Health And Personal Health: The Dimensions Of Health

The dimensions of health make-up and create an image of our overall health. This paper will refer to the dimensions of health in relation to myself, and what health change within one dimension would be beneficial to my health as a whole. Health, as defined by the World Health Organization (2014), is a state of total physical, mental and social well-being, not just when disease, illness or injury are absent (p. 1). My definition of health focuses on feeling well enough to perform everyday tasks and to perform these tasks to the best of my ability. Overall, as seen in my self-assessment tool (appendix), the dimensions of health in which a change may be beneficial are my physical, emotional, environmental, spiritual and personal health promotion/disease prevention dimensions. In these dimensions I scored under 30/40 or the 75% of over which I consider to be achieving healthy living. The social and intellectual health dimensions had the highest scores, with social health being the highest at 38/40. My physical health is the dimension I’ve chosen that requires a beneficial change. Within this dimension, changing my sleeping habits is my main goal. According to Hershner and Chervin (2014), irregular sleep patterns and sleepiness have a negative impact on a student’s performance, memory, and on their ability to learn

443). In changing my sleeping habits I am currently in the contemplation stage. This stage, according to Prochaska & Norcross, is the stage during which people know they have a problem and are planning on making a change but have not yet stuck to completing it (p. 443). Reaching this stage has been brought around by feelings of tiredness and an inability to get up in the morning, as well as comments made by others about how late I stay up completing school work or doing other