Wellness consciousness focuses on being aware of and participating in healthy behaviors and lifestyles. This includes eating a healthy diet, exercise/fitness, and the awareness of environmental stewardship.
Previous studies used actual health behavior measures to measure wellness consciousness, which limits its predictive power. This research uses a different approach by measuring the psychological traits of health consciousness and assessing its predictors.
Physical
Wellness involves holistically embracing a balance between different aspects of the mind and body. It aims to achieve well-being through physical fitness, nutrition, spiritual health, and mental wellness. This holistic approach promotes an active lifestyle and a healthy diet. It also encourages the cultivation of a positive worldview.
The study uses a new scale of health consciousness developed by the authors and validated by two experts in the field. It focuses on people’s psychological state of mind regarding their health rather than on specific behaviors such as eating fruits and vegetables. This concept has greater construct validity, although its application to the actual behavior of home-based exercise during the COVID-19 pandemic may be limited.
This study confirms that health consciousness can affect people’s home-based exercise. However, it is unclear whether this effect is directly caused by health consciousness or via health life goal and perceived behavioral control. It is recommended that future studies use a longitudinal design to examine the effects of health consciousness on people’s home-based exercise.
Mental
Wellness consciousness involves the active pursuit of health-promoting behaviors, habits and lifestyles. It also encompasses an awareness of one’s mental and emotional well-being, including the ability to manage stress and to engage in healthy social interactions.
Several studies have defined and measured the concept of health consciousness in different ways. Most of them have used actual health-related behaviors, such as food consumption and exercise habits, to measure the concept. As a result, these measures may not accurately reflect the psychological traits that underlie the concept of health consciousness.
To overcome this limitation, Iversen and Kraft (2006) employed factor analysis to construct a scale for measuring health consciousness. The first factor heavily loaded with Gould’s items on self-health awareness, while the remaining factors pertained to personal responsibility and health motivation. They found that a holistic view of health consciousness could be more reliable and valid than other traditional approaches. In addition, they developed a scale for assessing spiritual wellness and a scale for measuring the level of cognitive reactivity to negative thoughts.
Social
Social wellness is about building a strong support system and balancing the needs of your relationships. It also involves having a healthy work/life balance.
Using confirmatory factor analyses, we found that the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) predicts health information-related actions. Additionally, EI mediates the relation between health consciousness and healthy behaviors, with large standardized indirect effects.
The results of this study suggest that the concept of health consciousness may be a useful psychographic variable for further audience segmentation. Since health consciousness is a psychological state that can predict a wide variety of related variables, the use of this variable will provide greater predictive validity than using specific behavioral items (such as alcohol consumption or gambling) to measure health information-related behavior. Moreover, this study extends previous research on health consciousness by including the health motivation and health value scales from Jayanti and Burns (1998) in its questionnaire. These additional items further strengthen the predictive ability of health consciousness.
Spiritual
Spiritual wellness involves having a connection to something larger than yourself. This can be through religion, a belief in a higher power, or even a feeling of connection to nature.
Practicing spiritual health is a great way to help reduce stress, which is linked to many chronic illnesses and mental health problems such as depression. It also helps people feel a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. Spiritual well-being includes activities like journaling, meditation and traditional ceremonies.
Those who enjoy spiritual wellness usually have a strong sense of hope, forgiveness/self-acceptance, and commitment. They are willing to question things that they cannot easily explain or understand and seek harmony between what lies within them and the forces that come from outside of themselves. Spiritual well-being also involves having a high level of social responsibility and giving back to society.