Celebrate Good Times in Your Employee Wellness Program

People are notoriously bad at celebrating their own victories. Humility is important. But celebrating your victories can be equally important in making healthy lifestyle changes.

Every health victory—no matter the size—can and should be celebrated. The celebration will help you to have more victories and build up lifestyle filled with healthy progress.

Your employee wellness program puts you in an excellent position to help your employees celebrate their healthy victories. Your program can make it just a little easier for your employees to let loose, revel in the moment and celebrate the progress they’ve made.

What kind of health victories can you celebrate?

There are plenty of things to celebrate—and it all depends on the health goals you’re dealing with. Start by looking at the collective wellness goals your company has set, as well as the individual goals your employees have set. Then consider how you can measure success.

Some great things to celebrate include:

• Losing a few pounds. Or—if you’re not found of the scale—dropping a few clothes sizes.
• Improving biometric numbers like blood pressure, cholesterol or blood sugar.
• Getting more or better quality sleep.
• Achieving more defined muscle tone or a physical appearance you’re more comfortable with.
• Giving up bad habits like smoking, drinking pop, or eating fast food for lunch.

These are all great healthy victories that can help you build a healthy lifestyle. Celebrate them!

Why is celebrating healthy victories important?

When you celebrate, your body releases endorphins. Endorphins are a type of hormone that make you happy and feel incredible. Once you start to feel great, your body craves even more, which can help you to continue to make healthy choices.

Ultimately, healthy success builds upon healthy success. As you achieve healthy victories, celebrating them helps your body to realize just how great those victories are. Not only that, but the knowledge that a celebration is in your future serves as an extra source of motivation to keep working towards your goals.

Celebrating your wins is one way to soak in the accomplishments you’ve made. It’s a way to relish in your own progress and feel proud—if even just for a moment. That helps you to linger and focus on the positive parts of the journey, rather than getting stuck on the difficult things you had to overcome.

How can you celebrate health victories?

How you choose to celebrate is completely up to you! The most important part is that you take the time to celebrate before diving into your next healthy goal.

No matter what you choose to celebrate with, be sure it won’t sabotage the healthy progress you’ve made. You shouldn’t celebrate pounds lost by binging on cake and ice cream. You should choose celebrations that help you make even more healthy progress.

Your wellness program is a great route by which to celebrate your employees’ victories. You can use celebrations as simple as public recognition in the newsletter or on a bulletin board. You could even host a monthly lunchtime party celebrating everyone who has achieved healthy goals that month. If you have the means, you might even consider offering healthy rewards like subsidized gym memberships or fitness trackers to people who have met major milestones.

How you celebrate is up to you, your employees, and the culture of wellness where you work. No matter what celebration you settle on, take advantage of all the benefits of healthy celebration in your employee wellness program.

How do you celebrate your own healthy victories? Let us know in the comments below!