Career Wellness:

Involves creating balance between your passion, profession, vocation, and mission. Ikigai is the Japanese word that conveys a sense of purpose, or reason for living. Creating a work-life balance that aligns with your lifestyle and values is essential to growth and leading a good life.

Creative Wellness:

Involves using the arts in an expressive or creative manner, such as music, writing, drawing, painting, crafting, or hobbies to allow relaxation, decrease stress, improve neuropathy (brain & nervous system health), and improve immunity (by reducing inflammation in the body).

Emotional Wellness:

Involves creating emotional awareness, understanding, and acceptance of your feelings. This can be difficult to navigate. As humans, we all have different experiences, lifestyles, and situations that affect our ability to cope with emotions in healthy ways. Learning to navigate your emotions through challenges and changes is essential to your health journey.

Environmental Wellness:

Involves balancing ourselves, our home, our health, our community, and the planet's needs in a harmonious and sustainable way. This involves removing toxins and pollutants from your routine, recycling, reducing waste, and respecting resources. Having access to clean air and green spaces is essential to us all. It's especially important as it impacts mental and physical health.

Financial Wellness:

Involves our relationship with money and how it affects our lives. It's more than the balance in your bank account or your ability to pay bills. It includes the basics of financial literacy: income & expenses, personal taxes, understanding the credit system (growing credit), budgets, and goals. With financial literacy, you understand day-to-day costs and plan for the future. This provides financial flexibility and future financial independence. Finances can have a significant negative effect on your health & wellness, but it is possible to build a positive relationship with money.

Intellectual Wellness:

Involves the health of our minds and ability to learn, process information, and engage mentally in life. It encompasses curiosity, critical thinking, creativity, and lifelong learning. Developing in this area enhances problem-solving skills, improves mental agility, and increases adaptability in challenging situations. Your mind is a muscle, and it needs stimulation to grow. Reading, writing, puzzles, hobbies, reflecting on experiences, and trying new things. This contributes significantly to personal growth and overall happiness.

Physical Wellness:

Involves the active pursuit of optimal health, a healthy lifestyle, and quality of life. It goes beyond the absence of disease within the body. Proper nutrition, hydration, stress management, exercise, adequate sleep, preventative healthcare practices, and goals are foundational to physical health. Prioritizing physical health improves disease prevention, increases energy levels, supports longevity, and mental health.

Social Wellness:

Involves the ability to form and maintain healthy and meaningful relationships with others. This includes the broader community, family, and friends. Being social creates support systems that may aid us through our challenges and growth. These support systems reduce depression and sustain happiness during difficult times. Research also indicates that those with strong social ties often live 50% longer than those in isolation. Prioritizing relationships, open communication, and engaging in events, clubs, or hobbies can provide the social connections essential to your wellness.

Spiritual Wellness:

Involves the ability to connect with something greater than oneself. This could be universal awareness, religious practices, personal meditation and mindfulness practices, self-reflection, connection with nature, community engagement, or meaningful relationships. It develops a sense of purpose, inner peace, and balance, fostering overall well-being by aligning with our personal beliefs and values as we search for purpose and meaning in life. With spiritual wellness, we establish a sense of belonging and connection to others and the world around us, enhancing social wellness. We develop emotional resilience and mental clarity, supporting emotional and mental wellness. Prioritizing spiritual wellness can lead to reduced stress, better health outcomes, lower rates of depression, and improved overall health.

Personal & Professional Bio:

From "Forever Patient" to Health Anarchist Leader, Rachel Overholser brings a unique perspective as both a healthcare insider & a chronic pain survivor who refused to accept "sick forever" as her destiny.

PROFESSIONAL CREDENTIALS:
Master of Science in Integrated Healthcare Management
Bachelor of Science in Health Science
Director of Integrated Healthcare Management
Certified Nursing Assistant
Healthcare Population Analyst & Program Designer

PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION:

Like many healthcare professionals, Rachel followed all the rules she had learned in school – whole grains, low-fat foods, plant-based nutrition. The result? Nearly 300 pounds, multiple chronic conditions, & a medicine cabinet that defined her daily existence.

The irony wasn't lost on her: evaluating populations & designing healthcare programs by day & collapsing from chronic pain by night. A steady stream of pills on schedule.

After questioning everything she had been taught & implementing the methods in her published manual, Rachel transformed her health completely. She is now over 160 pounds lighter, medication-free, pain-free, & has guided many people through similar transformations.

TODAY:
Living proof that "chronic" doesn't mean "permanent."
Published author of "Health Anarchist's Guide to Nutrition."
Speaker & educator on health sovereignty & patient advocacy.
Community leader for the growing Health Anarchist movement.
Mentor to healthcare professionals & patients seeking transformation.

"My mission is simple: No one should suffer in silence when healing is possible. We illuminate the path for those labeled 'forever patients' to reclaim their health sovereignty – one bite, one choice, one victory at a time."