The words “Daily Wellness Check” are probably self-explanatory to most of you. It means checking on your wellness daily. However, that is a lot easier said than done. How can that be done? How do you perform a daily wellness check? There are many components that are involved in making sure you “feel good”. Work, school, families, social activities and the list goes on. Life in itself gets busy. Let’s be honest here. One human being has a lot on their plate during all stages of life.
What is a Daily Wellness Check?
First of all, let’s start by saying: You are doing a great job! And that you should very proud of yourself for everything you have accomplished (and will in the future). But sometimes, we need a little bit of help. This is your reminder that that’s okay! Let’s dive into how a daily wellness check can help you and let’s begin the journey to using a well-being tracker for better days to arrive.
How can I Track my Wellness?
As mentioned before, there are a lot of components that are involved in your daily wellness. What makes you feel good. What makes you feel bad. Toxicity. Relationships. Friendships. Family. And so much more. It can be very overwhelming sometimes. Tracking your wellness will begin with using a well-being tracker that is designed to guide or maneuver you to check off everything on your list. A platform that will attend to your symptoms, manage your feelings in a healthy manner and so much more. A true daily wellness check indeed.
Let’s begin to try to check off all of your important boxes that are involved in a daily wellness check…
Wellness Apps
What is a Wellness Tracker?
Using a wellness tracker or wellness app that allows you to track your daily wellness will be essential to understanding yourself (in more ways than you have realized). Remember, a human being is extremely complex: mind, body, and soul. 3 major components are extremely elaborate on their own. Imagine trying to juggle everything on your own. Constant stimulation from the outside world. Demands. Dealing with a world pandemic. Higher living costs. Increasing grocery prices. It’s too much. Take a deep breath…
Sometimes, writing down your emotions or how you feel today can be extremely simple and useful. Simplicity at its finest. A simple self wellness tracker. Using the CareClinic platform can help you achieve just that. A diary function that allows you to indicate (in your own words) how you felt throughout the day. A function that saves and logs every diary entry; perhaps for you to review and reflect in the future. Or it can be used in conjunction with your healthcare team. It becomes really difficult to remember everything you wanted to mention during a sit-down consultation with your doctor (whether it is for your physical or mental health).
Writing down things into a journal is highly recommended by many professionals- and this could be just the right place for you. Accordingly, a wellness tracker journal of your own. A mental wellness app. A self-care app. Or whatever you want it to be.
Mental Well-Being Tracker
Some of the most highly asked questions are: “How can I track my mental health progress?” or “What can I track in a mental health journal?”. Mental health is nothing to be ashamed of. Straight away, let’s get that stigma out of the way. Mental health is usually treated multidimensionally. It does really take a village to help one person. Necessarily, one of the ways to help with mental health is usually a combination of therapy and medications.
The CareClinic platform allows you to track all aspects of your therapies and aids in being your pocket-sized mental well-being tracker. By using this therapy function, you are able to track all the aspects that are aiding your progress in mental health. It acts as both your mental health journal and mental well-being tracker.
Not only professional therapy such as counseling can be recorded but other mindfulness and meditation practices. Medication and mindfulness exercises can be done in conjunction with your other healthcare needs to help you mentally. While there are many forms of meditation and mindfulness, those with an evidence base such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) are of particular interest for healthcare professionals. Speak to yours today regarding MBSR. Systematic reviews of such practices have shown improvements in measures of anxiety, depression, and pain scores. These practices translate well to different populations across the lifespan and range of ability. Introducing a mindfulness and meditation practice has the potential to complement treatment and is a low-cost beneficial method of providing support for mental health progress (1).
Lifestyle Trackers
Writing in journals and mental health are all important but again, only one piece of a finite puzzle of the human being. What about physical health? Equally as important. What you put into it. What comes out of it. How much you move. Sleep patterns. Preventative tests or screenings. Conveniently, an all-in-one platform such as CareClinic allows you to be a minimalist; a professional in lifestyle trackers.
Fitness Tracking
There is no doubt in anyone’s mind how important exercise is for the body. No scientist or professional would object to that. However, simply telling someone to exercise is not enough. How many sets? Reps? How to overload your muscles? This discussion has to be specific.
Especially for beginners in the fitness world, it is important to keep track of your exercises and the volume in which you performed them. That way, you can visualize your improvements every week to month! This is important for gaining muscular strength in the long run. It is not about the fanciest equipment in the fanciest places. Keep it simple. The CareClinic platform allows you to track all your activities such as weight training, endurance training, and everything else in between! Always remember to speak to your physician before starting any sort of fitness regimen.
There is overwhelming evidence that correlates exercise with a longer healthspan that shows a delay in the onset of 40 chronic conditions/diseases. There have also been more recent studies that show not only the increased quality of life with exercise but also the correlation of the molecular mechanism connections to mental health (7). An important checkmark in your lifestyle trackers – start your fitness journey today by using the fitness tracker in the CareClinic platform.
Wellness Tracking Sleep
Did you know that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that insufficient sleep is a public health problem back in 2014? (5) Sleep is highly underestimated for its value? It is essential to the human body. Imagine the body as a battery and running on low…Not a good feeling.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, young adults (age 18-25 years) and adults (age 26-64 years) should receive 7 to 9 hours of sleep but not less than 6 hours or more than 10 hours (for adults) or 11 hours (for young adults). Older adults (65 years and older) should receive 7 to 8 hours of sleep but not less than 5 hours or more than 9 hours. Many studies have shown that getting enough sleep is important to our health. According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, people with sleep deficiency have a greater risk of many health complications, including heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, and obesity (5).On the top of your head, how many hours of sleep are you getting each night?
By using the CareClinic platform and its sleep tracking option, you can track the number of hours (using the sleep time function) as well as record all your sleep factors and post-sleep impressions by selecting a facial emoji!
Wellness Tracking Nutrition
Get the word “diet” out of your mind. This is not that type of article. On the other hand, this is the scientific discussion of pure nutrients. What you put into your body that makes it function. At the molecular level! Those nutrients we provide the body by eating the proper foods provide the body with its nourishment, “providing raw materials needed for cells growth and proliferation, and fuel for powering cellular metabolism” (2).
The CareClinic platform has a nutrition section where you can track the foods you are ingesting. This will give you an idea of caloric intake, the net macronutrients as well as keep track of your serving sizes along. Using the symptom tracker alongside this nutrition tracker to track your food will enable you to determine what causes flare-ups or allergies. The importance of nutrition is crucial for your daily wellness check. Sometimes, eating nutrient-poor foods will lead to deficiencies in both nutrients and fuel which over time can harm both your physical and mental health. Yes! Mental health too! Your food choices will also affect your body and mind equally! Eating an abundance of calories as well has also shown to be an important factor responsible for the rise of acquired metabolic syndromes as seen in developed societies (2).
It is also becoming apparent that intake of diets with low energy density but high nutrient diversity may be the key to promoting and maintaining optimal health (2). Let the CareClinic platform help you become one step closer to your healthcare goals!
Wellness Tracking Fluid Intake
Water is essential. Period. A human being can only survive without water for a couple of days whereas can survive 1-2 months without food (6). Crazy right?
Without fluids (more especially, without water), it is lethal to humans. By using the CareClinic platform and the Fluids tracker, you can easily keep track of your fluid(s) intake for the day. Another part of your daily wellness check!
Drinking beverages other than water can have detrimental health effects on your body. Water is important for the prevention of nutrition-related non-communicable diseases. This is become more apparent due to the shift toward large proportions of fluids coming from caloric beverages in our developed societies (6). It is important to be as transparent as you can with your physician as these higher-caloric or even “low-calorie” options can be a deterrent to your overall healthcare goals.
Water and proper hydration can provide you with great benefits such as helping you regulate body temperature, GI (gut) functions, cognitive/physical performances, supporting kidney and cardiovascular functions, better-looking skin, and even can help reduce headaches that are caused by water deprivation and so much more (6). Start reaping those benefits by using the CareClinic Platform for all your daily wellness needs.
Wellness Tracking Screen Usage
Do not get both of those words confused. Screening does not always mean prevention. However, too often, screening tests are advertised as such. There are screening tests that are known to be beneficial for prevention by catching the disease early such as mammography, fecal occult, pap tests, etc. Some screenings are mainly opportunistic such as blood pressure measurements taken at the start of your visit at the doctor’s office.
A screening program can only be considered to be a “preventive” measure if it aims to determine and influence risk factors or detect and treat abnormal changes that could later develop into a disease. One example is an endoscopy of the bowel, which makes it possible to detect and remove intestinal polyps that could later develop into cancer. However, screening can come with a risk. For example, x-ray examinations expose the body to radiation, and endoscopy of the bowel can lead to bleeding or (in rare cases) serious injuries (3). These risk versus benefits ratios needs to be discussed with your physician when you want to determine which screening options are best for you.
The CareClinic Platform allows you to keep track of all of these measurements that are involved in your well-being. For example, you can track your blood pressure measurements, weight changes and include notes about all other screening measures that were performed. Put your best foot forward stepping into this new(ish) year!
Tracking Symptoms and Recording of Progress
As important as measurement recording is, as mentioned above, tracking your symptoms will also be an important measure of your well-being as well. Whatever your condition(s) are, symptoms are inevitably present. If you are struggling with depression, for example, symptoms include (but are not limited to): depressed mood, loss of interest or pleasure in nearly all activities, fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day, feelings of worthlessness, or excessive or inappropriate guilt, diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness, nearly every day, etc (4).
The symptom tracker in the CareClinic Platform allows you to keep track of all of your symptoms throughout the day. Beneath each symptom, there are options to write personal notes (that give you more insight into each one) as well as a scale of 1-10 to help you rate your symptoms numerically. This way, you can be on top of all of your symptoms. This can also be a platform that can work in conjunction with your professional healthcare team to be able to track your progress as well. Remember, treatments always require a multidisciplinary approach. Recording the symptoms and having a diary log of each day will be helpful for all aspects of your team to provide you with the best treatment (whether it is your family physician, your therapist, etc.) Take full control of your wellness today!
Daily reminder: You deserve it all. Happiness. Health. Take the steps necessary to achieve the best version of yourself. The best version of your well-being.
Daily Wellness Check for Well-being
That was a lot of information. A little recap never hurt anyone. Let’s break down the 2 major compartments: physical versus mental and how the CareClinic platform can help you (as well as be able to help you with reminders!):
Physical Well-being Reminders
The body needs nutrients to survive. Water. Food. Those are your basic needs…that everyone should have access to. Fuel your body correctly in order to enhance your well-being. The body can also benefit from exercise/movement and recover with restful sleep every night. What a great cocktail! Physical health will also present itself with symptoms and is important to keep track of those as well for your benefit. Doing some screening or preventative measures also has been shown not to be harmful (once agreed with a licensed physician).
Mental Well-being Reminders
The brain also needs fuel- not in terms of physical food (although those nutrients are useful) but in terms of mindfulness. Our minds will benefit from doing activities that will enhance our mental well-being (by whatever means- such as therapy, diary/journal entries, meditation, MBSR, etc.). Tracking mental health progress will also be a useful tool for seeing well-being levels elevate.
Although there is a lot of overlap between physical and mental health (they are essentially intertwined), it is important to have a platform that can help you with your daily wellness check and overall well-being. You can start doing so by downloading the CareClinic Platform using your Android or iOS devices by clicking below.
References
- Behan, C. (2020). The Benefits of Meditation and Mindfulness Practices During Times of Crisis such as COVID-19. Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, 37(4), 256-258. https://doi.org/10.1017/ipm.2020.38
- Chen, Y., Michalak, M., & Agellon, L. B. (2018). Importance of Nutrients and Nutrient Metabolism on Human Health. The Yale journal of biology and medicine, 91(2), 95–103
- Cologne, Germany: Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG); 2006-. Benefits and Risks of Screening Tests. 2013 Nov 7 [Updated 2019 Dec 17]. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279418
- Kennedy S. H. (2008). Core symptoms of major depressive disorder: relevance to diagnosis and treatment. Dialogues in clinical neuroscience, 10(3), 271–277. https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2008.10.3/shkennedy
- Lichtenstein G. R. (2015). The Importance of Sleep. Gastroenterology & hepatology, 11(12), 790
- Popkin, B. M., D’Anci, K. E., & Rosenberg, I. H. (2010). Water, Hydration, and Health. Nutrition Reviews, 68(8), 439-458. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1753-4887.2010.00304.x
- Ruegsegger, G. N., & Booth, F. W. (2018). Health Benefits of Exercise. Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in medicine, 8(7), a029694. https://doi.org/10.1101/cshperspect.a029694
