Lead Well

Seven Dimensions of Wellness for Women in Leadership

Dr. Paula Walker King

• Publisher: Purposely Created Publishing Group
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781644840078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

Women are natural nurturers, caring so much for others that health and wellness are often neglected or even non-existent. But for a woman to be her most effective self, one who both nurtures and leads, she must learn to nurture herself first.

Dr. Paula Walker King has devoted her life to this belief as a highly respected leader and medical doctor, who practices holistic health both in and out of the office. In Lead Well: Seven Dimensions of Wellness for Women in Leadership, Dr. Paula Walker King explains to readers how each dimension of wellness contributes to a healthy lifestyle that helps to prevent disease and promotes overall emotional, physical, and spiritual wellness. It is a dynamic, comprehensive view of health and wellness that features wisdom and strategies to optimize the reader’s journey to better health and better leadership.

The Seven Dimensions of Wellness

1. Physical Wellness

Thomas A. Edison, the famous, brilliant visionary pioneer and inventor said, “The day is near at hand when the doctor will no longer be engaged to patch up the sick man, but to prevent him from getting sick . . . the doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.” How prophetic and profound! Edison may not have realized at that time in the early 1900s that he was actually talking about wellness.

When most people think about their health, they often solely think about the physical plane of existence and the presence or absence of symptoms of disease. But physical health is a complex interplay of genes and environment. In this case, environment is the milieu in which genes operate to have their expression. This biological environment or milieu is often influenced by various lifestyle measures such as healthy or poor nutrition, the presence or lack of physical activity, certain habits such as smoking, alcohol consumption, recreational drug use, unmanaged stress, or sleep deprivation. This internal environment affects and alters how our genes are expressed. This concept alone is revolutionary. Until recent decades, it was thought that genes determined everything as it relates to our expression of health and wellness. Due to emerging data and increased research in the areas of nutrigenomics, psychoneuroimmunology and mind-body medicine, we now know that genetics has a bearing on about 30 percent of our health outcomes. Meanwhile, the primary drivers of our health and experience of well-being are our daily lifestyle choices, which represent approximately 70 percent of the health equation. This revelation is encouraging news! When it comes to health and its highest expression, wellness, genes do not equal destiny. Genes are not the primary determinants of health as we once believed. Daily lifestyle decisions, which are entirely under our control, largely determine our health outcomes, experience of well-being, and our ability to lead well.

For more than the last decade, heart disease, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, stroke, and diabetes have been the leading causes of death for Americans. The common denominator shared by these health conditions is that they are preventable. In fact, almost all chronic diseases are preventable, and the trajectory of such disease is even reversible if intervention is begun early enough.

For example, Type II diabetes is a chronic disease that occurs in both adults and sedentary children and teens who are overweight. In the paradigm of prevention, the approach to addressing the signs and symptoms of diabetes would start at its pre-cursor state known as pre-diabetes. Intervention at the pre-diabetes stage would include the introduction of healthier eating habits and an exercise regimen that facilitates at least a ten percent loss of body weight. These simple lifestyle modifications can make the difference in whether there’s full manifestation of the disease (diabetes) in those with risk factors alone, or whether the disease is treated with pharmaceutical therapy versus non-pharmaceutical interventions like daily exercise, weight loss/maintenance, stress mitigation, and diet. In this prevention scenario, we would be less likely to see the effects of end-stage brittle diabetes, which claims so many lives and impairs quality of life with accompanying end organ damage, e.g. eyes (blindness), heart (heart disease), and kidneys (kidney failure) that affects millions. Therefore, prevention is key.

In holistic healthcare, primary prevention of disease is the ideal goal. As part of this type of care, healthy individuals are counseled and educated about exercising, good nutrition, receiving recommended vaccinations, managing stress, wearing seatbelts and utilizing other safety precautions. Primary prevention, when practiced, has been shown to save lives and improve quality of life. So, why don’t we practice prevention more vigorously?

In my professional experience as a physician and public health practitioner, I’ve noticed that apathy and discouragement are barriers to individuals practicing effective disease prevention. Too often, the mindset is that nothing can be done about a generational inheritance pattern of disease. After all, for decades medical scientists believed (and told the general public) that genes determined our biological destiny. If heart disease or diabetes were part of a family’s history, developing those diseases seemed inevitable. However, thanks to a growing body of epigenetics research, we now know that genes do not equal destiny. While we cannot alter the structure of our genes or the sequence of our DNA, we can influence the expression of our genes to create good health and well-being. Through daily lifestyle choices, we can influence how our genes behave, helping to “turn on” the genes that promote good health and “turn off” or down regulate, the genes that promote illness.

Wisdom and Strategies to Optimize Your Physical Wellness

The lifestyle interventions that are proven to matter most when creating physical wellness are:

1. Sleep

To lead well, we should be securing between seven and nine hours of sleep every night (preferably sleep that’s not induced by alcohol or pharmaceuticals). Also, we should have a set bed time of 10:30 pm, no later than 11:00 pm. If we are in bed by this time, our chances are greater to secure the required sleep hours needed to be physically well in order to lead well. During deep sleep, the body releases accumulated stress and toxins while it self-regulates and repairs the cells of the body. If you’re sleep deprived, you are more likely to have a weakened immune system and chronic inflammation, which is associated with many illnesses, including frequent colds or bouts of flu, Alzheimer’s, fibromyalgia, autoimmune illnesses, and some forms of cancer.

2. Prayer/Meditation

Prayer and meditation represent a simple practice that takes us to a state of profound relaxation and dissolves fatigue and stress. People who pray and meditate regularly are less likely to develop high blood pressure, heart disease, anxiety, and other stress-related physical illnesses. I will talk more about this subject in the chapter on spiritual wellness.

3. Exercise/Physical Activity

Physical activity is any movement of skeletal muscle that occurs in an un-choreographed manner. Exercise, on the other hand, represents planned, intentional, repetitive and structured skeletal muscle movement intended to improve or exaggerate health and overall fitness. When it comes to human health, both planned intentional and structured movement (exercise) as well as unstructured skeletal muscle movement (physical activity) are beneficial to the body, with exercise yielding slightly greater benefits due to its intentional and repetitive nature which increases lean muscle mass by design.

In a general sense, we all know that exercise can help us lose weight and reduce belly fat. But did you know that you actually PAMPER yourself every time you exercise? For most, exercise does not conjure up luxuriating images or any sense of pleasure or self-indulgence. However, when you consider the benefits of exercise, you’ll quickly understand why exercise/physical activity is one of the non-negotiable laws of health and the ultimate key to wellness.

As a physician and health educator, I shift paradigms. P.A.M.P.E.R. is an acronym that I created to teach the benefits of exercise so people would embrace this lifestyle intervention for greater endurance and energy to lead well. In the spirit of popular culture’s successful milk campaign, exercise “does a body good!” This scientifically supported fact has led to the global health initiative called Exercise is Medicine®, which is managed by the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) and encourages physicians and other health care providers to include physical activity/exercise when designing treatment plans.

Earlier, I mentioned P.A.M.P.E.R. as a teaching tool and acronym to highlight the benefits of exercise. Indeed, you PAMPER yourself every time you engage in physical activity. Here’s how exercise augments your health:

P = Protects you from heart disease

Regular workouts reduce your risk of cardiovascular problems such as high blood pressure and high levels of cholesterol and triglycerides. These conditions contribute to blocked or hardened arteries and contribute to heart disease, the number one killer of men and women in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

A = Age in reverse

Exercise can improve your health to the point where you look and feel younger than you are.

M = Memory is enhanced

With regular exercise, you can fight brain fog and achieve enhanced mental clarity. Regular aerobic exercise seems to increase the size of the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with memory. Additionally, exercise is linked to sharper cognitive skills.

P = Posture is improved

With advancing age, poor posture can develop due to muscle loss and bone density changes. You can counteract this tendency with exercise and strength training, which builds muscle and bone mass, especially in your core and along your spine, so you naturally stand taller and shave years off your appearance.

E = Energizes

Exercise gives you more energy. It also increases your libido (sex drive).

R = Relieves stress and musculoskeletal pain

Exercise relieves stress and can, in some instances, relieve musculoskeletal pain. Physical therapy in patients with injuries and accompanying pain is a good example of this latter concept. Moreover, endorphins are released when we exercise. Endorphins, also known as endogenous morphine or internally produced morphine, are our body's natural "feel good" hormones and they heighten our overall sense of well-being, causing us to feel pain-free and less stressed.

Your body is engineered for movement and regular exercise is a key to health and longevity. The benefits of regular physical activity are too numerous to be constrained by my P.A...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• The Amalgamation of Favorable Health Components Equals Wellness
• The Seven Dimensions of Wellness
• Putting It All Together
• About the Author