The Anti-Wellbeing Blog
Wellbeing’s for life
*Not just for Wednesdays
This is perhaps a strange title for a blog from an organisation built on a framework of triple wellbeing. And yet I feel ever-more frustrated by the meaningless of the word wellbeing, of its careless overuse and its consistently disappointing delivery.
When did wellbeing become a commodity? When did we start selling wellbeing? When did someone else know more about what I need to be well in my own life than I do myself?! When did I need to start ‘learning’ or ‘training’ or ‘paying’ to discover the best ways for me to be well? When did we all start needing wellbeing experts or wellbeing Wednesdays? When did we lose autonomy over our own capacity to flourish, to then have it sold back to us at a ridiculously high price?
NB: the answers to many of these questions lie in the broken systemic structures that our societies are built around and which are starting to crumble beneath our feet. We’ll talk more about that later.
“So what’s really the problem?” you might ask. Surely anything that’s helping us to ‘be well’ is a good thing, isn’t it? Surely any attention we’re paying to ‘wellness’ has got to be a boon in a world that so often feels hellbent on pushing us into dark corners of woe…
Well, yes and no is my response.
On the one hand, wellbeing is the fundamental essence of life, of buen vivir, of us thriving on this one planet we all call home. Wellbeing is what we’re all fundamentally searching for and what a good life is built upon. It is, in so many ways, the meaning of life.
On the other hand, wellbeing is as meaningless and as noxious as candyfloss.
It is pretty clear to even the most short-sighted amongst us that we’ve something of a wellness issue emerging in our communities. We can see this starkly right now – in this locked-down world - as we slowly begin to stumble out of our houses, devoid of human contact, social connection and vitamin D. Looking more closely at our schools, it is abundantly clear that the mental health epidemic which has been building these past few decades has grown to extreme levels amongst young people of late, and is now sweeping our teachers off their feet too. The pressures in education this past year alone have been immense (don’t get me wrong, the pressures were already pretty intense, but this year has been epic) and, as such, the recognition that something has to give has hit staffrooms, boardrooms and ivory towers right across the sector. Which is when the wellbeing army started marching into schools up and down the land.
Working in education, wellbeing is the latest buzzword in a grand history of buzzwords and - like so many of its wordy-friends of old – has rapidly become overused and underdelivered. It swiftly nestled its way into school policy and quick as a flash we have wellbeing leads, wellbeing lessons, wellbeing Wednesdays – heck, even wellbeing packs sent home, like emergency rations, gift wrapped boxes for teachers filled with hot chocolates, woolly socks and, if you’re really lucky, a 50ml bottle of gin.
Much like any short-term comforter, these little titbits of wellbeing have their place – they make us feel good for a time and forget momentarily about the mountains of marking waiting for us in the morning, or the tidal waves of endless emails and paperwork waiting to strike. But those mountains and waves are going nowhere. In fact, they’re only growing ever higher whilst we’re not out there dealing with them – these temporary distractions merely put off the inevitable, relentless struggle to keep up with the system.
I was having a discussion with some colleagues yesterday about wellbeing, and one wise soul shared a pertinent thought. He mused on how differently we would approach wellbeing if we instead called it Workers’ Rights. After all, it’s how we’re all currently working that is making us feel so ‘unwell.’ Or, to frame it more broadly (and look for a moment at the bigger systems at play), it’s how we’re all living. The systems within which we are functioning are at odds with our fundamental wellbeing needs: strengthening ourselves up to be strong, resilient and well-enough to head back into the same broken systems that are breaking us down is neither supporting our wellbeing nor supporting the communities around us. It is simply kowtowing to a broken system and gaining temporary bursts of energy to keep climbing those endless mountains and surfing those ever-growing waves. Were we to see wellbeing as a foundational right to our capacity to work, would we maybe see it as more meaningful, more important, more worth the fight to change the bigger picture?
Even the very surge in wellbeing support is, ironically, making us ill. Teachers are being bombarded with so much ‘wellbeing’ right now, it’s absurd. There’s wellbeing courses, wellbeing training, wellbeing lessons, wellbeing resources, wellbeing strategies, wellbeing weekends, even wellbeing socks! The onslaught and the paradox of choice is ironically impacting the mental health and wellbeing of all those looking to support the mental health and wellbeing of themselves and the communities they are supporting. Pretty painful paradox, huh?
So here’s the thing. It isn’t wellbeing we need right now: it’s culture change.
We need to move away from this divisive work-life imbalance, wherein our own personal, human needs sit at the bottom of a big pile of ‘significant other matters of importance’ and only get a look in once in a blue moon, or every year on our birthday, if we’re lucky.
We need to move away from putting endless plasters on ever-gaping wounds of broken systems that are bleeding us dry. Chocolates, hugs and wellbeing Wednesdays have their place and are clearly and sincerely offered with positive intentions – but unfortunately they are not enough - and will never be enough - to help us to be well. Wellbeing is much more than a bar of nice chocolate. Even Lindt Lindors. Because, let’s face it: what are we really saying about the value and meaning of our wellbeing if we think that cupcakes every Tuesday or a wellbeing afternoon once a term is suddenly going to make the high-pressure, high-stress, mental-overwhelm and constantly overloaded work-life imbalance of our education systems suddenly seem ok?
I get it. It’s much easier to hand out smarties and hugs than it is to radically dismantle broken social, political and cultural systems which are making us unwell and which are deeply embedded into so many parts of our daily lives. And, understandably we’re often swayed by the quick fixes. It is infinitely more satisfying to have half an hour of feeling groovy once a week than a long-distance journey to dismantle archaic educational models that rely on the burnout of teachers to succeed. Yet much like hiding the washing up in the cupboard and hoping it goes away if we don’t look at it – we can all recognise, deep down (if we dare to open those cupboards and take a good hard look) that many of the ways in which we’re living aren’t making us well, and we need a significant culture change to help us to thrive. Sometimes we have to get ill before we can be well – and right now we’re a bit of a poorly bunch.
However, that’s when the healing starts.
So - what can we do in the face of endless mountains and tidal waves that need traversing now, whilst also plotting new roadmaps for healthier futures?
We can recognise how much we matter. The old ‘oxygen mask first’ analogy is a cracker. We have to start recognising the significance of ourselves, and our own state of wellness and how impactful this is on everything in our lives. If we aren’t well, our lives aren’t well either. Simple as.
We can stop overindulging on the candyfloss versions of wellbeing. Yes, I get it – they look appealing, they sound nice, they tick lots of useful boxes on policy forms and they look good on our school websites. But they’re still candyfloss – and if we keep on feeding ourselves candyfloss as a ‘healthy tonic’, we’re in for a mighty painful future of long-term health issues.
We can recognise that wellbeing is holistic. It is not only about us. It is not only about others. It is not only about the wider environment. It is all of these things. It is all these parts combined (what we call triple wellbeing) – and comes with the recognition that we need all of these parts to be well if we’re all going to thrive.
We can focus on wellbeing from the inside out and from the outside in. How? By focusing on both short term and long-term strategies for wellbeing. We can think about simple, everyday practices we can bring into our lives right now to help us to strengthen and we can look beyond the here and now to the wider blocks to our wellbeing, whether they be personally, organisationally, culturally or otherwise. And start dismantling them, one by one.
We can become well enough so that we can get active and change the things around us that need changing.
The good news is that we’re already talking about this stuff. Wellbeing is now very firmly on the agenda and has a place at the head of the table, meaning the hard part has already happened. What comes next – what we serve for supper if you like – is ours for the choosing. Me? I’m going for a double dose of culture change. And maybe a nice pair of cosy socks to wear whilst I’m eating.
Rachel Musson | Director of ThoughtBox Education
ThoughtBox is working both at school level and policy level to support culture change. We are helping embed practices for triple wellbeing at the heart of schools, whilst at the same time working with education leaders and policy makers to readdress and reform our educational systems and practices to have wellbeing as a foundational framework. The two actions go hand in hand: culture change from within our school communities and within our wider structural systems.
We have a growing community of educators we’re supporting in this journey and would love to work with you and your school community to help embed holistic wellbeing practices into your ‘today’ and into your ‘tomorrow’ . Let’s talk.