Wellness is a paramount aspect of living your best life and regaining your identity after a substance abuse disorder. It goes beyond just not being sick and focuses on identifying your ideal well-being. Financial wellness will be the focus in this post.
There are a number of sub-groups to wellness: physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, environmental, financial, occupational, and social. According to the World Health Organization wellness is, “”a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
Wellness is an important topic to discuss in regard to recovery for a number of reasons. First off, because it can help a person avoid relapse. Figures from the National Institute on Drug Abuse indicate forty to sixty percent of people who go into recovery will relapse within one year. The flip side to this statistic is that as much as sixty percent of people in recovery don’t relapse. Another reason wellness is helpful because it offers people recovering with the necessary tools to create a healthy lifestyle. Recovery is a lifelong process that takes place gradually. The further into recovery a person goes the greater their opportunity to build good habits one after another.
Financial Wellness
Financial wellness is the act of understanding how to positively handle your finances. It takes into account how well you manage your money. It’s obvious that money plays an important role in our lives. Being in a poor financial state impacts both your physical and emotional wellbeing. Stress over finances is probably one of the most common sources of stress people face in their day to day lives. Tracking expenses, creating a budget, and following it are all important tools to have in order to become financially strong. Learning to develop your financial wellness will help you in preparing for unforeseen financial difficulties should they arise.
As they say, money makes the world go round, so it can be difficult to handle your finances in a mature manner. Money for groceries, car insurance, housing, and bills along with taking care of a family isn’t always easy. Therefore it’s easy to understand how keeping up with your monetary responsibilities can eventually overwhelm you. However, simply ignoring them only causes feelings of stress, anxiety, and fear to get worse. Given all the responsibilities we must keep in the air, taking a few moments each day to determine ways to improve your financial wellness will help you with your stress. Learning good financial habits is an important skill to develop if you want to achieve your life’s goals.
How to Improve Financial Wellness
How do we go about developing better financial wellness? Simply do a Google search on budgeting apps. You’ll find countless numbers of tools that can be used to help you create an improved financial plan. These resources are available everywhere from workshops at your local church or college. All of which are various programs helping lead you towards managing finances more effectively.
Since everyone has unique financial circumstances it’ll be up to you to decide on the appropriate resources to help you on your journey to becoming more financially fit. It’s important to keep in mind that developing financial wellness is a process, meaning that it doesn’t happen overnight. Don’t procrastinate, it’s far wiser to recognize and deal with a financial problem before it begins otherwise the effects can snowball out of control. Virtually every aspect of Wellness ties into the financial sub-category so living a balanced life is part of this form of wellness.
