Masawa Minute 22
What to eat for good mental health? | Twitter can read your mood! | + More!
This is the Masawa Minute — mental wellness, social impact, and impact investing snippets from what we’ve read the last two weeks + where you can get active.
Today’s Masawa Minute features not one but two articles written by our very own team members. Their ideas dictated the topics we looked into this week — we’ve thought about how our mental health is shaped by and reflected in the regular activities we engage in, like eating, working or engaging with social media, as well as how we continue to lead our daily lives in the shadow of a global disaster — the climate crisis.
The goal of underlining the connection between all those seemingly unrelated parts of our lives and mental health isn’t to create more pressure (we know all of us have been feeling more than enough of that lately). Rather, it’s meant to emphasize how everything, including what we ate for lunch, ties into something bigger and how many ways there are to have an impact — in this case, on our mental health, but it also applies to any other system.
Get active!
👂 Listen
This Friday (October 30th) at 8–9.30 am PST, Masawa’s Founder & Managing Partner Joshua Haynes is appearing on a panel as part of BMW’s Responsible Leaders Forum. The discussion is focused on increasing mental health funding, so topics like philanthropy, investing, innovation, and, of course, mental health will be covered. Joshua will be speaking alongside luminaries like Isabelle Hau (Imaginable Futures), Zak Williams (PYM Health + Robin Williams’ son), Barbara Ricci (Mindful Philanthropy), and Aida Murad (AM Creatives). If you’re interested, reply to this email, and we might be able to secure you a spot!
👀 Attend
Fast Forward 2030 Co-Creation Sessions
The event offered by the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity and supported by Goodsted and The Impact Founders takes place on November 10th. It’s meant for anyone interested in social entrepreneurship and excited to get together and co-create innovative solutions to social and environmental problems with other participants.
The program will start with four speakers, who will share their stories and present the challenges which the participants will later tackle in groups. If you like the solution you come up with, you’ll get the support to make it happen, but it can also simply offer a boost of energy and creativity we all need right now.
The Link Between Social Media & Mental Health
With social media becoming an even more significant part of our lives as we spend more time in isolation, it’s necessary to understand the risks it can pose to our mental health. Even if you feel like you know them well, it can be difficult to know when we really need a social media detox and how to become less dependent on the daily hit of content.
All these questions will be covered in a webinar happening tomorrow, October 29th, 11 am EST, led by an assistant professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School Lisa W. Coyne. She’ll teach us how to set the ground rules for our digital consumption and lessen the unhealthy attachment.
What we’re reading…
🍒 We are (as happy as) what we eat
How often do you consider how what you eat will affect your body? What about your mental wellbeing? Numerous studies have found a direct connection between our gut and our brain — it specifically relates to the risk of depression.
While it’s currently unclear what exact chemical mechanisms are at play here, one chemical that consistently comes up in the conversation is serotonin, something you may have heard of as the happy hormone. 95% of the serotonin in our bodies is produced in the gastrointestinal tract. See the connection?
So what food should you prioritize for the best chance of reducing the risk of depressive symptoms and maintaining a healthy gut? Read the full article written by Masawa’s Investment Partner Najmeh Habili to find out!
Food for Thought: Does nutrition affect our mental health?
🏝 How are we handling climate change?
Most of us already know that immediate action and deep, structural change is needed to tackle the challenge. But how equipped are we to do it? And how is the process affecting our mental health?
Climate anxiety aside (we’ll come back to that later), climate change is affecting our mental health through stress and PTSD as a consequence of occurring natural disasters. It also amplifies the harsh effects of increased inequality, displacement, food scarcity, loss of employment and break-down of the community ties.
The best chance to mitigate the effects and tackle climate change is to raise awareness and understand the deep-seated connections between those issues. A way to achieve it while avoiding being consumed by fear or anxiety is to inspire people to appraise their potential to cope and act positively and communicate hopeful messages and practical solutions. We hope that the demand for change becomes impossible to ignore very soon, and we can see a global and interdisciplinary action being taken.
Decarbonizing the Mind: The impact of climate change on our mental health
💃🏼 Workplace friends are essential for mental health
While you may not be thrilled about all of your co-workers and may even enjoy the chance to only see them on Zoom these days, workplace relationships are essential to your mental health. A recent Harvard study discovered that altered or severed workplace relationships are at least partly to blame for our collective mental health deteriorating during the pandemic.
And that’s experienced not only by those that work from home. Some people that continue to be physically present at their worksite have reported that altered shifts, the protective measures, added stress have interfered with the connection they felt to their co-workers.
However, there is good news too. 47% of the survey respondents have noted that their management has become more compassionate, and 39% said that their co-workers have become more helpful and supportive.
It’s intuitive to place the biggest focus on making sure that everyone can do their work with this sudden change in the work environment — seeing whether the computers are working, the task flow is not disrupted, work schedules are fair. But it’s equally important to make sure that employee connectedness doesn’t suffer because it’s as big a part of the team’s success as all of the above.
Disruption of work relationships adds to mental-health concern
🐦 How are you feeling today? Twitter can give you an answer
Which day of 2020 was the saddest so far? Twitter has an answer to that — according to the Computational Story Lab of the University of Vermont, it was May 31st. And not only in 2020, but the saddest day the lab has registered in 13 years.
This kind of data is the courtesy of Hedonometer, an invention that has been analyzing millions of tweets daily for over a decade. The Hedometer — there’s an ever-expanding field of researchers working on using social media to get insights into our mental health. They do so by analyzing our tweets and posts’ linguistic subtleties that reveal our moods, our characters, to what extent we are avoiding things and how connected we are to other people.
Predictably, all the recent reports have been rather grim — the levels of sadness, anxiety, depression recorded were significantly higher than those in 2019. Of course, the algorithms are continuously evolving as language, and the context behind it changes quickly, also it’s impossible to make general conclusions from a sample of Twitter users. Nevertheless, the research provides valuable insight into what emotions dominate our online lives and what that means for our mental wellbeing.
Is Everybody Doing … OK? Let’s Ask Social Media
🔔 Is climate anxiety preventing action?
Have you found yourself feeling powerless or worried about reading yet another report about the worsening state of our climate and the deadline for turning things around approaching rapidly? You’re not alone — “climate anxiety” has made its way into our everyday vocabularies, and mental health professionals now find themselves routinely addressing it in sessions with patients of all ages.
Climate anxiety is also developing into mental disorders, manifesting itself through things like adversity towards water or compulsions to check light switches, stoves and other items. In certain places where the climate threat is the most prominent, people report such severe climate anxiety that it hinders their daily activities. It’s felt in countries that aren’t at such an immediate risk, too — 57% of American teens feel afraid and 43% hopeless.
It affects people differently — for some people, it acts as a powerful push towards taking action, yet for others, it’s completely paralyzing. Climate anxiety is warranted, and it can help convey the urgency of the changes that need to happen. Still, we have to make sure that those experiencing it intensely have the resources and the support necessary to control it because now we need everyone to act more than ever in their biggest capacity.
Climate Anxiety and Mental Illness
✨ Masawa Update
The idea of intersectionality is a lot on our minds lately. The connected systemic interplay of human’s mental health and their activities that exacerbate climate change, injustice, and democratic degradation is a hidden gem in need of research and investment. Do we know, for example, the extent to which the human need to over-consume as a coping mechanism has sped climate change? What’s the cost of the intergenerational trauma of 400 years of racial injustice and reduce value creation?
As we begin to make investments and partner with founders on their mental wellness and organizational resilience, we cannot forget about the intersectionality of the private capital we provide with the larger systemic picture.
💭 In Closing
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Give someone a big [virtual] hug today + take care of each other! 🤗😘
Gabija works as a Marketing & Communications Coordinator at Masawa. She lets her vision of a more just, sustainable, equitable world guide Masawa’s story and inform the work towards transforming global mental wellness to make it accessible and accepted.
