What Comes Under Social Health and Wellness?
By Charlie ParsonsMay 20, 2021700
Social wellness is nothing but our ability to socialize with people around us, including our friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. The emotional relationship that we build with our social group helps us in difficult times. Social wellness includes generating strong, sustaining, and supportive bonds and developing friendly connections with people around you. Social wellness also plays an essential role in mental wellness.
Importance of social wellness
Your social wellness is a vital part of your psychological wellness. Social wellness offers emotional protection to us. Maintaining an emotional connection with people around us assures us that there is someone for us during difficult times. These people are those we always see and talk with, our social group. This social group involves developing relations that include friendships, intimate relationships, family, and professional relationships. According to some studies, individuals who have poor social wellness happen to die at a young age compared to those with good social health.
So what things are essential for improving social wellness with your social group? Let’s find out.
Elements responsible for social health
Various factors passively influence your social wellness that includes finance, goods, and services, access to education, communities, etc. These are some elements that may determine your social wellness. The imbalance in these elements happens to affect your social policies and programs. It impacts your living. According to WHO, people have different life span depending upon where they were born. For instance, in Japan individuals live more than 80 years. In Brazil, 72 years; India, 63 years; and in one of the African countries, an average life span of an individual is less than 50 years. Therefore, there should a balance between social and economic development for overall social wellness.
People dealing with health issue may also have poor social wellness; as per experts such health issues are as follows:
- Experiencing a heart attack
- Chronic illness
- Mobility disorder or issue
- High blood pressure
- Raised stress hormones resulting in inflammation
- Cancer
- Deprived mental health
- Anxiety & depression
- Reduced immune system
Signs that indicate good social wellness
- Building assertiveness rather than being aggressive in a passive way
- Maintaining the balance between social as well as personal life
- Developing the ability to be your real self in every situation
- Engaging with people in your community and neighborhood
- Treating people with respect and cherishing diversity
- Constantly trying to build friendship and your social network
- Ability to develop boundaries with every relationship that encourages communication, trust, and management of disputes
- Remembering to enjoy the company
Having supportive connections of family and friends.
If you are unaware of the fact whether your social wellness is good, you can ask yourself few questions. Later, when you get the answers, and if the answer is no to the majority of questions, you need to prioritize your social wellness.
- Do you ever ask for help? If yes, then how?
- Do you have people in your life to whom you can trust, and you know they genuinely care about you?
- Are you able to communicate with others during a dispute?
- Is there at least one real friend you can count on?
- Are you completely alright being alone?
Some tips to improve social wellness
Exercise Self-Care
Maintaining a balance in your life in each aspect, including during difficult times, is a result of practicing self-care and having a good social group. Self-care is giving importance to basic requirements for yourself, which simply includes getting enough sleep, bathing and brushing your teeth, healthy eating, working out regularly, and avoiding bad habits such as drinking or smoking. Self-care also includes positive skills such as stress management, relaxation, and self-soothe. Consider enjoying activities like hobbies, crafts, art, sports, hiking, and dancing with your friends. You can also participate in yoga, spiritual tasks, meditation, therapy, etc. These tasks help you gain peace at the emotional level.
Build Connections
Social wellness means how you present yourself socially; it helps you cope with your personal and professional obstacles. Social interaction and building social connections impact your overall wellness. Social bonding helps you to explore different people to make friends and choose romantic partners. You can try to grow bonds by joining a social activity like going to the gym or a cooking class.
Build Healthy Relationships
When you grow your social group or interactions, you can now judge who you can trust completely. You can begin nurturing your relationships. Strong bonds are an essential element of complete social wellness. Even though developing genuine bonds takes a lot of time and patience, a social support network has considerable advantages. These positive relationships that you build are what make your good times happier and bad times effortless.
Do Activities Together
Developing a strong bond is not enough; you try different activities with your social group, which will also help your emotional wellness. For example, you and your friends could go hiking, for a walk, or you can cook a meal together. By doing activities together, you will observe improvement in your emotional and physical health. You will gain the assurance that somebody is there for you.
Do Not Scrutinize or Judge
Anyone could smoothly become a self-critic and pass judgment about someone else. It only reflects low self-esteem, contributes to depression and anxiety, and stops social interaction. No one ever wants to be judged or blamed. All these signs are unhealthy, toxic, abusive relationships.
Value Yourself and Others
Having a positive attitude and leading a positive life makes you and others around you happy and hopeful. Regularly understanding the positive qualities you have and see in others. Give genuine compliments to people around you; it will make you and others happy. Positive thinking holds a lot of power.