Wellness: Physical & Mental Care
Through this Wellness series, we have covered the many ways that design, materials, and furnishings can improve our wellbeing. In our closing section, we wanted to move onto the ways that we as individuals can impact our spaces and how that impacts the value of wellness. Regardless of what space you are inhabiting, taking care of your mind and emotions is the best defense against anything that could impact your mental wellbeing. When paired with maintaining your physical wellness, you can more easily use a space to its fullest potential.
Practicing mindfulness and having way to center yourself gives you the resilience to face the hurdles in your everyday life. Often when mental health is ignored, your body will reflect these issues by somaticizing and leaving you vulnerable to many kinds of illness. Acknowledging your emotions and cultivating a positive outlook can help mitigated or avoided difficult situations all together. There are circumstances when a person cannot overcome personal hurdles alone or within their support network, and getting outside help is almost always beneficial. Whether it is therapy, support groups, or having someone without a personal bias or agenda to speak to is a great resource everyone should have access to.
Going back to our previous conversation about ergonomics, making sure you can easily use a space without straining yourself and having your tools easily accessible is a great place to start. Even when you are outside of the workplace or your creative space, eating properly and maintaining physical engagement (like exercising) can have an immediately improvement on your wellness and outlook. Activities as simple as taking a break from your computer every hour or so and drinking enough water helps you avoid fatigue that can wear you down day over day.
The overall goal of Wellness is reciprocal, that a design improves our wellbeing and in turn we can improve the design. We hope this series on Wellness provides you with insight into how you may use Wellness in your own designs and in life. Being such a large and encompassing area of interest we could only touch on so many ideas so please reach out or share your own ideas with us so to keep the conversation going!