Many wellness practices and activities are designed to increase positive affect (among other results), and as such we feel our wellness focus here at CCC is therefore crucial to our clients' and caregivers' health on all levels. While some folks think that wellness is just a "nice extra", studies such as the one below show how absolutely vital wellness is for creating, improving and maintaining our health.

"Optimistic Expectancies and Cell-Mediated Immunity: The Role of Positive Affect," published by the Association for Psychological Science, is just the latest article showing the connection between attitude and health. In short: increases in positive cellular immune factors were shown to correlate directly with increased levels of optimism.

While typical care focuses almost solely on what's "wrong" with you, (that is, your diagnosed illnesses, losses in function, disabilities, etc), this -- for me and most other people -- doesn't do a thing to increase a sense of positive emotion.  In fact, the spreading medicalization of our lives produces the complete opposite of wellness: we become less and less able to remember that we are NOT just a collection of broken parts, but whole people capable of rich, complex, and satisfying lives. (Are you surprised to find out that the professor who impacted me most as an undergraduate, medical sociologist Irv Zola, helped coin "medicalization" as a now widely-accepted term?) Yet, every one of us has become medicalized as is typical of our culture. It is vital to counteract its depressing -- and health robbing -- effects.

For more about this how Caring Companion Connections employs wellness practices in our clients' homes, go here on this blog for a collection of articles on this subject: http://blog.caringcompanion.net/category/wellness/