Mental Wellness Collaboration Takeaways

The Global Wellness Collaborations bring industry leaders together in meaningful dialogue to share ideas and best practices for navigating the COVID-19 crisis around a specific industry segment.

Topic: Mental Wellness
Date of Discussion:  March 31, 2020
Countries/Regions Represented: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Kenya, Korea, Maldives, The Philippines, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Thailand, UAE and US

• Mental wellness is my ability to manage my emotions and thoughts, to remain in the present moment and bring harmony to my thoughts and actions.

• Being really compassionate and really in the moment, so you don’t ruminate on the past or worry about the future.

• The word resilience is really important, engaging in daily rituals: breathing exercises, journaling, some forms of gentle yoga.

• Trying to keep that balance between all of that heightened mess and staying well within. Connect to yourself so that you can respond and not just react.

• I think it’s about the positive control of stress.

• Mental wellness has also to do with social connectedness.

• Mental wellness is an opportunity to get into your deepest creativity; when you find that resilient part within, from which anything is possible. Body, mind, spirit and all of the joy. It’s when anything is possible, and you see every roadblock as a design opportunity. That’s another way to think about mental wellness.

• I think mental wellness can be defined as having the confidence to trust your intuition.

• The ability to develop resilience and strategies toward happiness in general.

• Mental wellness is also about being able to operate to your optimum level. Similar to your body getting fit, your mind can also be fit.

• The human brain has the capacity to grow throughout its lifespan. And we’re seeing studies on new gray and white matter in the brain with people who meditate regularly, do yoga regularly, or even interestingly, who dance regularly. Dance is a form of exercise that links the motor area with a communication area.

• The death of despair—people will die of despair because of their mental state of hopelessness, suicide, addiction, and all kinds of unhealthy behaviors, not really living in the future or the past but being in the present and being in a state of homeostasis.

• Mental wellness is the ability to optimize your relationship with yourself and others. And that optimization resides in conversation. It’s the ability to optimize your internal conversations and the external conversation where we’re able to better take care of ourselves, others and the communities around us.

• Of all the elements of wellness, mental health is the keystone.

• The world would be a better place if we could just rest, and sound is one of the fastest, easiest universal ways to do so.

• What’s working for me is breathwork. So, every day, I take 20 minutes to do breathwork, I just found a great site that is all about breathwork. It can be done anywhere. And if you just close your eyes and do the four in four out, it just calms me.

• Virtual options for meditation and sound healing are good ways to stay centered and calm.

• I try to laugh more, smile.

• I think humor is very good. And dancing in your kitchen or on the patio is a good idea.

• Incorporate the body as much as possible. Set boundaries around how much time you’re looking at the news, and you know, being really just like we are with what we eat and everything, like giving your mind a diet so that you’re not bingeing on things that aren’t good for you.

• Mental wellness has to involve the conversation about emotions and understanding how both our thoughts and our emotions affect every single cell in our body.

• Create psychological safety. Create a sense of community, belonging. Come together and stay creatively engaged in purpose and significance. Appreciative inquiry is incredibly powerful. Optimize your relationship with yourself and with others, and this optimization resides in conversation. This is about optimizing an internal conversation and an external conversation.

• The impact of the lockdown on mental and physical wellbeing is surely far worse for city people than people living in the country.

• We should focus on helping urban people primarily who do not have the god-gifted assets of fresh air, exercise and the interaction with animals and plants.

• The impact of lockdown on people who live in cramped conditions far more than those who can afford SPACE.

• I come from an architectural family and also have always believed that the world will become increasingly divided between those who have SPACE and those who do not.

• An open space surely has a healing effect.

• We must begin to think of those living in refugee camps and consider wellness therapies that work to overcome the feeling of claustrophobia or feeling trapped and locked in.

• Most of the hotels and spas in Nairobi or Cape Town have simply sent their staff home to their native villages because they cannot feed them in the towns. So, they’ve gone back to rural places, with infrequent power and lack of water. These people are frightened not just of the virus, but of not having enough food for their family with no job or resources.