My ‘Five Selves’ Essay (1516 words)

My five selves are physical, intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual. My physical self is quite healthy because I fulfill the requirements of the FITT principle. The letters of FITT represent frequency, intensity, time and type. My intellectual self is interesting because I am mainly right-brained which means that I tend to use my creativity more than my mathematical skills. I am also a visual learned which is connected to me being right-brained. My social self consist of friends, family, and my surroundings. I spend most of my time at home with my family. Whenever I am with my friends, I observe their behaviours and listen to their opinions. I am more of an independent type of person. Being with different people has influenced me into appreciating different cultures and beliefs. I have learned things that have now been incorporated into my own set of beliefs and values. I greatly value freedom of thought, friends and family. My emotional self deals with feelings and my ability to handle the demands of life. The spiritual self is all about my beliefs, values, religion and my life philosophies. By satisfying the needs of all five selves, the result can be holistic wellness which is the ability to feel good about myself and others.Physical fitness is having ample energy and the ability to perform daily activities without being exhausted. My energy usually depends on the amount of sleep and food I get. If I have too much or too little sleep, I don’t look forward to the day and am not enthusiastic about doing things. If I do not have a complete breakfast, it affects my energy level. When I have a good breakfast, and enough sleep, I can go through a whole day with enough energy and alertness to do many things. I have relatively good flexibility because I stretch a lot which increases the range of movement around my joints. I have muscular endurance which means that I am able to do repetitions over a length of time. Althought I have muscular endurance, I do not have muscular strength. I do not find that I am able to lift extremely heavy objects. I have adequate agility because I can move with speed and can change direction fairly quickly. My ability to balance myself changes very often. Sometimes I can balance in awkward positions, and other times I cannot. I have good speed maybe because I am an ectomorphor or maybe because I have a good cardiorespiratory system. My normal heart rate is 70 bpm, and my target heart rate is 155-185 bpm.Intellectual self deals with memory, learning, problem solving, decision making and creativity. I am a visual learner which means that I learn best by seeing the information. I am also right brained which indicates that I use my creativity more than my mathematical skills. Whenever I have a problem to solve, I usually draw a picture of the problem and draw a few possible solutions. This helps me to see and organize the problem more clearly. I make my decisions in a similar way. I list my possible choices, then write down the good points, bad points, and consequences to each choice. For the past 5 years, I’ve been keeping summer journals to remind me of my summer memories. To illustrate my entries, I use my creativity. Since a young age, I’ve always liked drawing. In general, my short term memory is better than my long term memory. I find that I can only recall long term memories if they are important to me, or if they are dramatic experiences. A few examples of my childhood memories are my grandma reading to me, falling off a bridge in kindergarten, slipping in a swim change room in grade one, following my dad to work when my mom was pregnant, and flying a kite I made in grade one at Ravina Park. The people who affect my social life the most are probably my family. I have a rather large family including my aunts, uncles, and cousins. They are whom I spend most of my spare time with. My family usually gathers every weekend for dinner. I am very open to different religions, cultures, and practices because I know many people with different backgrounds and beliefs. Since I’ve been influenced by various people, I’ve learned at a very young age to never judge people by how they look, dress, feel, or act. I am very fortunate to have learned that lesson at a young age because many people still do not understand the importance of accepting differences. In groups, I prefer to listen to what others have to say rather than contributing to the discussion. I like listening to the opinions of others, then comparing to them to my own opinions. I do not mind group work, but I think I do better at individual work because all the thoughts are my own and I contribute to one hundred percent of the work. My social self is most greatly influenced by my family and myself.In my life right now, my emotions are very unorganized. To me, my basic needs are clothing, food, shelter, and love. My emotional self also needs a sense of direction. Right now, my life seems to be motionless, and not going anywhere. I am not fully satisfied with myself at this point, but I do not completely hate it. My basic needs are present, but not as fulfilled as I would like them to be. The demands of life are getting harder, and I have not yet found the will to meet those demands to the best of my ability. I consider myself to be very emotional or sensitive to serious issues. I am usually stressed when I have more than one test on the same day. Exam time usually gets me stressed. During that time, I don’t get enough sleep, and that causes me to become grumpy and miserable. During the times when my brother and sister were being born, I spent a lot of time by myself or following my dad to his night-shift work. After my brother and sister were born, I didn’t receive much attention, so I learned to become independent and find things for myself to do. Many of my emotions are influences by my surroundings and the things I’ve learned.I believe that my spiritual self is the most important out of the five selves. I do not have a certain religion that I belong to and practice, but I believe in a bit of everything. I believe that after death, the soul goes somewhere and waits for a new life or purpose. Life follows a predetermined course and the purpose of life is to live, love, learn, and die. All of lifes obstacles, and experiences occur for a reason, which is for you to learn from them. Basically, everyone is destined to live life a certain way and everything that happens is supposed to happen for your own good even if they don’t seem positive or meaningful at the time. I believe that all people are equal and should treated equally no matter their height, weight, colour, race, religion, or anything else. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions and nobody has the right to judge another by their differences. I live by many life philosophies, but one of my favorites is “If you want a rainbow, you must put up with the rain”. Other philosophies I believe are “Dream as you’ll live forever. Live as you’ll die today”, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re always right”, “We are all angels with one wing, who can only fly when holding onto each other”, and “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice”.To achieve holistic wellness, I must fulfill the basic needs of each of the five selves. I think that I would need to improve my emotional self and self esteem the most to find holistic wellness. I find that my emotional self needs the most help because I tend to avoid and run away from conflicts rather than solving the problem. A method I could use to improve that area would be to express myself more and continuing to write journals. Talking to my parents might also help. I believe that my spiritual self is my strongest self. One reason for this is because there can always be expectations of the intellectual self, emotional self, social self, and physical self, but there are no limits or expectations for the spiritual self. The spiritual self is mostly a feeling that doesn’t need to be learned. To continue to improve each of my selves, I will try to get more sleep to clear my head so I can organize my wants, needs, and priorities. If my thoughts are less hectic, I can think better and therefore improve my selves. In conclusion, my physical, intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual self are being used each and every day of my life, and therefore I need to take care of myself.