Connectivity, mental health and the great outdoors

As I write this article, the Children's Mental Health Week 2023 is currently taking place with the theme - Let's Connect. The idea of this is to encourage people to go out of their comfort zone and make meaningful connections. This represents a simple but powerful message and is one we could all benefit from adopting in both a personal and business sense.

Connectivity is important from many perspectives and this is an element which has, at times, been lost in recent years, largely due to the pandemic. However, what many people did find during the course of the initial lockdowns and beyond was a re-engagement or new found love of green open spaces and different forms of exercise.

Exercise and embracing the great outdoors can play an integral role in improving our wellbeing. Researchers from the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare recently outlined that visits to parks, community gardens and other urban green spaces may lower city dwellers’ use of drugs for anxiety, insomnia, depression, high blood pressure, and asthma.

The research also found that visiting such areas three to four times a week cuts people’s chances of turning to drugs for mental health problems or high blood pressure by a third, and for asthma by about a quarter. Moreover, the positive effects of visiting green spaces were stronger among those reporting the lowest annual household income. The findings are suggested to correlate with a growing body of evidence that a lack of access to green spaces is linked to a range of health problems.

February might not always be the most enticing month to get outdoors but the benefits are obvious, as evident in the fact that the NHS and various mental health wellbeing charities recommend walking as a gateway to improving fitness and mental health. It is however a month where, as a business, we have set a new Countrywide Walks Countrywide Challenge for our regional and leadership teams. This involves a 20,741km (12,888 miles) virtual walk which represents the combined cumulative distance of the UK coastline and the circumference of Northern Ireland.

The aim of our challenge is to encourage everyone within the field to cover a minimum of 10,000 steps a day, to stay healthy and raise money for the charity MIND. This follows last year’s highly successful challenge which saw training academy members of Countrywide Surveying Services and SDL Surveying go head-to-head in a Route 66 Charity Challenge in aid of LionHeart, the independent charity for RICS professionals. This saw 20 individuals from both businesses’ academies try and get as far along Route 66 as they possibly could over the course of the June by walking, running, cycling and swimming.

What’s interesting to see in the most recent challenge is how people are approaching this individually and collectively. Whilst still getting their steps in, a number of our South Wales colleagues met up in Cardiff for a group tree planting cluster meeting which enabled them all to spend some time together whilst also helping the environment.

This was an initiative, purely off their own back, which takes us back to that word connectivity and the kind of culture which can be instilled within workplaces. Such a culture has to be at the core of the business and even in a world where remote working can dominate, challenges such as these can help bring people together, create an element of fun and adventure as well as supporting their wellbeing and generating money for some fantastic causes.