POWER OF MENTAL HEALTH
POWER OF MENTAL HEALTH
“What mental health needs is more sunlight, more
candor, and more unashamed conversation.” – Glenn Close.
The prevailing economic uncertainty and restrictions on
people’s social lives prompted a quarter of the population (25%) to prioritise
their mental and physical health last year. New researches shows that adults
who put their mental health first during lockdown periods improved their career
and overall wellbeing.
Tilney’s research found that, of all the adults surveyed,
those who paid extra attention by putting their mental and physical health at
the top of the agenda reaped the biggest rewards in lockdown. Almost a third of
this group (29%) used last year to spend more quality time with their families,
while a fifth (18%) appraised their working patterns and others (16%) invested
their own money to help improve their future mental and physical health.
Beyond physical wellbeing, the scale of disruption last year
also resulted in a fifth (17%) of adults appreciating the importance of
thinking about their future, with plans to address this going forward. Again,
of all surveyed, those who put some thought towards their future plans have
started making real changes in their working lives. Nearly a quarter (24%) of
this group have now taken advantage of their company’s flexible working
policies.
However, given how much money worries can impact both our
mental and physical wellbeing very few adults considered their long-term
finances as part of their reflections. Utilising lockdown as an impetus for
this, only 10% of respondents had spent time thinking about how to afford their
desired retirement lifestyle, 11% had thought about their will and estate
planning and a mere 9% had considered what they wanted their financial legacy
to be.
Zoe Bailey, Chartered Financial Planner and Director at
Tilney commented: “Given the widespread uncertainty Covid-19 has caused so far,
it’s encouraging to see more people are prioritising their mental and physical
health as well as taking stock of what matters now and in the future.
“However, considering how long the road to full economic
recovery in the UK could be and how badly people’s employment opportunities
have been affected, more needs to be done to encourage people to spend time
educating themselves on their personal finances, what policies are out there to
help them, to take real action and start planning for their future now so they
can not only recover any finances lost in 2020 but also start to think about
and secure their long-term plans.
For months, therapists have reported a significant increase
in clients who are anxious, worried or depressed over current events—the Covid-19
pandemic, economic woes, civil unrest. And while they can teach coping skills,
such as emotion regulation, to help deal with the stress, they say it’s also
important for people to proactively take steps to be mentally healthy, just as
they would if they wanted to be physically fit. “If you wait until a major
stressor hits to try and bolster your mental health, it’s like trying to
inflate your life raft while you are already drowning at sea,”
Many people turn to talk therapy, exercise, meditation and a
healthy diet to do this.
Concluding - 'mental health is not a destination, but it is
a process. It's about how you drive, not where you are going'.
