UAB Wellness Week is an institution-wide effort to bring wellness front and center of our personal and professional lives during the week of Oct. 17-21.
Events are listed on the UAB Events Calendar and many events will be recorded so attendees can view them later. Faculty, employees, and students are encouraged to take advantage of these special and continuing events hosted by offices across campus.
Five tips on incorporating wellness into your daily routines:
1. Understand the different dimensions of wellness:
Wellness is a broad term and how we define wellness can affect how we think about it and approach it. The UAB Medicine Office of Wellness focuses on five different dimensions of wellness.
Emotional Wellness: coping effectively with life’s stresses, acknowledging and identifying emotions, and the ability to adapt to change and difficult times.
Intellectual Wellness: utilizing and expanding one’s creative abilities, knowledge, and skills
Occupational Wellness: finding a sense of satisfaction and enrichment with work that allows for meeting current and future financial obligations
Spiritual Wellness: knowing and expanding your sense of purpose and meaning in life
Physical Wellness: taking care of one’s body for optimal health and functioning
2. Measure your wellness:
In the same way you weigh yourself on a scale or check your phone’s battery, it is important to measure your overall wellness.
The Well-Being Index is a simple web-based tool used to evaluate multiple dimensions of wellness, 100% anonymously! It also allows users to compare their scores to their peers here at UAB Medicine and nationally, in similar fields and roles. All UAB Medicine and Heersink School of Medicine employees have access to the Well-Being Index. To access, click here and use one of the following access codes based on your UAB Medicine/UAB Heersink School of Medicine role:
Faculty: UAB FACULTY
Advanced Practice Provider: UAB APP
Trainee (Resident/Fellow/Other Trainee): UAB TRAINEE
Medical Students: UAB MEDICAL STUDENTS
Nurses: UAB NURSES
Employee/Staff: UAB MEDICINE
We encourage everyone to measure regularly (monthly, quarterly, or annually) using the WBI or another tool that works for you. Remember you can’t improve what you don’t measure.
3. Incorporate some daily habits to maintain and promote wellness:
There are a number of daily practices you can incorporate to maintain and improve different dimensions of your overall wellness. The Office of Wellness is committed to sharing these regularly, particularly through Take 5! Here are some of our favorites:
Practice Gratitude: Gratitude is the practice of acknowledging and recognizing things that are going well. Saying them aloud, listing them in a journal, or simply thinking about 2-3 things you are grateful for everyday can yield numerous benefits. Research shows that regularly practicing gratitude can help people feel more positive emotions, relish in good experiences, build stronger relationships, and can even improve your physical health.
Be Mindful: Mindfulness is the act of bringing focus and awareness to the present. Engaging in mindful practices can help relieve stress, treat heart disease, lower blood pressure, reduce chronic pain, promote concentration and the list goes on and on. You can gain these benefits and more in just a few moments by being mindful. Here is a list of mindful moments for ideas on how to incorporate mindfulness in your daily practices.
Spend Time in Nature: There is something aweing about being outside near a body of water or during a crisp autumn morning. Spending time in nature has been linked to numerous benefits that affect every dimension of wellness. The next time you have trouble sleeping, feel anxious, or can’t think of an innovative idea, be nurtured by nature.
4. Take advantage of existing organizational resources that are free and available to you:
UAB offers numerous resources available to you, in each dimension of wellness. A near-comprehensive list of resources can be found on our UAB Medicine Office of Wellness website. Individual units and departments may also have additional wellness resources, such as Wellness Champions and Peer Supporters.
5. Know its okay to not be okay
Sometimes we can fall into toxic positivity with phrases such as “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Toxic positivity can be defined as the belief that no matter how dire or difficult a situation is, people should maintain a positive mindset. There are benefits to positive thinking, but rejecting and ignoring all negative emotions can be harmful to you and others, in particular, it can cause a lot of shame. Negative emotions are natural. Although uncomfortable, they are meant to keep us safe. By rejecting them, we are turning off our natural biological instinct.
Wellness, particularly mental health, comes with a stigma that we must break. Just like walking and consuming a healthy diet is good for our bodies and expected by our physicians; taking care of our minds must be a natural priority.
Wellness can be measured on a continuum that varies from day to day. As a person can be sick and not have a disease, a person can be mentally unwell and not have a mental illness. Where you land on the spectrum day to day is natural, but it is vital that you know when it is time to ask for help.
Follow @uabmedicineofficeofwellness on social media for more tips and resources.