World Mental Health Day 2024

How?many times a day do we hear the phrase 'mental health'? I’m guessing it’s numerous times and hopefully it’s a part of your everyday conversations. As a nation, we are becoming much more open and vulnerable when it comes to our own mental health, and as individuals, it seems like we are all sharing some focus on ‘filling our cups’ or taking those all-important minutes to ourselves throughout the week. But when does this priority cross over to our professional lives? Why is it that we are putting our mental health at the bottom of the to-do list each day?

This World Mental Health Day is focusing on workplace mental health, and as someone whose role it is to support the teams at t-three and Kiddy & Partners , a focus on this is music to my ears. I see daily how hard it is to fit it all in. Do we book the meetings back-to-back so that we can get the project moving, or do we say no and ask for longer so that we can take a screen break and grab some fresh air??The blue sky is that we all know the answer but doing it consistently can seem so much harder.?So, how do we protect our own mental health at work without just signing up for another wellbeing app and promising to be better at it tomorrow? I think the answer to this comes down to not seeing it as something to achieve each day on a?job's?list for certain times of the year, but rather something we learn to prioritise and move into our daily behaviours. We all know as soon as it begins to feel like a workload, we might avoid it, so I wanted to share some tips that some colleagues and I have been using since World Mental Health Day last year to help us prioritise our mental health whilst still smashing the daily jobs list.

How are you? No, seriously—how are you? This really is a game changer. We spend our entire working days communicating, whether it’s?via?Teams or face-to-face in an office. Talking about work, people, or projects, we are allowing ourselves to chat and build relationships all day. But it’s what our colleagues aren’t saying that we should pay close attention to. Someone once said to me, "The day you stop talking about the children or the dance class that you love going to—that’s when I know something is wrong". If someone you work with, or maybe yourself, has felt so overrun at work, you’ll start to hear… "No, not going to make it tonight, I have too much on". That’s a sign that your colleague, or again yourself, is struggling that day, feeling overwhelmed or maybe?burned out. So, I always try to start my calls by asking how someone actually is; you never know, you might be the only person to have asked that day, and a chat and vent might be the ticket to a healthier afternoon.

The power of blue and green spaces—we are all guilty of pushing the walk at lunchtime to tomorrow, but being outside and surrounding yourself near blue and green spaces (water, trees, sky, nature) can have a profound impact on your mindset for the day. Joe Wicks, MBE, also known as The Body Coach, recently mentioned in a webinar with Yulife that he now does some of his meetings out walking— “walkie talkies,”?he calls it. The idea is to prioritise the work but do it in a way that will support employees’ mental health and overall happiness for the day. So, grab some?AirPods?and ask your manager if that 1:1 over a call could be done whilst you walk, or better yet, a walk together?

Different fits for everyone—I know when I post something on our internal Teams channel, half the team will buy in and say, “Fab! What has Tash got us up to today?” However, it’s important to recognise that at work, that doesn’t work for everyone, and it really shouldn’t. When thinking about mental health in our workplace, it’s about giving people options, not all the solutions. Allowing your team to have numerous avenues to go down to get support or advice that suits them. This last year, we have tried to make sure we are balancing yoga sessions, free fruit, and step battles with clear and private signposting to professional support. An all-singing, all-dancing jazz-hand me on a tough day might not be what you need, but clear links from professionals might be just that.

So, this World Mental Health Day, we celebrate it all and recognise the work still ahead of us to prevent burnout and anxiety and all the other battles that we go through, knowing that saying yes to looking after yourself is just as important as the deadline.

Written by Tasha Slater