer it. In fact, you can go from a state of low life satisfaction to one of high life satisfaction by resolving health problems, reducing high stress, acquiring detachment, and recapturing a sense of wonder.
Table of Contents
Resolve Nagging Health Problems
Many health problems are minor, such as aches and pains and fatigue, and you can resolve these through simple health-rejuvenating practices. You will gradually feel better, both emotionally and physically, when you improve your diet, when you exercise regularly, and when you get enough sleep every night. Other health problems require medical assistance, but you can reduce or resolve them with the right medications or treatments.
Then there are those health problems that appear to resist healthy living practices and medical treatment. However, there may be a solution. For instance, skin conditions like psoriasis rarely respond well to medical treatments, but one way to reduce intense itching is to use home phototherapy, a type of light therapy that slows the development of scaly skin associated with psoriasis.
Reduce High Stress
While everyone experiences some stress because it’s a part of life, high stress can trigger many health disorders. Fortunately, there are many stress-reduction techniques you can use to dramatically lower your levels of stress, regardless of the circumstances that are making you feel stressed out.
Three practices that work well are meditation, mindfulness, and improving focus and concentration.
- Meditation is the practice of sitting in silence and focusing on a mantra or your breathing pattern.
- Mindfulness is the practice of staying aware of what is happening in the present moment rather than reflecting on what happened in the past or anticipating what might happen in the future.
- Improving focus and concentration comes from the practice of doing one thing at a time and giving everything you do your full attention.
Acquire Detachment
We rarely see reality as it is because we are quick to respond to what we see before us or hear in the news. By learning to observe without reacting, you can find a sure path to well-being.
Imperturbability can come from detachment, which is the art of observing the world as it is rather than how you would like it to be. By simply observing and not reacting and responding, you don’t have to view happiness as increasing pleasure and reducing pain. Mystics often refer to this state of witnessing things without attachment or aversion as being here now.
Recapture a Sense of Wonder
As children, we loved to learn. We delighted in new discoveries. Unfortunately, as we go through school, it replaces our sense of wonder with performance anxiety. We either try to excel in our grades or give up and tune out in class. Either way, we are no longer in touch with a sense of childlike wonder at all the marvels and mysteries of life. By rekindling your innate love of learning, your life can be full of happy adventures. You will relish learning new things that expand your worldview or improve the quality of your life.
Although it’s possible to experience well-being through a series of felicitous events, the best way to build a deep and lasting sense of well-being is to take an intentional approach.
