Doing A Year-End Deep Health Review
It’s no surprise that January is the busiest month of the year inside of gyms.
But physical health only scratches the surface of what having Deep Health means.
There are six domains to our health and if we sacrifice everything else in the name of physical health, we won’t end up feeling satisfied with the effort we’ve put into those goals.
Doing a Deep Health year-end review allows you to see the big picture on your health, leading to feeling the difference in vibrant balance across the different areas of your life.
What areas make up your life?
If you listen to any self-help guru out there, they will have their framework for the different dimensions of your life. Like the Deep Health complete picture, these are the slices of the pie of life that we consider when evaluating the current moment of our life and the time frame we have been through. Some systems will give you 10 sections, others 6, or maybe as little as 4. The Deep Health model is the 6 domains of health that encompass all of our experiences as humans. While you may also like to review other areas of your life when you reflect on your year, like finances or career, these areas can also fit well into the well-supported framework of Deep Health.
Doing a Deep Health Review
While there are many ways to evaluate our life, one of the most impactful to me is to look through the Deep Health lens to get a clear picture of what our overall health and the different aspects looked like and how they have changed in the past year.
Because our health is multi-faceted, it makes a difference to look at a Deep Health framework to understand what is going well in your life and what needs more work and focus to get back on track. Doing your Deep Health review with the Deep Heath Questionnaire doesn’t just have to be done once per year. It’s also helpful to use whenever you face changes or set new goals during the year.
It’ll help you to see your start and endpoints as a result of any goal.
Training for a marathon may improve your physical health and your emotional health if you’re an anxious person who likes to have a focused goal to work towards but all the hours spent training might take away from your social health or diminish your mental health making it hard to focus on work.
Complete a deep health questionnaire and compare it to past scores. Save your results so that you can look back on it again next year.
Click this link to download a copy.
This may be all you want to do with your year-end review to set new health goals through this more expansive lens of your health but if you want to continue on to get even clearer on your health goals next year, review more of the past year first.
Review Your Calendar and Notes
If you don’t keep track of at least some of the ways you spend your time in your calendar or note-taking in a journal, now is a good time to start.
By having the thoughts and experiences of your life captured in the moment, you are keeping a much more permanent record of the stories you are creating. Anytime I feel like I haven’t had enough fun experiences or accomplished enough for myself, I scroll back through my calendar and the notes I’ve captured and can see the progress on the pages there. And so it helps you to look back through all these moments to get that overview of your year as you review it.
This is also one of the more valuable reasons for keeping a Bullet Journal or other simple form of a physical journal. Notes get scattered across different apps and devices on our phones and computers. But in a notebook (or two if you write a lot), you can have a full year's worth of your quick thoughts, events, and experiences and this is my favourite way of seeing what the story of my past year looked like.
As you review your year and think about how it ties into your Deep Health, these are some helpful prompts to consider that will guide the decisions about next year’s goals as well.
What were the highlight moments or experiences? What were some of the best things you accomplished? What challenges did you face? All of these questions that you can review when looking back through your notes will help you to hold yourself accountable when you think about what the next year looks like for you.
More things to take note of as you review your notes from each month this year:
What new places did you visit?
Who did you meet and what relationships did you build?
What new skills did you acquire?
What did you learn about your Deep Health?
I’d love to hear from you about what you’ve realized about your health goals and how Deep Health plays into them.
Leave a comment below if you feel like sharing!