What is holistic therapy?

If you are trying to lose weight, you might start exercising more.

Maybe you incorporate more fruits and vegetables to your diet. Sometimes you even acknowledge that stress and lack of sleep are also affecting your ability to lose weight, so you commit to getting consistent sleep. A holistic approach to weight loss would look at all of these factors—sleep, stress, exercise, nutrition, and emotions—to help you live a healthier life.

Holistic health looks at every aspect of your life and analyzes how they could be affecting your health. The goal here is to make you the healthiest possible, realizing that health isn’t just a number on the scale. It encompasses all aspects of you—mind, body, and spirit.

Holistic therapy takes a similar approach in ensuring mind, body, and spirit are optimal. It recognizes—just as holistic health acknowledges that the mind affects the body—that the body affects the mind. When we can learn skills to continually support mind, body, and spirit, we begin to flourish and live well. Looking at and optimizing mind, body, and spirit is a holistic approach to therapy. The skills we learn that help us examine and improve these areas of our lives fall into well being.

Well being is about living well, even through difficult situations or environment. It is a series of questions and skills that help us optimize or physical and mental health right where we are. Unlike happiness, well being is something we can continually learn the skills to improve. Happiness is conditional; well being can adapt to any condition and environment.

Learning skills for wellbeing is the top priority for children as it will empower children to take their life into their own hands and enable them to adjust and overcome different challenges throughout their lifetime. In a sense, it’s the most important skill a child could learn.  Schools teach achievement, literacy, math, conformity, thinking skills, success, and test taking, but they rarely focus on how we can take care of ourselves. Unfortuntately, this model isn’t work for our children. Depression in young people is alarmingly high due to this gap in education. It is ten times more common in children. “Fifty years ago the first onset was around 30 years old and now it is below 15 years. Research states that greater well-being enhances learning.” Children aren’t learning the skills that they need to be able to cope in a variety of different situations—and that is key. Remember we aren’t just aiming to live well when life is good. These well being skills transfer to moments of adversity as well, which is what makes it starkly different from happiness and a more holistic approach to mental and physical well being.

It’s been proven that “Negative mood produces narrowed attention, more critical thinking, and more analytic thinking. When you’re in a bad mood, you’re better at “What’s wrong here?” when you’re in a good mood you’re better at “What’s right here?” Schools emphasize critical thinking (ie bad mood thinking) and following orders rather than creative thinking and learning new stuff. This results in children ranking going to school just slightly above going to the dentist.” In a way, we are equipping children for bad mood thinking but not nurturing the good mood thinking, which is needed for children to continually thrive. It is key children know how to do both in different situations. Being able to tap into good mood thinking is a skill well being teaches.

Martin Seligman talks about how “well-being is the antidote to the runaway incident of depression, a way to increase life satisfaction and an aid to better learning and more creative thinking.” Taking a holistic approach to therapy is key, not only treating the symptoms with medication and therapies, but also addressing those symptoms through analyzing exercise, nutrition, and sense life purpose and teaching skills to help each child optimize and thrive in their lives.

Well being, a holistic and proactive approach to therapy, needs to be taught in schools or adjunct programs like The Flourishing Way groups. The knowledge and skills that allow people to thrive needs to be more accessible to everyone to increase learning, positive mood, and boost positive relationships that lead to resilience and more empathic and contributing young adults.

Well being skills are just as important as math and science. Check out The Flourishing Way groups to support your teen or young adult as they grow because in a sense, their lives depend on it.