Dimensions of Wellness: Environmental Wellness
Environmental Wellness
This is an area of wellness that people don’t often consider wellness related. However, having an appreciation and understanding of how your environment affects your health and well-being and awareness of how your daily habits affect the physical environment is important.
The first step is awareness. While there are many messages about helping our environment, not everyone hears them or realizes that there is more they can do.
Remembering that the phrase “reduce, reuse, recycle” was designed as a hierarchy. So, we should first focus on reducing the use of resources and energy use and packaging. Many people believe that recycling is enough, but this was meant as what to do AFTER reducing and reusing.
Here are some things you can do to help reduce and reuse before you have to recycle.
Reduce water use by taking shorter showers, not running the water while brushing your teeth or washing dishes, running the dishwasher only when it is full, and only wash full loads of laundry.
Reduce the need for bags at the store by skipping them whenever you can and choosing reusable bags whenever possible.
Run errands in a single day to reduce driving time and fuel use. Have an appointment? Tack on the errands before/after the appointment.
When possible, buy local. Even if it is from a chain store, buying local will help reduce online store-to-door shipping and delivery.
Use reusable cups, dishes, and utensils rather than disposable items as much as possible. Many restaurants have to use disposable items right now, even with dine-in options, but you don’t have to. If you must, choose biodegradable items to help reduce the impact in the landfill.
Food waste is one of the biggest contributors to the landfill. This isn’t because of unfinished prepared food scraped into the trash, but from food that was never prepared in the first place, like those extra green and slimy vegetables lost in the back of the crisper drawer. When it comes to food, buy only what you need and use what you have.
Choose one less meat-based meal per week. Animal food production is a major contributor to greenhouse gasses if you want to go meatless all the time, great! But even one less meat-based meal per week can have a positive impact on our environment.
While you may be doing several things already, many people find they can do one or two more things to help with environmental wellness. Save-the-planet isn’t a hippie saying anymore. It is mainstream. And, in the 21st century, it is part of our wellness.
What are 21 things you can do in 2021 to improve your environmental wellness?
This was previously part of the 12 Days of Wellness 2020 – emailed to participants of that holiday email campaign in December 2020. Additional posts about the dimensions/pillars of wellness continue each week on #WellnessWednesday for six weeks in total.
