Mental Health Week: Are you surviving or thriving?
Are we surviving or thriving?
That is the question being asked of us during Mental Health Awareness week. The Office of National Statistics estimate that 1 in 5 people in the UK has a low level of life satisfaction and almost 1 in 4 have high anxiety on a daily basis. Too few of us are thriving with good mental health (or mental wellbeing as it sometimes referred to).
Hello, Craig here. Some of you may remember, that back in October 2016 when I was working behind the scenes at Momentum, we ran a lifestyle and wellbeing survey (see Mind Gains). Well, it’s a long time coming but as it’s #MHAW17, I think it’s a good time to report the results back to the Momentum crew.
What does thriving mean?
Intuitively, you probably have a good idea of what is to be thriving/have mental wellbeing. It can be broadly summed up as feeling good and doing well in your day to day life. The charity, Mind define good mental wellbeing as being able to:
• feel relatively confident in yourself and have positive self-esteem
• feel and express a range of emotions
• build and maintain good relationships with others
• feel engaged with the world around you
• live and work productively
• cope with the stresses of daily life
• adapt and manage in times of change and uncertainty
Our mental wellbeing isn’t fixed, it can change from moment to moment, day to day, month to month. So how you answered the survey questions 7 months ago may be very different from how you’d answer them now. The survey only provides a snapshot in time, but there are some interest findings for us to act upon.
Are Momentum members thriving?
Thanks to the 141 people who completed the survey, including the 33 non-members. For this article, we’re just going to focus on what the 108 Momentum members reported.
To give some context to the figures, imagine that you’re in the arch sweating your butt off in a class of 20 people.
• 15 of the 20 people in that class have high or very high satisfaction with their lives and feel that what they do in life is worthwhile
• 13 of the 20 have high or very high levels of daily happiness and positive self-image
• 9 of the 20 have high daily stress
• 5 of the 20 have high daily anxiety
• 11 of the 20 have high daily tiredness
• 9 of the 20 have experience restless sleep often or all the time
• 5 of the 20 barely felt rested when they woke up this morning
• 7 of the 20 people have low satisfaction with the amount of time they have to do the things they like doing,
Overall, when you look at things like life satisfaction, daily levels of happiness and anxiety, and how worthwhile people feel, it’s probably fair to say that most people in the Momentum community display good mental wellbeing. Perhaps that’s not surprising given that members choose to invest serious time, effort, and money in the pursuit of health and fitness.
But that doesn’t give us the whole picture. Not everyone in the community is thriving.
What if you’re surviving and not thriving?
Like the rest of the country, 1 in 4 Momentum members reported high levels of daily anxiety. A number of members also reported low levels of life satisfaction, daily happiness, positive self-image, and feeling worthwhile.
All of us are going to experience these feelings at some point in our lives. There’s a good chance that they’ll pass with a little time, but if they linger long enough or keep reappearing, they can really give our wellbeing a kicking.
If you felt low, anxious when you filled in the survey in October, do you feel differently now? If not, talking about how you feel is a pretty good place to start, even if it feels awkward, to begin with. Just being listened to can be helpful. Likewise, if you’re worried about a friend, talk to them, let them know you’re available. It doesn’t have to be a big ordeal for you or them. If you want to know more, check out the Mental Health Foundation’s guide to looking after your mental health.
Gains to be made
Despite the high level of mental wellbeing in the community, there are 3 big things that seem to be issues for about half of us: tiredness, stress, and finding balance. If we work on them we’re sure to improve our performance in the gym, and in life.
Tiredness
Speak to any of the coaches and they will rattle off countless reasons why sleep is so important. Excessive tiredness can reduce our physical and mental performance in all sort of ways, at the detriment of our health, training, work and social lives. Good sleep is not just about the length of time it’s the quality we’re getting too. Improving it may take more than eye masks, blue light filters, and a cooler bedroom. We may have to look at our lifestyles too.
Stress
Many of you that reported high stress also reported high levels of happiness and life satisfaction, and this fits with what we know about stress: it’s not all bad. Experiencing some stress can help us perform better and stay alerted, and the physical stress we get when we train helps us grow stronger. However, excessive stress (chronic) can negatively impact our physical and cognitive performance and in the extreme, it can contribute to heart disease or mental health problems like anxiety and depression.
Life balance
How often when someone’s asked how you are, have you responded with ‘busy’? We’re all busy. Not only are we all busy, we all want to achieve in every aspect of our lives: at work, at home, at the gym, financially, socially, with our kids. On top of that everything in the world seems to be competing for our attention: phones, email, social media, the internet, news, tv. Yet, there are only so many hours in the day and there’s only so much of us to go round. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and even if you feel in control, if you’re trying to attend to all these different things it’s likely that your wellbeing is taken some kind of hit, whether that’s performance in the gym, physical and mental health, or your relationships. At some point, we need to make decisions about what really matters to us and prioritise accordingly… easier said than done.
So where to begin?
Well, self-awareness is always a good starting point. Take a step back and think about whether these issues are affecting you right now. Are you feeling stressed, tired or both? Do you feel that you don’t have enough time to do the things you like doing? How long have you felt like this?
For a lot of us, the three things are probably interlinked, so focusing on one issue might help the others. For example, improving your sleep quality may improve your ability to deal with your daily stress or it could even be the other way round: handling your stress better might help you relax easier and help improve your sleep. Obviously, that’s an oversimplification but hopefully, you get the idea.
Which issue do you want to work on first? Speak to your Momentum friends about it, there’s a good chance they’re in the same boat as you. If you’ve got any comments, questions or you want more information to leave a comment in the private Facebook group and of course, if you want some help, speak to any of the Momentum team.
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