World Mental Health Day 2024

World Mental Health Day 2024 urges people to take stock and prioritise wellbeing.

This year’s official theme: “It is Time to Prioritize Mental Health in the Workplace,” highlights the importance of fostering supportive work environments, environments where we can thrive and be physically and psychologically safe.

The societal, business, and individual cost of poor mental health is immense. For the UK in 2022/23, 875,000 workers suffered from work-related stress, depression, or anxiety, and 17.1 million working days were lost. Now is the time to prioritise mental health in the workplace (Health and safety statistics 2022 ( hse.gov.uk ) . Startlingly:

q? 39% comfort eat due to stress.

q? Long term chronic stress can make us 4 times more likely to suffer a stroke.

q? It increases our risk of heart disease by 36%

So, what can you do to address this? For me normalising conversations around wellbeing including mental health is vital, and we can do this through peer support like establishing wellbeing champions, hosting mental health workshops both face to face and on-line, and running initiatives like panel discussions encouraging open conversations about feelings and self-care.

At Network Rail, since the start of the pandemic, I’ve hosted daily wellbeing lunchtime sessions on MS teams as a safe space to check in with and support each other. Here, amongst other things, I have a “Loose Men” panel discussion encouraging men to be more open about their storms and how to navigate them. In the UK, over 6,500 lives are typically lost each year to suicide and three quarters of those are men, so creating a culture where we genuinely care for each other, celebrate difference and uniqueness, for me helps to drive safety, performance, and innovation, whilst keeping us all as well as possible.

Can you spot the signs if someone is struggling? In actual practice, in some cases there may be no signs. In my experience, no one comes into work to do a bad job. If performance is slipping, encourage open discussion and find out what is going. And here, don’t be ready to provide solutions! Too often we might want to jump in an offer a way forward. But, simply listening, showing you care, being empathetic, can truly make the difference, and in the act of getting someone to open up, the pathway out of crisis can have a started.

The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu and His Holiness the Dali Lama have both stated, that the single most important thing we can do to transform the world is to educate our children to be more compassionate. I believe that if we bring this compassion into our workplaces these can be transformed too. When we create listening environment where everyone’s views are valued, we can have better conversations when milestones might be missed to find solutions and manage expectations together.

What about regular breaks and mindful moments?

With remote and hybrid working where we have moved from difficulties in booking meeting rooms to infinite meeting room availability through the likes of MS Teams and Zoom, we can lurch from one meeting to another without any natural breaks. It is so important to get up and stretch and look into the distance, connecting with our senses, to stop being human doings and be human beings. And short mindful moments as part of this can be a game-changer. Breathing exercises, guided meditation, or to just time to step away from the chaos for a few moments to refocus, call all help calm our frazzled minds. Small changes, building successful habits throughout the day, to reduce stress levels.

What about your flexible and hybrid working policies? Flexibility can alleviate a huge amount of strain in juggling the host of life pressures we have. Could you do better?

And what about awareness sessions such as talking about things we know many are addressing. Drink and drug awareness sessions, discussions on gambling harms and where to get support, discussions on other areas that impact our lives like coping with MSK issues, diabetes, urology health and so much more. For me, the more we can break the stigma on overall wellbeing and understand it’s connection with ED&I, then the more we create environments to be well in and able to flourish.

What about your own self-care? It’s easy not to prioritise our own wellbeing with so many pressures around us. Is it time to invest in you? Why not take time to maintain and build connections with those important people in your life; move a bit more, and perhaps go for a walk; be more in the moment, deliberately stopping your head ruminating over the past or worrying about the future; and staying curious and learning sometime new, fabulous for brain health? Thinking beyond yourself is great for our overall mental health too, like supporting a charity important to you or simply letting someone out in traffic. This can boost mood and provide better perspective, when other things might be starting to overwhelm us.

Ultimately though, just be kind. To you and to those around you, whenever possible. And it is always possible!

Happy World Mental Health Day!?