I talk regularly about how we as individuals can work on our wellbeing. Here at Bird we believe you can do a lot to self-support in order to feel good about who you are and what you do.
If you are consistently gremlin-taming, practicing gratitude, acknowledging yourself, making decisions based on your values, your purpose and your intuition, and creating visions for what you want in the future you are doing yourself a huge favour. There is no doubt this stuff works to help us shape and live the lives we want. And if we couple that with prioritising self-care strategies like exercise, eating well, connecting with like minded individuals, and connecting to mindfulness or some kind of spirituality we are helping ourselves even further to feel fulfilled and at peace with the journey we are on.
However, we live in a disconnected world. Day to day life isn’t set up to help us with the above. In many places in Western Europe, Australia and the US, society is arranged to make our lives ‘easier’ and ‘more convenient’. It’s easier to connect in a text rather than meet, it’s easier to get in a car rather than walk, there are many opportunities to go to work and do a job and get paid and go home with no real need to deeply engage with those around us.
Up until now we’ve developed a society that makes it easier for us to do less, it’s super easy in society to numb out, which unfortunately tends to lead to ill-health and depression.
The truth is it can be hard to truly practice wellbeing and self-care within most Western societies.
So what’s needed is a much bigger, wider change. For the sake of future generations, we must think about the societies we’re creating and how they are making us more disconnected, from ourselves and from each other.
Dan Buettner has done tonnes of research into what’s needed in society in order for us to thrive. Dan came up with the concept of ‘Blue Zones’ which are places in the world where people live longer, are more healthy and report more feelings of joy and fulfillment. There are various elements at play within these communities, but notably they encourage connection with those around you, they make it easy to walk places rather than drive, they support spirituality, and enable healthy (plant-based) eating and moderate drinking of alcohol (two small glasses of wine a day apparently!) Places with more sunshine apparently make for a healthier, longer living society, as well as access to nature.
You can learn more on his website:
https://www.bluezones.com/live-longer-better/
Or via his Ted talk:
The more of us that come together to take active steps to create communities that work for us the better. I believe this conversation is the most important conversation of our time. We really do need permission and support from society to look after ourselves.
If you would like to discuss this more please get in touch.
With love, Hannah
PS. If you took up the self-care challenge two weeks ago please email me on with an update on how you got on!
PPS. There are still places on the August Self-Care for You summer coaching programme, and I have a couple of spots for coaching in September. Again, email me at hannah@birdmovement.com for more information.
Photo by Rémi Walle on Unsplash