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I'm Dr. Carolyn Chambers Clark, wellness, selfcare,
and relationship expert. I'm a nurse with a masters degree in individual, couple, group and family relationships,
and a doctoral degree from Columbia University focused on wellness and how to best help people learn new behaviors. My
purpose is to help you achieve a high state of wellness, no matter your age or medical condition, so keep reading...
Let's start by defining What is wellness?
Wellness is achieving a personal
balance in your life. It includes eating well, sleeping well, moving, well, breathing well, setting personal health
and wellness goals, keeping your stress at a level that works for you, having positive relationships, and doing all this in
a purposeful way. For example, humor and positive thinking are two ways to up your wellness quotient. (See "Humorous
Books to up Your Wellness Quotient" below for some ideas!)
What do I mean by purposeful? Wellness doesn't
just happen. You have to decide to be well and then pursue it. On this web site, I'm your guide for finding personal
wellness.
What is the difference between wellness and health? Health is a medical term based
on your temperature, blood pressure, how often you breathe, and laboratory tests. There are no laboratory tests for wellness.
You know when you're well. You feel good, you're at peace. You can be well even when you're dying or ill if you
have a purpose that brings you peace.
In wellness, you are the expert in you. Only you know how well you
feel at any given moment and what works best for you. Here's an example...A physician can take your blood pressure and
it can zoom way up because you're anxious, so the blood pressure taken at that moment may not be an accurate reading of
how well you are or even what your health is. This is called "White coat hypertension." Having a blood
pressure apparatus at home and taking your blood pressure when you feel relaxed will usually give you a much lower reading.
Learning relaxation procedures is even better because then you can stay relaxed in the physician's office and in other
stressful situations.
Although I use research results in my articles on this web site, bear in mind that research
findings only tell you "the average response to a particular treatment." That means half of the people above and
below that average response have another reaction.
This is why personal care wellness is so important.
You are a unique human being with unique human responses to foods, exercise, stress reduction methods, and so on. That's
why my books and articles give you many kinds of self-care approaches you can take for a particular condition. You
become your own research project, trying different safe and reliable self-care methods 
click here to hear me defining wellness
What is self-care?
Self-care actions are things you can do for yourself to up your health and be well.
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