Student Life Wellness and Wellbeing Index

This dimension encompasses the importance of our intellectual, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing.

• Intellectual wellness embraces life-long learning by being intentional about what sparks our creativity and interest. Through intellectual wellness, we strive for an open mind to incorporate new concepts, information, and skills.
• Emotional wellness is realizing our own capacity to affirm ourselves and cope with daily stressors through acknowledging thoughts and feelings and implementing strategies to manage our lives in a healthy way.
• Spiritual wellness is a process of honoring the sacred within the natural world.  Through spiritual wellness, we seek to understand, challenge, and strengthen individual beliefs, values, rituals, and ethics that guide and give meaning to our lives.

Purpose is applying one’s unique values, passions, and abilities to gain meaning and direction.

Physical well-being includes lifestyle and behavioral patterns which are maintained over the course of time and are tailored to meet an individual’s goals and needs.  These lifestyle and behavioral patterns help to ensure health, avoid preventable diseases and conditions, and to live in a balanced state of body, mind, and spirit.

This dimension encompasses the importance of our connectedness through community and culture.

• Based on a common experience or purpose, community wellbeing involves the wellness of both the individuals and the larger group. Community wellbeing builds healthy and supportive networks to cultivate belonging and general connectedness with others in the community, which in turn leads to a willingness to act together in mutually beneficial ways. Contributing to community facilitates safe access to spaces, opportunities for us to participate as our authentic selves, and promotes a shared culture of wellness.
• A culturally well person/individual is able to acknowledge their own culture, regardless of identity and experience, and the impacts their culture(s) have on others. Additionally, they are able to honor and celebrate the unique experiences that other backgrounds and identities bring to the community. Holistically, they are able to intertwine the experiences of self and others to positively contribute to the UMD community.

Environmental wellbeing is the way in which connection with our surroundings contributes to overall positive health, happiness and fulfillment. Making a deliberate effort to explore new environments with unknown variables in nature and in society helps a person develop new skills and learn from their successes and failures. With enhanced curiosity and courage to explore new environments the potential for lifelong learning, wellbeing and personal growth are infinite.

Economic wellbeing is defined as the state of having present and future financial security. It also includes the ability to make economic choices and feel a sense of security, satisfaction, and personal fulfillment with one's personal finances and employment pursuits. Economic wellbeing may be achieved through policies that ensure the ability to build financial knowledge and skills, access to safe and affordable products and economic resources, and opportunities for generating income and asset-building.