Why am I such a proponent of wellness care? Not only have I been doing it for years, and received enormous benefit for myself, and for many of the people in my practice, but it just makes sense. I’d like to use a very simple analogy to show how beneficial it can be.
Debt can be hard on the back!
Most of us understand money and it’s unattractive black hole, debt. When we are in debt, we’re usually acquiring interest, and it just keeps getting worse, if we’re not paying it off, right? We have purchased something with money we didn’t have, and now we have to pay it back, at a further cost. Most of us want to get out of debt, right? And what then? What do you do when you get out of debt? When you’ve managed to pay back all of the money you’ve borrowed, and the interest that you’ve accrued, you do one of two things.
- You start spending money again, borrowing more, and getting into more debt, which you will pay back later. OR!
- You could start putting that money into savings, and building for your future. That money will then make interest that benefits you, and goes back into your pocket eventually.
Which would you choose, if someone laid it out for you like that? All else being equal, you’d prefer the second, right? It can be difficult to do, especially when the next shiny thing presents itself, but we all know that.
Health is the same.
When you are in crisis, you’ve accrued a debt of stress against your health. You are in sickness or disease, or perhaps just in dis-ease. That debt is having an impact on your life, the interest that it is costing you is in terms of happiness, activity, and enjoyment. As you get adjusted, you are basically helping to pay off that debt, and the interest, the cost in happiness and function, becomes less and less until your debt is paid.
Once that debt of stress is paid, you have basically two options:
- Spend your health again, and accrue stress until the interest piles up and you are suffering once again.
- Embark on Wellness care, put health into savings, and become better and better.
What happens when you go into Wellness care? You are basically putting health into reserve, making you healthier so that the next time a stress happens (like a big expenditure) you don’t have to dip into debt to do it, you can pull from your health savings. You might still feel it, but it won’t be debilitating, and it won’t cost you interest. It will take a bit from your health savings, which you might feel, but it won’t hurt.
Now sometimes a big stress expense will come along, and even though you have health in savings, you will still have to go into debt. But here’s the thing, even in debt, it won’t be so bad. You won’t have had to take as much debt. That means less interest, and with the habits you have, you’ll get out of debt faster and back into savings.