Mental Health Month Part 1

G’day, everyone!

October is a special month, it’s the start of the final quarter of the calendar year and is also National Mental Health Month! This is a perfect opportunity to pause and think about how you want to round out 2021. In the spirit of Mental Health Month, I'll be sharing tips each week to support your mental wellness and help you smash your personal and professional goals.

My focus in presenting these tips is to demonstrate that your wellness and your work should not be thought of as trade-offs; sure we need to prioritise differently at times but fundamentally your ability to perform well in your work is directly related to your ability to put yourself in a thriving state of health. The best in the game understand that performance is a product of preparation, planning, rest and recovery, and self-care. We hear this a lot but what’s the actual impact? Check out this research by the Flow Research Collective:

Flow is a fancy word for feeling great mentally and physically. The professional benefits of feeling great are significant. A ~500% increase in productivity, learning or creativity allows you to get done in an hour what you would otherwise do in five. In the corporate world, we don’t like to think this is possible, surely our effort/hours and outcomes are more tightly correlated. They’re not. Science increasingly shows that time on our computer or with clients and colleagues is not created equal. Peak focus, creativity, problem-solving and overall performance can only result from a strong foundation of health and happiness.

So, if you want to kick goals and end the year on a high professionally, you have to look at your life outside the office. Investing in your life outside of work can have greater returns than another hour on a PPT deck. Think about where you are on the scale below, the key to a successful career is spending as much time as possible in the growth and learning zone.

Again, we often reject this type of analysis; I often believe that pushing myself a little bit harder and spending some time in the distress zone has to be better, this is where the real go-getters operate, right? Science tells us this is wrong.

“The prefrontal cortex —the most evolved brain region—subserves our highest-order cognitive abilities. However, it is also the brain region that is most sensitive to the detrimental effects of stress exposure. Even quite mild acute uncontrollable stress can cause a rapid and dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities.” *

Yep, the PFC, the part of your brain that makes you the great consultant you are, can’t function under even mild uncontrolled stress (for anyone interested in learning more about this mechanism and the effect of stress on our physiology and brain watch this TED TALK called “Being brilliant every single day”, a bold title I'm happy to say the talk lives up to).

Back to the tips that’ll help us get this balance right. Each week of Mental Health Month I'll be sending you new ways to live a healthy lifestyle and showcasing how these practices also support your performance. We’re going to focus on the lifestyle factors that allow you to do great work AND feel great doing it.?

Here’s how it’s going to go down, we will attack our health from a different perspective each week.

Week 1: Physical Health - the things we can do to optimize our physiology and unlock the energy that creates a sense of flow and ease in all that we do.

Week 2: Mental wellness - the things we can do to create a more positive and productive headspace, and cultivate greater mental clarity.

Week 3: Life philosophy - the things we can do to reflect on how we are living our lives and start to live with greater purpose, meaning and fulfillment.?

Week one is already complete and available here. Try and focus on a new tip every day or pick your favorites for the week and double down on those.

If you’d like to learn or read more about these topics I have a website where I and a small team of volunteers publish free articles and practical tools: alivesydney.com

Thanks,

Richard

*Arnsten AF. Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function.?Nat Rev Neurosci. 2009;10(6):410-422. doi:10.1038/nrn2648