You might very well have found yourself in a coffee shop somewhere, overhearing a conversation about the latest meditation App, or perhaps you use one yourself?

We find ourselves in an exciting era in terms of the widespread adoption of wellness practices — and with the technology to help us implement it — paired with incredible longevity thanks to the wonders of modern medicine. And yet, irritatingly, we continue to find that stress and anxiety are common battle foes in our day-to-day lives, that niggle and hold us back from the personal growth that we aspire to. So, what gives?
Despite our fantastic upward steps in terms of health, a clear self-vision from a holistic perspective is still something that most people find a little difficult to pull into focus. Fascinatingly, a surging trend in prioritising financial wellness is helping to draw the various puzzle pieces together, and bringing clarity to that all-important greater picture of what health and prosperity should look and feel like for everybody.

What Is Holistic Health?
If you think of health, you might simply think of being OK or being sick, but if you imagine your true and genuine best self, how do you imagine that version of you would feel? You might go for adjectives like ‘energetic’, ‘free’, ‘empowered’ and ‘joyful’. This is where holistic health lies — the driving concept being that our well-being is not simply defined by the absence of illness, but by our wellness as a whole: physically, mentally and emotionally.
In practical terms, this means assessing the balance of our lives, uncovering what sits behind symptoms and ailments, and identifying the scale-tipping triggers that can wreak havoc on on our mental and physical health. If it’s not a concept you were aware of, it is something you were most likely already doing to a certain extent. In this ‘holistic’ vein, rather than just popping a pill, we tend to strive to keep our health in check through eating well, getting enough sleep and protecting our mental state through practices like yoga and meditation.
Factors, such as belonging, a feeling of purposefulness, a safe environment, keeping stress in check, feeling heard and our general sense of security, also act as powerful influencers when it comes to our health and happiness. The rise of Apps that help us out with everything from tracking our mood to filtering out sleep-disrupting blue light on our mobile phones are testament to this broader awareness of how our day-to-day existence effects us.

Is Your Financial Well-being On Track?
As we progress deeper from simple symptoms, to managing our lifestyles, through to digging for base triggers, the concept of financial wellness is only a fairly recent addition to our healthful vocabularies. Lessons have been learned, as the American Consumer Financial Protection Bureau identified that in “the wake of the recession, many employers have seen how financial distress reduces worker productivity, increases absenteeism, and undermines employees’ health.”
Familiar words immediately start to pop up: ‘stress’, ‘worry’, and even ‘helplessness’ are ways that we might hear people describe the way they feel about their finances, which are certainly not the adjectives of well-being! Increasing student debts, poor interest rates and pension fears contribute to painting an emotionally challenging landscape that is sure to impact our overall health. Thankfully, this burst of clarity has seen an up-shoot in the development of holistic financial wellness training in businesses around the world, and a rise in entrepreneurial efforts to make financial stability more accessible to everyone.

Building A Toolkit For Financial Wellness
For many, thinking about future finances can make your head swim, while for others, there may simply be a sense that there’s more to be done in creating a firm footing for the future. Strategising your own financial wellness plan is an effort well worth pursuing, and you can leap off the blocks by making an honest assessment of your current financial situation. Include the root causes of any obstacles in your way, and what steps, support and tools you require to lift you from your current position towards a far brighter outlook. You can sculpt your strategy from the following action points:
• Seek support when crisis management is necessary
• Develop a budget that will allow you to live within your means
• Assess and plan for your future goals
• Make sure you are financially prepared for the unexpected
• Find information and tools to help you in financial decision making
In reaction to this very poignant need for stability that so many face in today’s economic climate, the team behind an upcoming App called GRAYLL set out to create a system that would help their users to “create freedom, prosperity & wealth without trading time for income”, ultimately by using the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Their user-friendly App is intended to let people of any means invest and grow what capital they have without stress, tedium or expert knowledge. This kind of innovation certainly points to a future in which fresh approaches to creating financial stability open up new pathways for growth, power-sliding between the uncertain pillars upon which our financial systems traditionally stand.

Getting Real About Health And Finances
Setting out of a journey of self examination can make for a slightly bumpy ride, but we can look at addressing our holistic health as an exercise in checking our own structural stability. Each building block — from the family and community around us, to the environment in which we live; from the work we do, to our sense of autonomy to live our best lives — contributes towards our well-being just as much as the food that we eat or how many hours we sleep each night. The intertwining between our financial stability and the various markers that define our prosperity is something that we can leave unacknowledged, knowing that the negative impacts of burying our heads in the sand can be great, or something that we can draw focus from, empowering ourselves towards the positive growth we desire, and the best selves that we imagine.
