Category: Physical, Mental, and Social Well Being

only month of the year we think about our mental wellness. We asked mental health experts in the NationSwell Council how we can center our mental health all year long. Here’s what they’ve shared so far.

Give yourself permission to feel: Many people are socially conditioned to suppress their emotions, especially those considered negative, to such a degree they become disconnected from their inner selves. Here is an exercise I created to help people honor all their emotions and access the wisdom transmitted by their emotions. Visualize yourself sitting in a circle with your emotions and feelings as honored guests. It might help to draw a large circle on a piece of paper and write down along this circle the emotions and feelings arising within you. Next, identify the three to five strongest emotions you are feeling (circle them on the paper) and welcome a conversation with them. One by one, say to each: “I honor you and give myself permission to feel you and to listen to what message you want to tell me. Is there anything you want to tell me?” Then sit in a moment of silence with each one to give it space to talk to you. (For more tips, please read this article: “Tender, Loving Self-Care for Asian Americans: A guide for tending to the traumas of anti-Asian violence and racism.”)

Submitted by Due Quach, CEO + Founder, Calm Clarity 

Eat lunch: Instead of working yourself to exhaustion hoping that you’ll have time to rest later, carve out time to do the things that recharge you NOW. A small and powerful way to start creating space in your day is to take a lunch break. Start taking a consistent, hour-long lunch break and do something you enjoy – read a book, meditate, watch your favorite show, or enjoy the outdoors. When you prioritize taking time on a daily basis to do the things you enjoy, you’ll have more energy and you’ll be able to show up in all the parts of your life — for your job, your family, and yourself. 

Submitted by Whitney A. White, Founder of Agra Global, Creator of Take Back Your Time

Hold space in the workplace to discuss: Any credible conversation about belonging at work or within any community requires addressing mental health (among other critical topics). Sharehold’s research on belonging at work during a time of uncertainty found that mental health was the top reported factor that impacted employees during a prolonged crisis. Now, as we emerge from the crisis, we must take the lessons forward with us by holding space to discuss mental health and burnout at work – and take action on what we’re hearing. This could mean a period of reduced work loads or a company-wide, pre-scheduled break during which everyone is offline, and investing in trauma-informed internal communications. It’s critical for managers and executive leads to lead by example here.  

Submitted by Sarah Judd Welch, Principal & CEO, Sharehold

Forget the hype: Remember, mental health is a journey — not a to-do list. Last fall, during a wave of depression, I wrote this blog post about how I needed to let go of the “wellness hype” to keep going in my healing journey. You might not feel better after a week of meditating. You might feel better and then something small triggers you, and you’re down in the dumps for a week. Taking care of your mental health isn’t about succeeding. It’s about taking time to acknowledge and honor your feelings, needs, and desires day to day, moment to moment. Journaling is a powerful way to get in tune with what you need for your mental health day to day – because everyday is different.

Alina Liao, Founder + CEO, Zenit

Learn more about the NationSwell Council here.

For #BuildItBackBetter, NationSwell asked some of our nation’s most celebrated purpose-driven leaders how they’d build a society that is more equitable and resilient than the one we had before COVID-19. We have compiled and lightly edited their answers.

This article is part of the #BuildItBackBetter track “The Relational Era: Building a Culture of Connection, Bridging and Belonging” — presented in partnership with Einhorn Collaborative.

Can Americans get along across the political divide?  Should they even try? After all, for many left-leaning Americans especially, getting along can mean reinforcing a status quo that is, among other things, miserably inequitable, racist and sexist. So is it possible to bridge divides — to have unity and economic, racial and gender justice? 

Achieving these twin goals is no small feat, and it will require work on many different fronts. Perhaps most centrally, it will mean doing two things we rarely do: creating regular opportunities for difficult conversations that advance both of these goals in the places where we spend much of our lives, including schools, workplaces and religious institutions; and having hard conversations about moral principles and creating for these conversations a moral framework. 

How do we do this?

One aspect of a moral framework is creating conditions where people can assume that their beliefs — but not their fundamental worth — will be contested. Our research suggests that Americans are willing to talk across the divide, if they feel they will be respected.

In a survey that Making Caring Common, an organization I lead at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, conducted of 1,400 Americans last July, most respondents are having conversations with those who don’t share their political views, but they tend to find these conversations only marginally useful or not useful at all. Yet 80% reported they would be “happy” to engage in conversations with people who have opposing political views if the other person “listens to” them “respectfully.” 

But perhaps more important, we will need to create a moral framework that enables us to confront challenges at the heart of our democracy — challenges that we rarely take on squarely in community institutions, workplaces, or schools at any level, including universities.  Important as it is to create environments where people feel respected and to encourage multiple views, it’s also critical to protect people from disrespect and degradation. And these two rights — the right to free speech and the right to freedom from discrimination — frequently collide. 

Teachers have asked me, for instance, if they should invite diverse views on same-sex relationships in a class when they have religious students who think that homosexuality is a sin along with LGBTQ students who will not only feel attacked by this view but may be subject to harassment outside of class. Many Americans believe that immigrants tend to be criminals or that low-income families lack a work ethic — should they be encouraged to express these views?

Difficult as it is to navigate these topics, it’s hard to imagine that we can rebuild our democracy if we don’t try. And there are guideposts that can mitigate harm and help make a wide range of conversations constructive. 

We can create clear norms for these conversations, including challenging ideas rather than people, expecting mistakes, appreciating the complexity of other people as one appreciates one’s own, owning the impact of one’s actions and assuming others’ good intentions. In our recent survey, over half of respondents reported holding back “a lot of things” they want to say out of fear of offending someone unintentionally.”  We can also start with simple exercises that build empathy and help to retrieve one another’s humanity.

Those facilitating these conversations can consistently ask what burdens they should be asking people to bear and whom they should be asking to bear them. Should an immigrant student be expected to engage in a conversation about deportation? Should a gay student be expected to endure a conversation about whether homosexuality is a sin? We might use brief surveys to assess participants’ views about discussing highly sensitive topics and give participants opportunities to opt out of certain conversations.

We will need to do the difficult work of creating a moral framework that enables us to discern political arguments that have a strong moral basis from those that do not. Moral relativism, the idea that no moral position is better than another, is rampant in our schools and communities, and it’s dangerous. Universal principles of justice and human rights need to be constant touchstones in these conversations. Many Americans couldn’t distinguish in Charlottesville between marching to degrade human rights and marching to protect them. There are strong arguments, rooted in these principles, both for and against various strategies for limiting immigration. But there isn’t a strong moral argument for separating parents and children at the border, a form of childhood torture and a violation of human rights.

These discussions will be murky and contentious at times—there will be reasonable disagreements, for example, about whether an argument violates human rights—and there will be land mines. But that in itself teaches an important moral lesson. We live in an age of morality lite. Far too often we neglect to teach our children or remind ourselves that being a caring, ethical person isn’t simply about being nice. It’s often about the difficult work of wringing moral truths out of the mud of many views and avoiding the smug, easy gratifications of demonizing others. It’s about staying true to fundamental ethical values—whether free speech or protection from discrimination– even if it means at times angering others and sacrificing harmony and happiness. It’s about being willing to rigorously probe our own biases.

None of this will be easy. But for far too long we’ve avoided these conversations, and it is upon this work that our brave, imperiled democracy depends.

Rick Weissbourd is currently a senior lecturer on education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and at the Kennedy School of Government. He is also the faculty director of the Making Caring Common project and the faculty co-director of the Human Development and Psychology master’s program.

For #BuildItBackBetter, NationSwell asked some of our nation’s most celebrated purpose-driven leaders how they’d build a society that is more equitable and resilient than the one we had before COVID-19. We have compiled and lightly edited their answers.

This article is part of the #BuildItBackBetter track “The Relational Era: Building a Culture of Connection, Bridging and Belonging” — presented in partnership with Einhorn Collaborative.

I met J. R. Doyle more than 25 years ago in a food bank in the Arkansas Ozarks. A white, retired high school principal and some-time hog farmer, Doyle was looking for a reason to get up in the morning when he heard a radio ad for the Delta Service Corps.

“I just called the number, not thinking anything would happen,” he said. “And about a week later I got an application. I sent it in, and pretty soon they told me to go to West Memphis for an interview. I was hired.”

This was back before AmeriCorps, back when the Commission for National and Community Service’s biggest investment was in a new program called City Year. Creative ideas for new service models were hopping, and the Delta Service Corps was one.

The Corps’ animating idea? It was intentionally intergenerational. Older and younger members worked side by side in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi — staffing food banks, delivering meals, tutoring preschoolers and teaching classes at senior centers.

Doyle loved it, even if it was quite a bit different than he expected.

“I’ve had to learn some new things,” he told me. “How to get along with different kinds of people, people who’ve had a lot of bad luck, who poverty’s really dealt a bad hand….”

“We had a guy from New Orleans, who died a few weeks back,” Doyle said about his friend Don Harding. “He had a heart attack, and it just devastated me… I had met him in Little Rock, in training, and we spent a couple of weeks together. Just an outstanding human being, and he was trying to make a difference in the New Orleans area with the drug problem. We lost a good man when we lost Don Harding.”

The experience of his friendship with Harding, a Black man, opened Doyle’s eyes in ways that 40 years in largely segregated public education hadn’t. Old and young, Black and white serving together, bridging divides, forging bonds.

The Delta Service Corps and J. R. Doyle are long gone, and I’m afraid the lessons they taught us have all but disappeared with them. For all the progress that’s been made with service in this country over the past 30 years — witness City Year today — we still have no formal, widely available intergenerational service corps.

Sure, there are many programs mobilizing older people to serve younger ones. And even more efforts engaging younger people to reach out to community elders.

But the notion of joint service? It’s mostly happening informally. The aging field has a phrase for locations where older people tend to congregate for companionship — Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities, or NORCs. I see a lot of NOICs in the context of service efforts — Naturally Occurring Intergenerational Connections. Not the most poetic turn of phrase, but the connections themselves are enormously promising.

With five generations in the workplace at once, and more people over 60 than under 18, the time is ripe to put real muscle behind new ways to bring older and younger generations together. We have a powerful need for their combined human and social capital, and an urgent need for the generational and racial understanding that would result.

“James lived a very full and productive life,” Doyle’s obituary noted in 2012. “He was a member of the Arkansas Retired Teachers Association, a former Arkansas director of the Delta Service Corps and was a U.S. Air Force veteran, having served in the Korean War.”  It concludes by adding, “He was described by his family as having a colorful personality,” as having “never met a stranger.”

Intergenerational service helped see to that for J.R. Doyle. It can do the same for so many more of us now.

Marc Freedman is the CEO of Encore.org and author of How to Live Forever: The Enduring Power of Connecting the Generations, coming in paperback on Dec. 1.