Is there a difference between Wellness and Wellbeing?

This is a question that I see asked all the time, and as someone within the wellness space, I felt that now was a good opportunity to bring it to the table. For those of us who live and breathe both wellness and well-being in our work and personal lives, the answer may seem obvious – but most people still have a difficult time articulating the differences.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, ‘wellness’ is ​’the state of being healthy, especially when you actively try to achieve this.’  Well-being, on the other hand, is considered ‘general health and happiness, a state of emotional/physical/psychological well-being’. Within these definitions, it can be easily said that wellness is the day-to-day pursuit of attaining a sense of well-being, leading with examples such as physical exercise, movement, meditation, sleep and nutrition. To put it simply, the difference can be seen as action versus result.

However, at the moment, wellness is having an identity crisis; it’s currently on a popularity overload, where everyone wants to be ‘it’.  The word wellness is overused – it’s vague, it’s commercialized, it’s trendy, it’s a lifestyle, it’s a #hashtag – the list goes on. When we look at how to achieve a state of well-being, we need to look at wellness as a lifestyle.  But wellness comes in so many different shapes and forms to different people and cultures across the globe, it makes it challenging to narrow the focus.

Let’s take a look at how wellness is expressed in different daily rituals. Researcher and author Dan Buettner has identified areas around the world known as Blue Zones – places with the world’s longest-lived people. In the Blue Zone of Okinawa, Japan, people consider wellness to be eating a plant-based diet, engaging in activities you enjoy, having a beautiful community of people, staying active through movement, and enjoying being outside. Moving to the other side of the world to Sardinia, another Blue Zone, the lifestyle of wellness and longevity means strong family and community values, eating a healthy and well-balanced diet with plenty of plant-based foods and minimal meats and fish, taking part in regular physical movement, and drinking one or two glasses of good red wine per day. Both examples give us beautiful ways to shape our lives, leading to a sense of emotional, physical and psychological well-being. I mean, who’s opposed to having a healthy, active, outdoor lifestyle that results in watching the sunset each day with a beautiful glass of red wine in the company of family and friends?

What was really interesting about Buettner’s research on Blue Zones is that all of the different cultures he identified all had one thing in common: their sense of purpose and belonging, which is a strong factor in living a well-balanced life. In many other cultures, it is important to note that ceremony, ritual and devotion to a higher good were instrumental in living a well life.

About three years ago, I embarked on some regular coaching sessions with @leadingwithflow that changed foundations of how wellness showed up in my life. I had a fast-paced job, and was always in the air, eating on the run, mentally stimulated, pushing myself at the gym and getting a maximum of six hours of sleep a night – I was literally burning the candle at both ends, and yet I worked in the wellness industry. Before too long, I found myself needing some personal balance and introspection, and I took the time for some inner work. One of the first exercises that I worked on with my coach, Ghada, was an activity focused on defining my own personal values. This sounds so simple, but it resulted in a powerful shift of how I fundamentally lived my life. I began to see that when our values are clear, we begin to live life in alignment. This was a profoundly rewarding process that made me take a step back and evaluate my own world, and how it was spinning out of control around me. I managed to narrow down a very long list to just six core values, which have steered all my decisions, and which help move me through the world and take me safely to the next journey. My own personal values, I’ve defined as connection and the importance of community within my friends and family; vitality, which encompasses physical movement and healthy nourishing meals; knowledge, which empowers me learn and grow; contribution, which was linked to charity and doing more for to a better cause; authenticity to myself and others; and last but not least, I wanted time. Who could have known that Covid-19 would feed those values so strongly? Without excluding other important values within my life, these shaped my version of living a well life, and continue to inspire other personal passions and projects as I move forward in my next chapter, and ever-onward in a pursuit of true well-being.

I do find myself getting bent out of shape when people misuse #wellness in a commercial sense, using it as an opportunity for marketing rather than what defines its true nature.  I am coming to grips though with the fact that #wellness isn’t meant to be confined.  When #wellness is used, it is individually defined, and each person, culture or brand expresses it in a different way, which allows it to be vague and non-prescriptive. This, in turn, can support everyone on the pathway to a positive state of well-being.