Wildness & Wellbeing

An evolving theory about how change will happen

What’s holding us back?

We have more education, technology, wealth, abilities to communicate and organise than ever before, but the story of our collective action as the human species, is still wildly out of step with the ideals that many people hold.

It was awhile ago now that I accepted the reality that ‘change’ isn’t something that happens thanks (or no thanks) to other people, it happens because of all of us. Once I made the switch from ‘powerless’ to having agency over my life and the world around me, I removed the phrase “someone should…” from my lexicon, and started trying to understand how change happens.

If you’d asked me 2 years ago “what do you really care about in the world?”, I probably would’ve answered something like

“Trees, Nature, Wild spaces!”

… or something similar. I was wide eyed, energetic, and committed to working on projects which investigated and created solutions which changed the way we treat our planet.

At the time I was deep into working on the food system; I saw it as a vital intersection of land use, energy use, population growth, philosophy about seed ownership, local & regional resilience, economics, health, connection to nature and more. We recognised that if people were disconnected from their food as well as the ‘natural world’, then our actions and attitudes toward the land, sea & sky which allows us to survive and thrive were less likely to be empathetic, sustainable and regenerative.

If I wasn’t working on food, I was working with Conservation Volunteers New Zealand — enabling people to get urban areas and take action to improve the environment.

AND THEN EVERYTHING CHANGED

Over the last 18 months I’ve had a massive re-alignment of my thinking about what’s stopping us from working together to regenerate communities and ecosystems.

My new thinking can be summed up in one word: Flourishing.

It’s an entirely new theory of change for me, so let me tell you how I got there…

A NEW JOB ALWAYS MEANS NEW RESEARCH

When I joined the Lifehack team toward the end of 2013, I felt deeply privileged to join a small group assembled by Enspiral which was handed the mission to improve youth mental health in Aotearoa New Zealand. In the process of researching more about opportunities to improve mental health, we discovered a range of strengths-based treatments which focused on resilience and improving subjective wellbeing. Mental Health (or mental ill health) is not on the same ‘axis’ as Wellbeing — so you could suffer from mental health challenges such as axiety or depression, yet have it stabilised and have high wellbeing & resilience.

We know from the social innovation community that we need to try to tackle the root causes of problems, as well as how the problems present in our own lives and in our communities — otherwise the problems are likely to grow and become more complex over time. Our mandate was to provide more interventions in the ‘preventative and early treatment’ end of the mental health spectrum, rather than ‘crisis’. A new vision emerged — improving the lives of all young Kiwis; it’s clear any of us can develop mental health problems — and indeed 50% of Kiwis are expected to in their lives.

When you start asking “Why is this happening?” a with mental health problems, you get a wide variety of complex problems which sit underneath — housing, relationships, employment, emotional intelligence and much more. Keep asking why, and you start to see some patterns forming. Here are a few that we found:

• Re-defining Success
• Finding Purpose
• Our Economic System

The more I understood Wellbeing from the emerging field of science which is studying this topic, the more I realised the implications for our ability as a species to tackle a range of topics — from mental health to environmental regeneration.

“Flourishing” is a term which emerged from the science of positive psychology, pioneered by Dr’s. Fredrickson, Losada, and Seligman:

Flourishing widens attention, broaden behavioural repertoires, which means to broaden one’s skills or regularly performed actions, increase intuition, and increase creativity. Secondly, good feelings can have physiological manifestations, such as significant and positive cardiovascular effects, such as a reduction in blood pressure. Third, good feelings predict healthy mental and physical outcomes. Also, positive affect and flourishing is related to longevity.

The many components of flourishing elicit more tangible outcomes than simply mental or physiological results. For example, components such as self-efficacy, likability, and prosocial behaviour encourage active involvement with goal pursuits and with the environment. This promotes people to pursue and approach new and different situations. Therefore, flourishing adults have higher levels of motivation to work actively to pursue new goals and are in possession of more past skills and resources. This helps people to satisfy life and societal goals, such as creating opportunities, performing well in the workplace, and producing goods, work and careers that are highly valued in [American] society.

This success results in higher satisfaction and reinforces Frederickson’s Broaden and Build model, for more positive adults reap more benefits and, are more positive, which creates an upward spiral.

Studies have shown that people who are flourishing are more likely to graduate from college, secure “better” jobs, and are more likely to succeed in that job.

Flourishing has been found to impact more areas than simply the workplace. In particular community involvement and social relationships have been cited as something that flourishing influences directly. For example, those that flourish have been found to volunteer at higher levels across cultures.

As I read these studies, it occurred to me that we are much closer to knowing what makes up flourishing and wellbeing, there’s whole research centres committed to it, articles written about it, TED Talks about it, even Nation-scale Wellbeing indexes.

MY AHA MOMENT

With the complexity of the problems we face as a species, we need humans operating at their highest levels — not operating as ‘cogs’ in an organisational machine. We need people operating creatively, collaborating with one another across disciplines, and working on the edges of what we know (often in fuzzy systems) to usher in new interventions and solutions which lift everyone in the world up.

An “educated elite” wont cut it — we need more people working on things that matter — everyone seeing it as their role to contribute to regenerating ecology & society. If that’s the case, we need more people flourishing.

CAUSE AND EFFECT

My final aha moment was that my deep respect for 4.5 billion years of evolution wasn’t misguided, and in fact had a fascinating cause AND effect cycle related to wellbeing & flourishing.

Studies are showing that our wellbeing improves with our connection to nature.

Four reasons why nature is likely to aid human functioning via UK Centre for Confidence & Wellbeing:

1. In the natural world we have a sense of being away from the day to day stresses and strains of life.
2. Being in nature helps us to put matters in perspective.
3. The natural world stimulates and pleases our senses.
4. Being in nature usually makes people feel that they are in a supportive and harmonious environment.

Studies went on to show benefits of green spaces in urban settings as well:

Unlike many other changes in life circumstances, where effects on mental health can be short-lived, moving to a greener urban area was associated with sustained mental health gains.

So, there’s significant research to prove the link between spending time immersed in forests, mountains, lakes, beaches and other ‘green spaces’. As a population we’re accelerating toward more and more people living in urban areas — typically our built environments don’t do so well.

That said there is moves in architecture and town planning which recognise the benefits and are trying to rebuild ‘green infrastructure’ — or simply rewild areas of our towns and cities. There’s some great research and action happening in Biophilic Cities, Biomimicry and Urban Greening.

THE UPWARD WILD-WELL SPIRAL

My happy realisation was that my two main focuses — Wildness and Wellbeing were self reinforcing.

Time in the ‘wild’ improves our wellbeing, and in turn our wellbeing fuels the creative, collaborative, humans who can find the new tools, processes, methods and approaches to reverse the tide of human-caused extinctions.

More Wildness = More Wellbeing = More Wildness = More Wellbeing

I’m excited to see where this thread leads my life next — whether it’s building it into my work with Lifehack, or adding a new and exciting layer to my startup, Volunteer Impact, which is bubbling on the back-burner whilst I’m busy with Lifehack. Either way, whether I’m working on Wellbeing or Wildness, I’m working on the other at the same time.

Further links:

• Does Nature Make Us Happy? — Psychology Today
• Culture, Environmental Psychology, and Well-Being — Rainisio & Inghilleri
• The relationship between nature connectedness and happiness — Capaldi, Dopko, and Zelenski
• The concept of eudaimonic wellbeing — Bonlwell
• The science of wellbeing: an integrated approach to mental health and its disorders — Cloninger