How to find wellness within you

Beth Spurr is a mental health champion, Hearth Member and founder of The Mind Set Collective which combines meditation and movement to unlock inner strength & clarity to live a more bold & expressive life. When World Mental Health day took place on Monday and valuable conversations amplified around mental health and wellness , we spoke to Beth about how avoiding burnout and looking after ourselves needn’t be as complicated as it sometimes seems.

About 5 years ago just before midnight, I found myself sitting powerlessly in front of a blank computer screen - tears streaming down my face, heart thumping and hands throbbing. In just a few minutes I will have officially missed the deadline I’d been working tirelessly to meet, and it was all because my computer had let me down…again.

The next day, I dragged myself to the closest computer store and explained my situation to the advisor. He politely explained to me that my expectations of my computer were just too high – that it wasn’t capable of multi-tasking to the level I wanted it to.

‘Sorry, just to clarify, you’re telling me that my computer can’t have ten huge documents open at the same time…across multiple software…while simultaneously saving changes in various documents? My onslaught of frantic clicking while the machine is going into meltdown mode isn’t helpful? And when I press the ‘esc’ button over and over to override the technological horror that’s staring me in the face, I’m just making it all worse?’

Oh…

…I see.

Manic clicking was all I felt I had time for. I didn’t have the capacity to consider why my computer kept crashing. As far as I was concerned, I had only the capacity to panic, re-do the work as quickly as possible in the hope that disaster wouldn’t strike again before miraculously managing to click ‘save’. This self-perpetuating cycle was causing me to feel about as well as the fragile machine I continued to exploit.

The advisor’s reply to my confused monologue was mind-blowingly simple, it’s the analogy that changed the way I think about almost everything…

Rule number 1 of Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo’s ‘KonMari’ method is ‘Commit yourself to tidying up’. Often, the term ‘tidying up’ is associated with your environment - your coffee table, for example. We’ve probably all lost precious time searching for a lost piece of paper on a cluttered surface. Translated into a digital workplace, surveys show that workers lose up to 2 hours per week unsuccessfully searching for lost digital documents.

Neuroscientific evidence proves that our cognitive resources and ability to focus are drained when constantly faced with disorganisation. Emotional exhaustion and stress cause delayed decision making, encouraging individuals to set things aside within easy reach for future use - an action which causes a messy environment leading to coping and avoidance strategies. Lo and behold, the cycle continues.

Let’s forget about laptops for the time being. What about you?

If your brain were a laptop, what would it look like? If your brain were the operating system of your computer, would it be working on overdrive attempting to manage all the open mental tabs? When computers overheat & crash, the lifespan of the internal components is reduced, data can be permanently lost, and the machine can suffer irreparable damage. When you begin to think of your operating system in this context, it’s no wonder that emotional exhaustion & prolonged mental stress causes burnout in humans. Our brains automatically work to remember the information we see and hear – although our working memory can hold less than ten items at a time. Constant information input can be detrimental to our focus, decision making and memory – the brain literally loses some operating power. This is true regardless of the nature of the information, meaning that constant ‘positive’ input can quickly lead to overload just as ‘negative’ input can.

How many self-help books have you opened but never finished? How about those notes you jotted down during that conversation with your friend last week? Let’s not overlook the endless saved posts on social media and that yoga class you’ve squeezed into your schedule next week. Maybe, if you’re honest, ‘Wellness’ sometimes feels like a world wide web full of inspiring, yet strangely unattainable & unmanageable opportunities. I wonder whether there’s a chance you might forget what wellness actually is while frantically trying to find ‘it’. Will you know when you’ve found ‘it’, or will you continue searching?

By definition, ‘Wellness’ means the quality or state of being healthy in body and mind, especially as the result of deliberate effort.

In this case, if you are overloading your mind with wellness inspiration without beneficial action, you’re quite literally not in a well state.  

The human brain is arguably the most remarkable operating system on the planet. But the reality is; if you continue to fuel self-perpetuating cycles of wellness overload, you will likely feel as well as the operating system you continue to exploit. The great news is; while it’s true that continually exposing your brain to overload may have detrimental result, it’s also true that consciously selecting the stimulus that you expose it to can have positive influence. Your brain is physically altered when it is exposed to repeated & targeted focus – therefore a repeated act of being calm & mindful leads to learned behaviour and healthy state. That sounds a lot like wellness, to me…

So how about you down your tools, power down and reboot? Break free from constant information input and commit to tidying the overloaded clutter. Choose to take deliberate & mindful actions to teach your brain what wellness can really be. Maybe one inspiring book, image or quote is enough. Maybe, just one conscious breath is enough to help you discover what wellness really means to you – free from external influence.

Maybe, just maybe, you’ll soon realise that you already have absolutely everything you need.