Corporate Fitness
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Finding Balance: The Keys To Maintaining a Healthy Workplace
Health can be broken down into five basic elements: physical, emotional, social, spiritual and intellectual. While physical health is perhaps the most commonly considered of these components, balancing all five is vital to achieving optimal health on the job and off.
- Physical health refers to the body's physiological condition. Smoking, physical activity, alcohol, nutrition and other lifestyle choices can all affect physical wellbeing.
- Emotional health, the mental state of being, includes the stresses in a person's life, how one reacts to stresses and the ability to relax and devote time to leisure activities. Growing evidence links emotional health to health care utilization, susceptibility to disease and unhealthy lifestyle practices.
- Social health refers to the ability to get along with others, including family members, friends, co-workers and neighbors.
- Spiritual health involves the condition of the spirit. Having a sense of purpose, being able to give and receive love and feeling charity or goodwill toward others are all manifestations of spiritual health. For some, religious faith may be included in this category as well.
- Intellectual health relates to achievements in life that occur through work, school, community service or hobbies. The relationships between education and healthy lifestyle practices; unemployment and disease; socioeconomic status and medical care utilization are all manifestations of intellectual health's impact on overall health.
As a boss, it is important to encourage your employees to achieve a balance in all of these areas. Because of the intricate ways in which these elements interweave with one another, many employers choose to work with professionals like MeritCare's occupational health team to get their programs started.