?? How to Turn Breakdowns Into Breakthroughs

A Game-Changer on Mental Health

Photo: Anastassiya Bezhekeneva / Getty Images

At Thrive our philosophy is that the best way to help people improve their lives is to meet them where they are. And where?3 billion people?— over one-third of the world — are is gaming. In July, a?study?of 40,000 gamers from the University of Oxford found that gaming doesn’t negatively affect players’ well-being. This is good news, but what if we widen the conversation and actually use the power of gaming, and the growing passion for it around the world, to?positively?affect players’ well-being? By embedding well-being into gaming — by gamifying Microsteps and well-being strategies — we can help people not just lower stress, boost their performance and rack up wins and achievements within gaming, but also progress and “level up” their overall well-being outside?gaming. The potential to move the needle on mental health, because of gaming’s unique ability to inspire, motivate and connect people from diverse worlds, is our biggest opportunity right now.

The Fault of Burnout, Dear Brutus, Is Not in Ourselves

A fascinating new?report?out from McKinsey Health Institute takes a data-driven approach to understanding?the shift in how companies think — or should think — about well-being. The report?notes that rates of burnout have soared around the world, and employers have responded. But many companies have focused on “individual-level interventions that remediate symptoms, rather than resolve the causes of employee burnout.” Instead, “employers can and should view high rates of burnout as a powerful warning sign that the organization — not the individuals in the workforce — needs to undergo meaningful systematic change." It’s like those horror movies where the cop tells the frantic family, “we’ve traced the call — and it’s coming from inside the house!” The good news: “Never in history have organizations around the world devoted so much attention and capital to improving employee mental health and well-being.” The task now is focusing that attention where it will do the most good — by thinking of well-being not as an individual perk, but something to be embedded into the workflow itself.

Collective Transformation Has to Start With Personal Transformation

According to the CDC, nearly?one quarter?of American adults are now taking prescription drugs for mental health conditions. And yet, even as treatments have become more widespread, mental health outcomes — including depression and anxiety — have gotten worse. That’s the subject of?Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health, by Thomas Insel, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. “Put simply, the mental health problem is medical,” he?writes, “but the solutions are not just medical — they are social, environmental and political.” And, I would argue, spiritual.

The mental health crisis is only a downstream symptom of a larger crisis: a crisis of meaning in a world in need of spiritual renewal. We’re in the middle of multiple breakdowns — historically necessary for much-needed breakthroughs.

As Yale historian Frank Snowden, who studies the way epidemics hold up a “mirror” to?society, has?said, “Epidemic diseases reach into the deepest levels of the human psyche. They pose the ultimate questions about death, about mortality: What is life for? What is our relationship with God?"

This longing to connect to something larger than ourselves is universal. It’s the fourth instinct we all share, beyond the first three of survival, sex and power. It’s our relentless drive for meaning, for purpose, for self-discovery, for becoming. It connects us both to each other and to ourselves. In peaceful, placid times, this longing may lie dormant. In times of crisis, it rises to the surface.

“Everything is falling apart, and something new is emerging,” Serene Jones, the President of Union Theological Seminary,?has?said. “The new can’t emerge without the old breaking down. I have never felt more strongly that, at a spiritual level, each and every one of us is called to serve as midwives to this birth.”?To bring about a collective transformation, we have to start with personal transformation. The breakdowns are all around us, but so too are elements of the breakthroughs, even if we can’t yet see them clearly: love, renewal, redemption, growth, the need to connect with something larger than ourselves. These are what will make a better world possible.

Before You Go

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Neologism of the Month (new words, terms or phrases that define our time)

“Distracti-pression” from?this?New York Times?piece by Casey Schwartz about the growing use of psychiatric medication during the pandemic. It’s “the age of depression meets the age of distraction.” It will take years to grapple with the pandemic’s true toll on mental health,?but there’s already?enough data to draw this conclusion: “We are depressed, anxious, tired and distracted.” As Schwartz notes, the practices of mental health professionals are full of patients “in significantly worse shape than before.”?The age of “distracti-pression” is yet another signpost of the crisis of meaning I write about above.?

Moment of Wonder

Photo: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

Last week, NASA?released?stunning images of the Cartwheel Galaxy, formed from a collision with another galaxy. Like us, the galaxy is, NASA says, “in the midst of a slow transformation.” That’s only fitting, since, as Carl Sagan said, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” Or, to put it more lyrically, here’s the great Joni Mitchell, who on July 24th made a?surprise appearance?at the Newport Folk Festival, her first public performance since a brain aneurysm in 2015:

“We are stardust

We are golden

And we've got to get ourselves

Back to the garden”

Best,