Masawa Minute 43
Cities that enhance wellbeing | How strong is your 8th sense? | + 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.
This week’s newsletter is about building wellbeing — transforming our outlook as well as our environment in a way that benefits us and our mental health. It’s also the last newsletter of the summer, so we hope you will make the most of the remaining weeks, and we will see you in September!
Masawa Thoughts
A few fun updates!
- Job alert!! Masawa, the mental wellness impact fund, is looking for an Investment Principal! Do you want to (or know someone who wants to) drive the evolution of mental wellness + impact investing? Are you extraordinary, humbly speaking?
- Mental ill-health is a growing epidemic that costs society and the economy greatly. Yet opportunities abound. Let’s work together so that billions live life.
- Check out this job description + spread widely. Our world needs a lot more capital to be deployed in impactful areas like mental wellness, especially now!
- The first in a 3-part series on the link between Urban Space + Mental Wellness drops today (see below for an overview).
- We did a quick refresh on our website, check it out!
Get Active!
Now is Not the Time for Mental Health Misalignment
It’s the latest open webinar of Ginger, an on-demand mental health company offering emotional support to companies, that will take place on August 24th at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET / 7 pm CEST. Featured speakers — Daryl Tol (One Mind), Jason Richmond (Ginger) and Jill Santercier (Ginger) will share tips on how to communicate mental health solutions in the “new normal” workplaces as well as how to transform your company’s approach to mental health. Don’t miss it!
What we’re reading…
🏠 Masawa Special: Building for wellbeing
This is Part 1 out of 3 in our series exploring the connection between our wellbeing and urban environments. Today more than half of the global population resides in urban areas, and this number is increasing. While urbanization has important implications for the economy, culture, and education, it also leaves us with some less-than-positive outcomes, like reduction of green spaces, decreased physical activity and lack of social connection. We’ve known for a while that our mental wellbeing is influenced by a range of factors — our communities, our habits, our food, our sense of security, to name a few, so the environments we live in are no exception. Let’s take a closer look at some important factors in our cities that affect our mental health.
To begin with, humans need communities to thrive. While it might seem like cities are perfect hubs for making social connections due to population density and diversity of inhabitants, large urban spaces tend to make us feel lonely and isolated. There’s also a notable lack of accessible socializing hubs, resulting in city inhabitants feeling more disconnected than ever before. Next to that, our bodies aren’t perfectly adapted to living in loud, overcrowded spaces. Not only does such an environment cause us an array of negative emotions, but overstimulation also leads to lowered attention capacity, weakened self-control, irritable and impulsive brain. Finally, cities are also known to deprive us of some factors that are essential to mental wellbeing, like regular access to nature and physical activity. Our urban lifestyles have driven us away from nature and lead us to increasingly sedentary habits, which robs us of all the mental health benefits that nature can offer, including relieving stress, improving focus, decreasing symptoms of depression and anxiety, and so on.
The negative effects that cities have on our mental wellbeing are clear, just as the changes we need to make in order to build an environment that benefits our health. So why haven’t we done something about it yet? Unfortunately, lack of knowledge, as well as very limited data, leads to idle decision-making. Cost is also an important factor. Developers tend to focus on short-term goals and prioritize commerce, which pushes the development of wellbeing-focused spaces to the background. Yet while good urban design might be expensive, the cost of design that contributes to increasing mental ill-health are sweeping. Reducing the rate of mental illness in urban areas by just 20% could save the world $250 billion yearly. It’s time for our cities to become part of the solution — let’s build our environments to benefit rather than harm our wellbeing.
Building for Mental Wellness: A Case for Mindful Cities Part I
🧠 Get to know your 8th sense: interoception
Have you already heard of “interoception”? No, it’s not some latest development of the Gen-Z speak. It’s our brains’ representation of sensations in our bodies that leads to an ability to identify, understand, and react appropriately to our internal signals. Interoception is an “inward-facing” sense that has great consequences for our wellbeing. The newest research suggests that our sensitivity to interoceptive signals can affect our ability to regulate emotions, as well as our vulnerability to symptoms of depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders.
Interoception is a foundation for our mental and physical health, as understanding our body’s signals helps us regulate our emotional and physical states. It’s also the mechanism behind our sense of intuition, the cause of why something feels a certain way without us being able to provide reasoning for it, as well as a significant contributor to our sense of self. Many people, however, struggle to connect with their interoceptive signals, which can have an impact on a range of mental illnesses. Luckily, therapies focusing on this problem already seem promising despite being in the early stage. Studies show positive results, with participants reporting lower anxiety, depression and cravings. With time technologies can also aid interoception training.
Interestingly, interoception can also help us understand why certain physical activities benefit our mental health. Regular exercise changes the signals our brain receives: the better shape we are in, the better our organs will deal with strain, showing more resilient responses. The practice of exercise also helps us become more attentive to the signals our body sends so that we can read them more accurately and elicit a more appropriate response. And it’s not only aerobic exercise that is known to help — strength training was found to be particularly effective in reducing feelings of anxiety. Overall, interoception seems to be one of our most important senses, and the effort put into training it is likely to pay off. As we know, wellbeing starts on the inside, and just by paying a bit more attention to what interoception tells us, we can have healthier bodies and minds. There’s no excuse not to!
Interoception: the hidden sense that shapes wellbeing
🪧 Let anxiety guide your action
Devastating climate news is becoming our almost daily reality. Seeing fires, floods, heatwaves, tropical storms all around the world, as well as the destruction they cause, can easily result in heightened climate anxiety and a sense of dread. As evidence of the threats that climate change holds to humanity mounts, many people have been grappling with these feelings silently, but now the conversations about it are starting to surface. Young people report feeling debilitated by anxiety and frustrated by the inaction of the older generations. At the same time, their parents worry about the future of their children and some even share gratitude that they may not be there to witness the catastrophes that the future holds.
All these feelings are valid — anxiety is a rational response to the growing risks we’re all facing. But it shouldn’t be ignored, as these emotions need to be identified and embraced. At this point, everyone can observe the impacts of climate change in their proximity, and, as we’ve learned during the pandemic, not talking about anxiety can lead to isolation and, in turn, depression. To avoid this and to encourage people to voice their emotions, some people are holding informal gatherings known as climate cafes all around the world in hopes of creating a safe space where people can share their feelings regarding the climate crisis. Other groups offer support by helping people commit to meaningful action on both personal and community levels.
And really, action is the only way to go. The goal should be to do things that resonate with you personally and reflect the shift in your outlook on climate change, no matter how small or large. Many people don’t feel like they have a lot of power on a global level, but most of us can contribute to a notable change in our homes, cities and even countries. Some, for instance, commit to shopping exclusively second-hand, others campaign for climate-conscious politicians or volunteer for local organizations. What all these actions have in common is the key to combating anxiety — it provides us with an opportunity to take back control and notice the difference that we’re making every day. That’s why we shouldn’t ignore or try to get rid of our anxiety but rather use it to reframe our work. Approaching it with some imagination can lead to creating a positive impact, finding an outlet for climate-related emotions and contributing to a better environment for our communities. A win-win-win!
How to Calm Your Climate Anxiety
💻 Learning about open social innovation
Currently, we’re facing quite a few societal challenges: next to the ongoing threat of Covid-19, there’s the climate crisis, social injustice, economic inequality, to name a few. One thing that all these challenges have in common is that it brings old and new societal problems to the surface and uncovers persistent flaws in our systems. As a society, we need social innovation: we have to address these challenges while rebuilding our systems, for which we must find practical, flexible and scalable solutions. However, the practice for social innovation that we have witnessed so far doesn’t seem to be able to provide all this and leaves us with one conclusion: social innovation needs a makeover. We must stop considering individuals, the state, or businesses to be singular agents of social change. Instead, we need opportunities to combine collective action and co-creation with orchestrated experimentation.
Before the pandemic, an experiment bringing all the stakeholders of society — including citizens, social businesses, organizations, foundations, philanthropists, and public administration — together to work on social innovation in an event supported by the government seemed to be a utopian dream. Yet a bit over a year ago, Germany succeeded to make it come true with WirVsVirus, a social experiment where 28 000 citizens across demographic and professional categories came together for 48 hours to tackle the pressing challenges related to Covid-19, followed by a six-month support program to further develop, test and scale solutions. Innovating social innovation, however, doesn’t end there. This experiment and the lessons it taught us now serve as a proof of concept for open social innovation (OSI), an approach that opens social innovation to a variety of stakeholders throughout the whole process — from generating ideas to scaling solutions — and can be used to benefit our society in numerous ways.
It’s easy to start thinking about this approach as one that provides us with more and better ideas at lower costs and with fast impact, as is typical for open-innovation methods businesses use. But social innovation is different — unlike typical business challenges, societal challenges often stem from relational problems. In this case, the markers for success need to reflect multiple dimensions and therefore opening up the process of social innovation actually slows it down. OSI also encourages the participation of stakeholders that are traditionally underrepresented, yet it’s important not to fall for the illusion that a more diverse set of participants automatically prevents the process from perpetuating patterns of exclusion — organizers have to actively tackle their biases to make the process truly open. It’s important to understand that OSI is not a panacea and will not work for every single societal problem. But if you want to learn more about the concept, read this article and see how its principles can be applied to your activities. If anything, it’s certainly a promising way to encourage collective action and become one step closer to a better future.
💸 Is stakeholder capitalism good for our brains?
Stakeholder capitalism can be a hot topic — some people say it goes too far, some believe it’s not enough to tackle the challenges we face. Nevertheless, any step towards businesses considering how their activities affect the entire society and the planet as well as focusing on creating long-term value is a positive change. More interestingly, the article suggests that this form of capitalism is better for our brains. Our brains are our greatest asset, and they need to be agile, adaptable, and resilient to survive and thrive in the modern world. So how can an economic system get us closer to our optimal brain health?
Firstly, our environment has a huge impact on our brain health. Air pollution, lack of nature, negative effects of the internet, violence, lack of purpose in life, and economic insecurity can all negatively affect our wellbeing. All of these factors are related to some societal problems that companies under the system of stakeholder capitalism should consider. Secondly, stakeholder capitalism allows for initiatives that prioritize Brain Capital. Some examples include the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board including mental health and wellbeing in its proposed updated human capital standards, the signatories of the Principles of Responsible Investing listing mental health as one of the top 4 social issue priorities in the future, global pandemic response initiatives providing vaccines to low and middle-income countries, protecting Brain Capital of recipients by protecting them from the neurological complications of Covid-19. Next to that, initiatives that support entrepreneur mental health are likely to improve economic liveliness and resilience.
Brain-based stakeholder capitalism is achievable and beneficial to the system itself. Brain capital should become a priority in all policy sectors in combination with various types of instruments, such as impact investing, venture capital, thematic exchange traded funds (ETFs), public-private partnerships being utilized. Prioritizing minds and brains followed by an increased investment into Brain Capital will help governments, civil society, and companies become better equipped to tackle the future global challenges and face them with resiliency. It’s in the best interest of all the stakeholders to improve their mental wellbeing — it’s simply a must for the people and the planet to thrive.
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.
