May 20, 2021
Masawa Minute 27
Emotional support for men | Texting anxiety | + More!
This is the Masawa Minute — mental wellness, social impact, and impact investing snippets on what we’re pondering + where you can get active.
We’d like to start by wishing you a happy New Year: we’re thrilled about this new beginning and, hopefully, so are you! Every day is an opportunity to start the change we want to see in the world. This newsletter, however, isn’t about that — it’s about the importance of human connection. Hope you enjoy it and get inspired to find new ways to make connections in your life.
Get active!
📔 Learn
Breaking Down is Wisdom Waking Up
There’s a new program we wanted to share with you — Breaking Down is Wisdom Waking Up. It’s designed for ambitious, passion-driven people who want to learn how to transform their distress into wisdom for personal growth and global impact. The Break Down. Wake Up. project is dedicated to helping people discover the groundbreaking wisdom within their distress.
In the eight-week online live group program, you’ll learn tools, frameworks, and practices to transform your distress into fuel for new projects, deeper relationships, and a stronger, more compassionate relationship with yourself. Find out more and apply or check out the podcast episode about the program.
🧍Attend
The Impact of Modern Society on Mental Health
In this event, professor Craig Morgan from the world-leading Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London, will explore the latest research into modern society’s impact on our communities, workplaces, and schools.
The research considers how the recent social and economic changes affect young people, marginalized communities, and looks into the relationship between mental health and welfare policies. The connection between social change and mental health is an essential one to explore — we’re excited to learn more about it. See you there!
What we’re reading…
🧶 Who’s at the receiving end of your gratitude?
Let’s take another look at gratitude — how do we practice it as a society? In recent years, the purpose of gratitude has gradually been shifting away from an interpersonal function towards its personal advantages. It’s partly due to gratitude being increasingly portrayed as a positive psychology practice and/or a self-help instrument.
Its predominantly social nature, therefore, is the part that’s getting left out. However, historically its value has been derived precisely from this part — Seneca and other thinkers considered generosity and gratitude to be the glue that binds society together. It was argued that if a person felt fortunate without crediting anyone for it, it wasn’t gratitude at all.
The recent development of seeing gratitude as a wellness tool pushes this understanding and the complexity of gratitude out of our collective consciousness. However, this line of thinking can lead us to miss out on its original value. Sharing gratitude to others emphasizes our vulnerability and how dependent on one another we are — yet, it can help us feel closer, and strengthen our relationships and communities, which is critical during this disconnected time.
True gratitude is a communal emotion, not a wellness practice
🐚 Fighting off loneliness
Loneliness. It’s a heavy word and a heavy matter — it’s something everyone experiences at one point or another, yet it remains a matter most people are wary of discussing. This stigma and shame of experiencing loneliness alienate people further — something that has become clear to many in the last year.
A study done during the pandemic revealed elevated levels of loneliness, depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders among 18–35 years old adults in the US — a result that’s rather predictable given the severity of social isolation. It turned out that the essential thing helping to combat those adverse outcomes is social support. The importance of perceived connections is immense — it’s been proven to lead to a measurable rise in health and comfort.
The past year has proven to many that nobody’s immune to loneliness. And neither this realization nor the feeling of loneliness itself will go away anytime soon, so making an effort to reach out to someone can make a whole world of difference. Writing a message or, if you can’t bear to look at the screen a minute longer, having an old-fashioned phone call or maybe even sending a handwritten note will make you feel better and possibly turn someone else’s bad day around. We can get through this together — and hopefully become better at speaking up about loneliness as a result.
Riding the Second Wave of Lockdown Loneliness
🌆 Do our brains need nostalgia?
Some people are all for nostalgia, others consider it to be a denial of reality. Many people experience it when a significant change occurs or when they’re feeling alone. But how necessary is it to human psychology? As it turns out, it plays a crucial part in shaping our experiences.
Throughout the centuries, nostalgia has been considered an illness. For example, in the 20th century, it was mostly associated with homesickness, a negatively regarded psychological mechanism experienced by people unable to adapt to a life away from home. Now it’s not treated as a disorder anymore, yet it still attracts a lot of interest from researchers, who now often analyze the positive associations connected to it.
And their research reveals nostalgia to be quite beneficial. It improves your mood, self-image, strengthens your identity, and sense of social connectedness, as well as increases the willingness to help others. It also reduces the negative psychological impact of loneliness, as one finds confidence and encouragement in the past interactions and events. So allowing yourself to slip into a nostalgic daydream once in a while isn’t so bad — on the contrary, it might greatly benefit your present interactions.
👬 Emotional support for men
As statistics reflect, men are less likely than women to receive mental health treatment, open up about their experiences, and seek support. Men also suffer from depression and anxiety far more than we as a society know or would like to believe, not only because they don’t seek help but also because they’re often misdiagnosed.
Andrew Reiner, the author of “Better Boys, Better Men: The New Masculinity That Creates Greater Courage and Emotional Resiliency” argues that it wouldn’t be such a prominent issue if men were as effective as women in building social support networks. Compared to women, their networks are typically smaller and involve less frequent exchanges of social support.
While many of the men interviewed for the book claimed they didn’t need a support network, the truth is that many men can count on close friends for advice and physical, but not emotional safety. Joining men’s support groups or even an online discussion forum for mental health support could be a step towards connecting with other men and building an emotional network that’s essential for social and mental wellbeing.
Building Emotional Safety Nets for Men
⌨️ Tired of texting? You’re not alone
No matter if you’re a reliable texter or someone that doesn’t get to a message right away, chances are that lately you’ve found typing out replies a tiring duty, maybe even an unbearable one. If so, you’re not alone. Many people are experiencing discomfort communicating virtually and feeling a great sense of guilt about it — feelings that are also known as “texting anxiety.”
Texting anxiety can manifest in different ways – from not being able to put down your phone to constantly avoiding it. It can be fuelled by a desire to keep in touch and not to miss out, anxiously waiting for a ping of a new notification and scrolling to the point of losing track of time. It can also simultaneously mean experiencing screen fatigue and feeling like your mental capacity for communication is at its limit.
One of the best ways to feel better is to realize that you’re not experiencing this alone. Other people understand how you feel and (likely) will not judge you. It’s also essential to become more intentional about your time, especially the time spent away from a screen. So put the phone away and go for a walk or read the book you’ve meant to pick up forever or find another activity that will allow you to disconnect. Your mind will definitely thank you.
Is It Just Me, or Has Texting Become Harder During the Pandemic?
✨ Masawa Thoughts
New Year, New You? Wait. Why haven’t we blabbed on about New Year’s resolutions, making a fresh start, etc.? Might be because this year, we’re still stuck in the same quagmire from last year. A new year is technically a human invention; viruses don’t care that it’s a new year, economic inequities don’t care that it’s a new year. But we do know from Daniel Pink that the beginnings of weeks, months, and years are great times psychologically to re-assess and re-boot.
So at Masawa, we’re re-focusing our efforts on being in service to others. The core driver of our impact on the world rests on the extent to which founders and teams become and stay well, maintain and execute their impact drive, and develop and grow their businesses. Maintaining our intentionality and delivery is the key to the kingdom of making the most impact possible.
What are you refocusing your efforts on?
💭 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.
