This is a very common question in the wellness industry, especially now that so much can be found online. With healthy recipes, nutrition advice, exercise routines, yoga poses, inexpensive equipment delivered to your door, meditation videos, hypnosis sessions, music streaming, and even video chatting with doctors and therapists, you have a virtual health and wellness personal assistant right at your finger tips in the comfort of your own home, at low or even no cost.
Even though you can do many things on your own at home (and some things you should still do at home even if you are seeing an out-of-the-home health professional), there are some good reasons to pay a wellness practitioner in a professional office.
1. It has been proven time and again that people are more successful at changing habits and reaching goals when they have a support system. Everybody needs a cheerleader to motivate and celebrate successes, but also to remind them of how far they have come if they become defeated because it is hard for them to see it themselves.
2. Some of the advice on the internet isn't always the most accurate or easy to understand, so it can be nice to have someone you are comfortable with that you can discuss your questions and concerns.
3. It is much easier to skip out and make excuses when you don't feel like doing something if you are on your own. If you have paid for sessions and have an actual appointment booked with a practitioner to hold you accountable, you are more likely to follow through with it. Paying someone gives you a sense that you are investing in your life changes.
4. You would have to spend hundreds of hours reading, researching, and learning all that your practitioner does. You might do some reading for a couple of hours here and there in the evenings or weekends, but chances are your practioner lives and breathes their specialty. They spend day-in-and-day-out practicing, learning, evolving, keeping current with the latest trends and innovations, and yes, sometimes even making mistakes from which valuable (and sometimes costly) lessons can be learned. Not everything can be learned in a book!
5. There are things that you might not even know to look for unless it is recommended for you to do so. Some of the connections between our mind and body can be missed if you don't know what to look for, and there are some treatment options available that you will never have heard about or come across in your own reading without your practitioner pointing them out.
6. A holistic practitioner is going to treat you as a whole person. If you are trying to treat something of a physical nature, sure you can look online and find ways to deal with that particular physical problem. However, a holistic practitioner will also help you to see the mental and emotional facets that may be sabotaging your efforts at physical change. They can help you to explore corresponding emotions and thought patterns, as without changing those too your chances of success are lessened and your chances of relapse even if initially successful are higher.
7. The environment you are going to outside of the home has been designed specifically for your health and wellbeing. As well-intentioned as many of us are, trying to do things at home that require concentration or relaxation can be extremely difficult. When you are at home you have phones ringing, spouses and kids wanting your attention, pets jumping on you, the TV blaring in the other room, distractions such as the pile of dirty laundry in the corner of your eye as you are trying to meditate, and on and on.
8. Unless you have a pretty healthy wellness budget, your practitioner will have invested in better quality equipment than what you would have at home, and often you get what you pay for. For example, there is most definitely a quality difference between $10 and $250 headphones, and while you don't need to spend $500+ on headphones for binaural beats, you do need ones that cover the necessary frequency range, and most cheap ones will not. Even if you are in the market for your own equipment, trying out the tools and equipment used by a practioner is a good way to get a feel for what is available and how it works before you buy.
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