Physical wellness is the state of health that is the result of doing healthy things, such as eating good foods, exercising daily, and feeling good about life. Wellness is the state of health and well-being we are able to achieve. It is not only being free of illness, it is being the best we can be.
Physical Wellness and MTSS
Multi-Tiered System of Supports or MTSS is a term used to describe an evidence-based model of schooling that uses data-based problem solving to integrate academic and behavioral instruction and intervention. (Florida’s MTSS Project). This definition brings together the worlds of academic instruction and behavioral intervention.
The MTSS movement is catching on because you cannot separate academic performance from social/emotional learning. The eleventh and last step in our Success Profiler and its core assessment of emotional intelligence, the Personal Skills Map, is physical wellness.
Physical wellness is a personal effectiveness trait that is often overlooked in the process of academic performance. In the race to improve academic performance, physical wellness takes a back seat. It shouldn’t, but it does. But it is obvious—when we feel well, we perform well.
The Three Cornerstones of Physical Wellness
There is a billion-dollar industry in advising people how to take care of themselves. This industry has thousands of books specifically targeting physical wellness. A quick review of all that literature shows three important aspects:
- Self-Esteem: The desire to take care of one’s physical self begins with self-esteem. If your self-esteem is low, your opinion of yourself is also low. Low self-esteem will lead to a lack of desire to maintain or improve physical wellness. On the other hand, if you self-esteem is high, you feel good about yourself and how you look and feel.
- Stress Management: The link between stress and disease has become clear. Research has found that stress, over long periods of time, results in damage to the immune system. A damaged immune system leads to poor health.
- Personal Responsibility: Responsibility is the state of being responsible and accountable for one’s actions. Put the word personal in front of it and it takes on the meaning that you are responsible for your own actions. If you won’t take responsibility to live a healthy lifestyle, nothing can be done. When talking about personal responsibility for physical wellness, we must include such things as what you eat, how much you eat, how much you sleep, and how much you exercise.
Conclusion
This concludes our eleven blog series on MTSS and the Personal Skills Map and the eleven skill interventions of the Success Profiler. Make sure to visit our blog history to catch up with our other blogs. We hope you now see the connection between our social/emotional assessment and skill intervention system and MTSS.
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