Maintaining health and wellness is an active process of becoming aware of and making choices to lead a healthy and fulfilling life. It is a state of mental, physical, and social well-being and not simply the absence of disease or illness. It is an active, lifelong process of making decisions and choices that contribute to your personal well-being, which then can translate to the well-being of your workplace, community, and family life.
What does this have to do with working in the natural gas industry? The labour and work of the natural gas industry often occurs under challenging conditions. The work can be physically and mentally demanding. It often requires the workforce to live away from family and friends for periods of time at “camps” closer to the location of the natural gas exploration or drilling. The work often occurs in harsh climate conditions of extreme cold

in the winter, rain in the spring and heat in the summer. Regardless of most of these conditions, the work continues.

The culture of Canada’s natural gas industry can also be a challenge to those unfamiliar with working in what has been called a “cowboy culture” or a “get ‘er done” (Get It Done) atmosphere; one where personal matters are put aside, language can be rough and attitudes abrasive. While there have been significant changes in recent years to ensure that safety comes first, with individuals and companies endorsing zero-tolerance policies for discriminatory or abusive behaviour, this is an industry where the work is challenging and individuals must take a proactive approach to maintaining their own health and wellness.

There are many dimensions of personal wellness; they overlap and workt ogether to create an integrated system of well-being

• Emotional wellness—is about being aware of your feelings, how you express them and manage them effectively. Emotional wellness helps you have satisfying relationships with people, deal with conflict, and manage stress.
• Social wellness—has to do with how you interact with others and live within society. Developing good communication skills, nurturing friendships, and understanding how your actions impact others and the community are part of social wellness.
• Intellectual wellness—is about how you take information in and what you do with it to expand your knowledge or skills, and experience life more fully. Intellectually-well people are open to new ideas, think critically and seek out new challenges. Learning, problem solving, and mental productivity are important aspects of intellectual wellness.
• Spiritual wellness—has to do with what you perceive to be the meaning of life and how you fit into it. Acting in concert with your beliefs and value systems is a sign of spiritual wellness.
• Mental wellness—this pertains to your mental health. While it encompasses depression and anxiety, which may be either hereditary or circumstantial it also includes positive emotions such as joy, contentment, and happiness.
• Financial wellness—being financially stable and managing money responsibly is an integral part of personal wellness.
• Physical wellness—this encompasses nutrition, physical fitness and the avoidance of unhealthy habits like smoking, drinking too much and usingdrugs.
• Occupational wellness—this aspect of personal wellness stresses the importance of a positive attitude towards work, and a rewarding and enriching career path.
• Environmental wellness—this relates to your level of environmental consciousness. Remember that every cell in your body was created by elements from the environment through the food you eat, what you drink and the air that you breathe. Your well-being is intertwined with the well-being of the environment.
• Medical wellness—this involves health-promoting medical practices like medical check-ups, preventative healthcare and medical health management. This also includes recognizing when you are unwell or possibly contagious and should not be at work so that you do not make others unwell.