Masawa Minute 37
Masawa Minute 37 | Mental health and economy | Wysa raises $5.5 million in Series A | 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.
Welcome to the last newsletter of May 2021! The next time we talk to you, we’ll already be enjoying June — we have a feeling this is going to be a good one. Coincidentally, this newsletter is about centering wellness on many different levels, from individual to societal. We hope that you stay well and learn something new!
Masawa Thoughts
When’s the last time you took a minute to check in to see how you’re really doing? Have you thought about the mental wellness of your groups/organizations and communities?
It’s the micro-macro gradation of wellness that really defines what we can achieve as a species. When enough individuals themselves are mentally unwell, the potential of the groups, communities, and societies in which we exist erodes. When you, your groups, and communities are well, flourishing, and able to thrive, journeys are richer and outcomes are better. This applies to startup teams and societies, alike.
When perusing this newsletter’s content, challenge yourself to also view wellness from these many different levels!
Get Active!
🎈Attend
Burnt Out to Fired Up: Replacing Anxiety & Depression With Hopefulness
Ginger, an on-demand mental health care provider, is organizing a workshop around tackling anxiety and depression. During the class, a mental health coach Tammy Ellis will share some strategies grounded in mindset work, movement, and storytelling to help us handle the symptoms of depression, anxiety, and burnout better.
The workshop is taking place tomorrow, May 27, with a possibility to register for two different times: 11 am PT / 8 pm CEST or 4 pm PT / 1 am CEST. If you cannot make it to either of these sessions, you can register anyway and receive an email with the recording and the summary on Friday, May 28. Enjoy!
🎧 Listen
Do you care about entrepreneurs as people? With Dr. Michael Freeman
What are the traits that make somebody do something risky and unpredictable like starting a business? Can you learn to be an entrepreneur or is it something you’re born with?
If these are the questions you’ve always wanted to ask, this podcast from Masawa friends The Future Farm and Dr. Michael Freeman is for you. Michael joins Vladi and Nektarios for a very special episode to discuss entrepreneur wellness, explore the traits of an entrepreneur and contemplate whether entrepreneurs are cared about as people.
You can follow Dr. Michael Freeman on LinkedIn and visit his website to learn more about his research.
What we’re reading…
🚀 A different economy for a better mental health
Mental health problems are on the rise, but while it’s good to see mental health finally making its way into the mainstream conversation and the stigma surrounding the topic slowly but steadily decreasing, many problems still persist.
A huge challenge anyone trying to tackle the issue of mental illness is faced with is the prevailing social inequality. While it’s true that we all have mental health and anyone can struggle with a mental illness, factors like economic class, gender identity and disability significantly contribute to our experience of mental health remaining not even close to equal. People’s position in the economy determines the likelihood of developing a mental illness, access to treatment, support, and how this kind of diagnosis affects their job security.
To tackle the problem of mental illness, this needs to be addressed. We have to stop treating it as an individual issue and understand how the systems we’re operating within contribute to the health disparities. It’s necessary to address the problem on every societal level — from individual to policy change — and rewrite the rules of the economy to prioritize the wellbeing of the people and the planet. The change isn’t easy, but it’s up to us what kind of world we want to live in and leave for the next generations. And that’s the choice we need to make right now.
🧘♂️ Taking control of our wellbeing
These days we often wonder to ourselves and out loud how long it’s still going to take before our lives return to normal. But to some extent, the answer may be up to us. There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting there are a few simple steps that we can take in order to take charge of our sense of purpose and fulfillment. The official term for the combination of physical, mental and emotional wellbeing we’re striving to achieve is flourishing — a polar opposite of languishing, known as a sense of stagnation and emptiness.
The journey to improved wellbeing starts by asking yourself where you are at on the scale between languishing and flourishing. It’s an effective diagnostic tool that can help you realize what exactly you need in your life. Next to that, it’s vital to become more mindful and learn to acknowledge and enjoy small moments that you experience throughout the day. No moment is too small to be a source of joy. If it’s difficult to notice such moments in your daily routine — try something new. Getting excited about experiencing different things and finding interest in life every day are essential components of wellbeing.
It’s easy to isolate ourselves from other people when we aren’t feeling our best, but we need to experience human connection on a regular basis. They don’t have to be lasting relationships — even exchanging a few words with a stranger or greeting a barista in the coffee shop can contribute to a sense of fulfillment. It can also be helpful to try to perform small acts of kindness as we go — research suggests that doing five acts of kindness in a single day once a week can have an incredible effect on our wellbeing. And if that seems too much at first, you can start with a habit of doing a small favor for someone daily — like forwarding this newsletter to a friend :)
The Other Side of Languishing Is Flourishing. Here’s How to Get There.
🕊 The company filling the gap in mental health support
An AI-based mental health startup Wysa has just raised $5.5 million in its Series A round of funding, lead by W Health Ventures and attracting interest from the Google Assistant Investment program. The company, launched as a side project in 2015, aims to target the “missing middle of mental health” — all the people interested in improving their mental wellbeing. Including the latest funding, Wysa has now raised $9.4 million in venture-backed investments.
The platform currently offers cognitive behavior therapy, sessions with professional therapists, a wide range of tools backed by science for mental health support in many situations, as well as mindfulness and coaching exercises. The platform’s core is a chatbot function that offers a safe space where the users can share their experiences, feel heard and validated, and get advice and support without the pressure or stress that people sometimes experience in a one-on-one setting in therapy.
Wysa believes that everyone could benefit from improving their mental health, not only the people with diagnosed mental health conditions. It has already attracted more than 3 million users and has facilitated over 100 million conversations. It’s also used by 20 enterprise partners offering Wysa’s services to their 500 000 employees across 53 countries. The newly-raised capital will go towards supporting the B2B offering and partnering with more employers that are interested in including Wysa in their mental health benefits. The company also looks to scale its team and therapist network. Have you tried Wysa yet?
Wysa Puts $5.5M Series A To Work Targeting ‘Missing Middle Of Mental Health’
🌋 The ultimate cure for burnout
Research has taught us that burnout is an organizational problem rather than an individual one. But while it’s up to the employers to prevent burnout, helping someone who’s already experiencing it is much more complicated — external efforts rarely pay off in this case. So if you’re feeling burnt out, the person most likely to be able to help you is yourself.
It’s essential to understand your experience first. Burnout can present as any combination of three distinct symptoms: physical or/and mental exhaustion, loss of social connectedness, and a lowered sense of self-efficacy. Recognizing the symptoms present in your life will help you understand what you are currently missing. The strategies to tackle each of these can be very different — for example, while some self-care time can do wonders for exhaustion, it might not make any difference when you’re feeling disconnected.
Moreover, research suggests that agency is essential. To be able to help yourself overcome burnout, you must feel empowered to take control of your wellbeing, your life and your decisions. Many recovery techniques work only when people have the ability and space to pursue their own restorative opportunities. Compassion also plays an important role — learning to be kinder to yourself and others and engaging in small compassionate acts during the day can alleviate burnout much faster. Therefore agency and compassion are essential values for a company to practice in order to support their employees best and help them find their own path towards recovery.
Your Burnout Is Unique. Your Recovery Will Be, Too.
🚧 Is trauma standing in the way of social change?
We are continuously learning new things about trauma, a human experience able to spread across people and time. Only relatively recently we discovered that trauma could be passed from generation to generation and persist long after the memories of the traumatic events have faded. Yet that’s something that change makers constantly have to face and address in the communities they work with and frequently experience personal trauma resulting from their work.
There are certain ways how learning about trauma can help the work for social change. It can help understand and define the roots of social issues, as well as recognize the connection between the underlying trauma and even seemingly unrelated areas of society. It can also help make the trauma healing measures more effective and become better equipped to provide them on time, as unaddressed trauma mounts and spreads.
The social sector needs to take steps to address intergenerational trauma right now. Starting from recognizing it as a widespread challenge to improving societal wellbeing, the change makers have to advocate for active exploration of such trauma within the sector and deepen the academic understanding of the topic using an interdisciplinary approach. Finally, it’s essential to develop better methods and practices for healing — ones that allow us to preserve dignity, agency and build resilience. Only once we get the obstacle that is our limited understanding of trauma out of the way can we genuinely start moving towards a society that centers wellbeing.
Addressing Trauma as a Pathway to Social Change
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.
