How we stop work from killing us
It’s Mental Health Awareness Week and the focus is on nature. Cue posts about going for another 🤬 walk in the park.
Research published this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that stressful events like:
battling industry downturns
the threat of takeovers
…and pandemics?
cause premature ageing and even early death (based on 1,605 company bosses at large publicly listed US firms over the last 50 years).
💀 Yep—the way we do business is actually killing us.
Now look at how we’ve been working in lockdown, with our longer hours, fewer breaks, and feeling guilty for leaving our desks—without the endorphin highs that we get from talking, laughing, and doing things with other people. And many lack the ability to switch off from a task mindset; always on the go mentally, moving things forward.
For our family, an antidote to all that task-minded stress emerged from the darkest days of lockdown.
One day, our children ran off down the path from the skanky ASDA carpark, strewn with litter, to claim a scrubby bit of woodland as their magical kingdom. They call it The Dens ✨, a place where they crawl through mud, tumble out of trees, trade rock currencies, and treat all medical emergencies with what they imagine are dock leaves.
We know why this unfettered and risky free play is good for them—for the evidence, I highly recommend Balanced and Barefoot by Angela Hanscom. Her research shows that modern children are weaker, more fidgety, and more likely to be diagnosed with development challenges than ever before. In some places, one in four kids(!) is diagnosed with some sort of anxiety disorder. She puts this rise in challenges down to a lack of free outside play in mixed age groups: literally rocking around in wild spaces without enforced structure.
And what do The Dens do for the adults?
Allow for just ‘being’, with no task mindset. Seeing the tress, smelling the breeze, watching fat squirrels frisk. All while sharing 79p cups of ASDA tea, chatting, laughing, and hauling stuck kids out of trees.
Who knows, The Dens may even help us live longer—if we survive the zipwire.
Christine
PS. Next week? When you should—and should definitely not—work for free.
