How to Better Your Well-Being
toAchieve More
Jasmine Dumasia has worked
variously in banking and as a public
servant in the UK and in India and now
part-owns and runs two companies.
One provides training and consultancy
services to the financial industry as well
as individuals and the other invests
in property. She is also a sought-after
freelance coach, trainer, and speaker
on topics such as well-being, mental
health, productivity, parenting, finance,
peak performance, and strategy for
individuals as well as companies.
Her educational background is in
finance and psychology and she has
a dual Masters, one being an MBA
and the other an MSc (Cross-Cultural
Psychology). She lives in London
with her husband, two sons, and her
Labrador, Tara. She loves travelling,
reading, writing, and meeting people.
Jasmine Dumasia, B.Com, MBA, MSc
Director,Culture Hacks
Abstract: People dont think about well-being until they
lose it and get ill. This guide shows you why it should be
the top priority for everyone, right now and always. It
reveals that better well-being translates to higher achieve-
ments and more happiness. Furthermore, it unpacks the
components of better well-being (i.e., physical health,
mental and emotional health, and social health), while
giving clear, easy, step-by-step ways to achieve all three,
with minimum cost and little effort.
Keywords: Achieve, easy, emotional, health, mental,
physical, social
Often at the bottom of everyones list of things to do,
well-being has a huge impact on several aspects of ones
life. Being physically fit gives you the best chance to
ward off diseases such as high blood pressure and cancer.
Furthermore, science shows that when you are healthy
your mood is better, you are friendlier, have better men-
tal health, have higher life satisfaction, increased lev-
els of happiness and achieve more. Classroom studies
show that students who are healthier actually learn and
perform better with higher concentration levels, better
cognitive ability, higher mathematics scores, and lower
absenteeism.
This guide is divided into three sections:
(i)Understanding well-being and its importance in
your life
(ii) The components of well-being
(iii) Quick and easy ways to improve your well-being today
Understanding Well-Being and Its Importance
inYour Life
The Oxford dictionary defines well-being as The state
of being comfortable, healthy or happy, whereas The
World Health Organization (WHO) suggests that well-
being is ... a resource for everyday life ... a positive
Expert Insights 1
 How to Better Your Well-Being toAchieve More
concept emphasizing social and personal
resources, as well as physical capacities.
A study in 1974 by Marc Lalonde ob-
served that three factors affect health: ge-
netics, environment, and lifestyle. Over 40
years later this still holds true. The genes
you inherit, the environment (both physi-
cal and cultural) that you grow up and live
in, as well as your lifestyle, all play a part
in determining your health and well-being.
There is very little that can be done to alter
your genes and although you have some
control over your environment, lifestyle,
the third factor, is one you have most con-
trol over.
Therefore, it is heartening to know
that, science shows, lifestyle is the one
factor that impacts your health and well-
being the most and that, to a large extent
our well-being is a matter of the lifestyle
choices we make. R esearch shows that
health behaviors can trump a lot of your
genetics and only 25% of the variation in
longevity is due to genetics ... . o thers
can attain a similar result by targeting
the same pathways with appropriate
life style . . . Lifestyle choices impact
your health with respect to heart disease,
cancer, Type 2 diabetes and, aging. In fact
studies indicate that healthy lifestyle
has the biggest impact on cardiovascular
health and only 5% to 10% of cancers
are due to genetics. In a ddition, diet and
physical activity could be the d ifference
between a frail and a strong skeleton,
impacting your ability to live a long and
healthy life doing things you want to
do. The Medical Research Council states
that Behaviors such as diet, how much
exercise we do, and consuming tobacco,
alcohol or drugs play a major role in
influencing health, wellbeing and the
risk of chronic diseases. Thus, crucially,
lifestyle factors not only affect your life
span but also your health-span.
It is never too late or too early to start look-
ing after your health and well-being. Studies
do indicate, however, that the younger you
2 Expert Insights
start the better and easier it is to get healthy
and well and stay that way. According to
Northwestern Medicine, Healthy lifestyles ad-
opted in young adulthood maintained a low
cardiovascular risk profile in middle age.
Donald Lloyd-Jones, MD, states, .... earlier
they start making healthy choices, the more
likely they are to maintain a low-risk profile
for heart disease. Kiang Liu, a professor of
preventive medicine at the Feinberg School,
proposes that it is very important to adopt a
healthy lifestyle at a younger age, because it
will impact you later on.
Now that we know how important
well-being is to your life, right now and
going forward, let us look at what exactly is
well-being made up of.
The Components of Well-Being
A variety of studies have been done on the
components of well-being and a distillation
of these has led to the three cornerstones
of well-being: physical health, mental and
emotional health, and social health.
Physical Health is not just the absence
of sickness and disease but the presence
of an active and fit body that serves your
needs. A physically fit person is strong,
flexible, full of stamina, and can move fast
when needed.
Once again mental health is not the
absence of mental illness but a state of
mental well-being. You like who you are
and accept yourself for who you are. You
can recognize and express emotions includ-
ing difficult ones like anger and jealousy
in a healthy way. You can face adversity
and stress and deal with them in a posi-
tive way. Mental and emotional health go
hand in hand: mental affects emotional
and emotional affects mental
Social health indicates your place in your
world. A person with good social health
gets along with others and has close and
meaningful relationships with family and
friends. They have people in their lives
who they can count on and who can count
on them in times of need.
 How to Better Your Well-Being toAchieve More
All three aspects of well-being are inter
connected and impact each other. For
instance, poor physical health due to
unhealthy food and drink choices, lack of
exercise and excessive dependence on sub-
stances such as alcohol and drugs could
lead to stress and anxiety as well as low
self-esteem. Of course, the opposite can
also be true where stress and anxiety lead
to poor choices in food or drink and a de-
pendence on alcohol or drugs. In both sce-
narios there could be difficulty in kindling
and sustaining meaningful relationships,
resulting in social isolation. Poor physical,
mental, or s ocial health affects well-being,
which in turn impacts your ability to per-
form and achieve, as well as your happi-
ness. All of that, in turn, inevitably affects
your life.
Quick and Easy Steps to Better the
Physical, Mental and Emotional
as Well as Social Aspects of
Well-Being
We now know it is important to look
after our well-being because it impacts
all aspects of our life. We also know that
to better our well-being, we need to bet-
ter our physical, mental and emotional as
well as social health. Knowing that there
are three clear areas to target is the very
first step toward better well-being. In
this section we will look at the key fac-
tors that influence each of these three ar-
eas and learn quick and easy techniques
to maximally impact each one of them,
with minimal investment of our time and
money.
Physical Health: The Five Factors That
Can Make a Big Difference and How
toImprove Them
. . . regular exercise, limited alcohol con-
sumption, abstinence from smoking, sleep-
ing 78 hours a night, and maintenance of
a healthy weight play an important role in
promoting longevity and delaying illness
Expert Insights
and death. Housman & Dorman 2005,
pp.303304.
Northwestern Medicine states that The
five most important healthy behaviors for
preventing heart disease are, not smoking,
low or no alcohol intake, weight control,
physical activity and healthy diet.
Here are the five key factors that a ffect
physical healthfood, weight, sleep,
exercise, and toxins. Let us take a closer
look at them and see how we can improve
each of these for better physical health.
Food and Drink
Food is a key part of our lives. It not only
keeps us alive and well, but is also a vital
part of what keeps us healthy or unhealthy.
It defines our very identity and is an ex-
pression of our culture and our religious
beliefs. We celebrate with food and we nur-
ture with food. The social connections we
make are rooted in the meals we share to-
gether. It is a way to welcome people into
our inner circle, a way to show our love.
When you look at the science of food, it is
very simple. Food, measured in calories, is
required to give our bodies energy so that it
can perform everyday tasks such as breath-
ing, lifting our arms, and moving our legs.
If we did not eat, we would die. There is
clear evidence now that what we eat has a
direct impact on our health and that an
overall healthy dietary pattern versus
an unhealthy one is the cornerstone of a
healthy body and prevents a number of
conditions such as heart disease, diabe-
tes, high blood pressure, stroke, and can-
cer. For instance, certain foods increase the
chances of getting a range of cancers such
as colon, breast, esophagus, and kidney.
Top Tips
Eat a well-balanced diet.
Official guidelines recommend consump-
tion of at least five portions of different
colored fruits and vegetables a day, r educed
intakes of saturated fat, fried food, and salt,
and increased consumption of complex
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