UNH’s Well-Being Wheel is a visual representation of what it means to be well. This whole person approach empowers individuals to boost confidence and develop the skills needed to move towards a state of thriving.
Understanding Your Wellness
8 Dimensions of Wellness
The inner circles of wellness represent the different ways you actively care for yourself. Each dimension reflects an area of life that contributes to your overall well-being.
- Emotional Wellness
- Environmental Wellness
- Financial Wellness
- Intellectual Wellness
- Occupational Wellness
- Physical Wellness
- Social Wellness
- Spiritual Wellness
Your Values
- Your values act as a compass, guiding your decisions and helping you make choices that support and enhance your wellness.
- Values motivate and guide you as you work toward your goals. Example, your goal might be to excel academically, and you may rely on your value of responsibility to stay organized, manage your time, go to class, and meet deadlines.
Your Identities
- The identities you hold (such as culture, background, roles, and lived experiences) can influence how you experience and access wellness.
Hands of Well-Being
- The hands holding the wellness dimensions represent the ways that the communities that you live, work, and play in support your overall well-being.
- You can't be well just through self-care alone.
- You can think of well-being as a community care, where systems and supports work together to influence your ability to be well.
Why a Wheel?
- The Well-Being Wheel is designed as a circle to show that life, and your wellness, are always changing.
- As a college student, your priorities often shift from one moment to the next. For example, at the start of the semester you may focus more on social wellness, while during midterms and finals your attention may shift toward intellectual wellness.
- The circle reminds you that being well means accepting that life includes both strengths and challenges, successes and struggles.
- To support yourself through these changes, you'll need to continuously make small adjustments and choices to meet life’s demands and actively care for yourself. You do this through self-care (wellness) and community care (well-being).
Check-In with Your Wellness
You can use the UNH Well-Being Wheel as a tool to check in with yourself and reflect on your overall wellness. Consider the following questions:
- Where in my wellness am I experiencing strengths? What is contributing to these areas feeling strong?
- How can my strengths support me in areas of my wellness where I am facing challenges?
- Am I making choices that are aligned with my values and enhance my wellness?
- How are my identities impacting my wellness?
- How is my community supporting my wellness?
- Who can I ask for help? What systems and policies can I utilize to help me be well?
- How am I contributing to the well-being of others?
- What would help me be well right now?
These questions can help you build awareness, recognize patterns, and identify small steps you can take to support your well-being.
Knowing When You're Well
- You allow yourself the flexibility to recognize that challenges are a natural part of being well—not perfection.
- You feel a sense of meaning in your life.
- You experience a sense of belonging.
- You use your self-awareness to intentionally make daily choices that support your well-being.
- You ask for help.
The Wellness Center Services
Learn how a well-being framework guides the services we offer at Health & Wellness
In 2022, Health & Wellness updated our previous design of the Wellness Wheel to be more inclusive. We recognize that an individual can practice as much self-care as possible, but without a supportive community and an accessible environment, a state of well-being is out of reach. The new Well-Being Wheel encourages communities—such as the UNH campus community—to take an active role in supporting an individual's ability to reach their full potential.
