Personal experience with
Wellness checks

‍The process of designing a wellbeing assessment tool started off in a fairly similar way to any design process: with an explorative phase. The result was a deep dive into the vast and well-established research field of wellbeing assessments. It became apparent that there are many different theories that understand human wellbeing in equally different ways, resulting in a range of factors that either constitute or contribute to wellbeing. Accompanying these theories are various assessment formats and techniques. From this information, we compiled a list of key wellbeing factors and validated questions to assess them.

So how can we decide which questions would be best suited for our wellness check?

After all, we are facing a totally unprecedented situation. It’s not like you could Google the question: “What does it mean to be well in times of a global pandemic?” Well, the answer is: ‘eat your own dog food’! In other words, try out what you're creating on yourself, be your own guinea pig. 

In these early stages of the project, we noticed that this tool didn’t just provide us with information about how we were doing overtime. By getting these regular ‘wellness check-ins’, we noticed that we became more reflective about our own wellbeing.

In the first week, for Willem - he realized that he should go out more, exercise more, and should ring his grandfather more than he did in the past few weeks. For Caiseal - she noticed a pattern of low mood on days where she didn’t go outside or the weather was poor, and improved mood after (virtually) speaking with friends. This pattern motivated her to get outside and put more effort into maintaining her relationships.

While this may sound familiar to seasoned wellbeing researchers, it was a welcome realization to us. Because what this means, is that it provides an incentive for people to actually use our tool!

Our deep dive into wellbeing research also showed us something very important: your long-term wellbeing is greatly improved through awareness of the factors that influence it. Tracking and reflecting on your wellbeing over time -- with a tool like My Wellness Check -- can help you to do this.

‍Sign up here to begin your wellbeing journey today.