Kenneth Gardner
LIVING WITH HIV/AIDS is a tremendous challenge, however, strive to live your life to its fullest. An active, energetic life is needed to provide optimal personal, interpersonal and environmental well-being. There is the need to take charge of your health and chart a path to wellness at whatever level that is achievable.
Individuals with an HIV/AIDS health concern can rise and have been rising above their physical and mental limitations to live rich, meaningful and vital lives. True wellness is largely determined by the decisions you make about how to live your life. By way of a few examples, wellness is a dynamic process of change and growth in your physical, emotional, social and intellectual life. You need to make the effort to live life fully with vitality and meaning.
ACHIEVING WELLNESS
By eating well, participating in regular physical exercise, avoiding harmful habits and making prudent decisions about managing the drawbacks of your HIV/AIDS situation, the quality of your life is positively related to what you want.
Achieving and maintaining emotional wellness requires monitoring and exploring your thoughts and feelings, identifying obstacles to your emotional well-being and trying to find solutions for your emotional concerns. The integration of physical wellness and emotional wellness can be experienced quite easily with the use of physical exercise as an antidote for emotional distress.
Intellectual wellness
Your intellectual wellness is an important factor in maximising the success that you can achieve from your investments in a better life. An active mind is important to your own wellness. Open-mindedness, critical thinking, the ability to motivate self and master challenges, creativity and curiosity are significant indicators of intellectual health. Your intellectual prowess is crucial in terms of how you face your challenges as well as rationalise how to get the desired outcome. You need to maintain your sense of humour or even develop a better one if necessary.
Spiritual well-being is important, you can enjoy spiritual health through a set of guiding beliefs, principles or values that give meaning and purpose to your life especially during these difficult times. Spiritual wellness provides the capacity for love, compassion, forgiveness, altruism, joy and fulfilment. When things seem hopeless spiritual wellness is the antidote for cynicism, anger, fear, anxiety, self-absorption and pessimism. Spirituality transcends the individual which can be a common bond among persons with the HIV/AIDS problem. Meaning and purpose in your lives can be found through a variety of activities that you find fulfilling.
Satisfying relationships are basic to both your physical and emotional health which results in interpersonal and social wellness. Having supportive persons in your lives is an important need. It is worth the effort to solicit the help of HIV/AIDS support organisations if necessary to meet other persons in similar positions with whom you can bond especially where support from family and friends are non-existent.
Social wellness involves participating in and contributing to society. This can be done by your involvement in public education, sharing your experiences at seminars, workshops or any forum where others can benefit from your contribution. This is also a good opportunity to validate your self-worth.
Your environmental wellness should not be treated lightly, you are at a disadvantage which requires acute awareness on your part. By increasing your knowledge about the risks, prevention and care of lifestyle problems you can be proactive in enjoying optimal wellness.
Life is dynamic and the various dimensions of wellness interact continuously and influence each other. Any adjustment in one area of wellness invariably affects some or all of the others. Regular physical exercise helps to increase ones total wellness. Managing HIV/AIDS should be a dynamic process in which you improve your body's resolve to cope with the challenges more efficiently.
Kenneth Gardner is an exercise physiologist at the G.C. Foster College of Physical Education; email: yourhealth@gleanerjm.com.
