Understanding the Well-Being Practices

Each week during the Whole Life Challenge, you’re presented with a new Well-Being Practice to try.

What Is a Well-Being Practice?

Well-Being Practices are exercises in practical mindfulness — guiding you to pay attention to your thoughts, your relationships, and your automatic actions, and to alter them as needed to live a calmer, more connected lifestyle.

The Well-Being Practices span categories throughout your life, including improving your personal relationships, increasing productivity, doing the things you love, serving others, connecting with your thoughts and feelings, expressing gratitude, and examining your relationship with technology.

The end result of these Practices vary for each person, but all of them are aimed at creating personal awareness and mindfulness, allowing you to determine if a given Practice deserves an ongoing place in your life.

A few examples:

• One of our favorite Well-Being Practices is to limit exposure to social media during mealtimes, when with friends, or completely for a set period of time, helping you understand the impact that constantly checking Facebook, Instagram, and the like can have on your mental state.
• We also like to include a meditative practice in each Challenge, inviting you to be still and spend time with your thoughts, learning for yourself whether this type of activity leads to stress reduction, insight, or other positive outcomes.
  
  
• Other Well-Being Practices include de-cluttering your home, keeping a journal of some sort, reaching out to friends and loved ones, and including gratitude in your thoughts. These are just examples — for a more comprehensive look at potential Well-Being Practices, you can visit the past catalog here.

How Many of These Do I Have to Try?

As you approach the Well-Being Practices, there are a few things worth understanding:

First, there are 6 Well-Being Practices presented during each Challenge. You should think of this as a “survey course” in potential practices, giving you exposure to a variety of different options in areas you haven’t yet explored. In other words, we’re going to show you a bunch of activities that have improved our lives, and invite you to try them.

Because each Well-Being Practice is an invitation, you don’t necessarily need to try each one — but you’ll will still need to perform the Practice of your choice each day to earn your 5 points on the Whole Life Challenge scoreboard.

In making your choice of Well-Being Practice, consider the following advice:

• Once you choose your Well-Being Practice for the week, stick with it for all 7 days.The Practices can seem difficult (and perhaps odd) at first, and only through sufficient repetition will you begin to see whether each is benefitting you. Don’t give up early.
  
  
• If this is your first or second Whole Life Challenge, please try all 6 Well-Being Practices as presented. This will give you exposure to a variety of approaches to mindfulness, allowing you to properly understand all of the options available to you.
  
  
• If a Well-Being Practice strikes a nerve, perhaps leading you to reject it out of hand, it may be an indication that you need to try it (rather than put it aside). Some of our profoundest personal realizations have come from pursuing something we “didn’t want to do” — things like meditating, shutting off our phones, and keeping a daily goals journal.
  
  
• The point of the Well-Being Practices is to find one (or two) that you can bring into real life, beyond the bounds of the Challenge, bringing mindfulness to your ongoing experience. As such, treat each potential Well-Being Practice as an adventure, and be conscious about how it might fit into your daily routine if you find it properly beneficial.
  
  
• If you’re a Whole Life Challenge veteran, and you’ve adopted a Well-Being Practice that makes a real difference in your life (or would like to concentrate on turning a single Practice into a true habit), feel free to pursue the same Well-Being Practice every day for all 42 days. Or, to try new Practices for two weeks at a time. Or to rediscover the joy of variety by trying all 6. The only criteria for our veterans to earn daily points is that you’re choosing a Well-Being Practice each week, and you’re keeping with it for 7 days.

Six Weeks to Greater Mindfulness

Of course, if you have any questions about the Well-Being Practices, you can email us — support@wholelifechallenge.com or use the Live Chat feature at the lower right corner of any of our web pages, including this one. Please leave a message if we're not live at the moment. We look forward to hearing from you!

Enjoy the Challenge (and the Practices). :)

- The Whole Life Challenge Team