By Rayhan Abdullah Zakaria Chartered MCIPD, Doctoral researcher & Lecturer at the University of Chester Business School

We now can do a fantastic amount of tasks with the click of a button. We are told that we can work smarter, live longer, learn faster, and consume quicker, yet living in the age of fast fashion, fast life, hasn’t improved our mental health. On the contrary, generally speaking, today more people are suffering from mental health compared to our previous generations. The internet is full of weird and wonderful noise on what we need to do to look after our mental well-being and yet it may be time to go back to basics and learn from our senior generations, after all, they are our grand and great grandparents, but they are also a treasure trove of life skills.  Point to note that every generation had good and bad what we should try to do is take the good and ignore the bad from all the generations including our current time.

Look after your physical health

This doesn’t mean signing up for a gym membership or some expensive upmarket hot yoga session. Rather it’s more about listening to your body and doing what you like doing. A regular brisk walk in your local park could be much better than going to a gym full of strangers all crammed together trying to use all the weird and wonderful machines. Physical activity is half of the debate, our senior generations ate wholesome organic natural food while now we gorge on ready-made fast food. We need to feed our bodies with high-quality locally produce sustainable wholesome food just like our senior generations did. Remember Hippocrates said let food be thy medicine after all.

Fix relations

In our current fast pace of life, we have forgotten to talk to each other as a family. On demand, media has taken over our lives and we have more screen time as compared to having a normal conversation. Our senior generations did not have the never-ending youtube shorts of cute cat videos or bottomless TikTok videos. In general, what they did had was each other to talk to, they were experts in fixing relations, and making friends, it’s true they did not have thousands of Facebook friends, but they had real genuine friends. Maybe we need to do the same. Maybe next time we sit together as a family to have our dinner we could turn off all media devices and try talking to each other. It might be hard at first but soon we will be able to be free of the rectangular devices called smartphones permanently stuck to our hands.

Read

This doesn’t mean carrying the entire British library catalogue in our back pocket but rather it means picking up an actual physical book and having quiet time to start reading it. Since the advent of ebooks and e-readers, we have forgotten what a book feels like or what a new book smells like or what the texture of the page feels in our hand. Our senior generations did not have the world’s books at their fingertips, on the contrary, they had a few books from their local library that they read. This act of reading builds patience and deep thinking as you tend to get fully focused on one book. Through reading, you can up-skill yourself which may allow you to gain higher qualifications which in turn may allow you to improve your financial health too.

Do charity

Even our charity has become a few clicks of a button compared to how it used to be like parting with physical cash to an actual charity box or better even helping out in the local community event helping to feed the local community. Helping a fellow human being in suffering goes a long way in fixing our mental well-being. It allows us to understand and be part of the human story it makes us feel connected at the same time we can see the positive change we are making. Charity always starts within us first; this means we should look into our family and extended family members who may need our help during this difficult period. This also hopefully may link back with our earlier point of fixing relations.

Re-evaluate your surrounding

We are often influenced by our surroundings, the environment and also the people we are associated with. It’s time to re-evaluate our inner and outer circles as well as our environment to cut out negative energy, stress and people who always harm our mental well-being. It’s better to surround ourselves with positive energy as cultivating a positive outlook will benefit all of us during these special hard periods.

Focus in present

We often get carried away about our future and forget the present. Planning for the future is important but what we generally tend to do is overlook the present. Our senior generations may not have had the world at their fingertips and be able to see different lifestyles and compare. However, what they were able to do was be content with their present. If you think back to the huge historical events which they have witnessed and yet they stuck at it and made the best of their situations, they may not have foreign holidays, but they made the most of going to their local areas. Celebrating and being content with what we have is a good thing as compared to thinking about what I could have and wish I had. In other words, being grateful will have a positive effect on our mental well-being as there are so many people out there who are in much worse condition than we are now.

In conclusion

Our senior generations may not have all the technological breakthroughs and advancements which we have now but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a thing or two from them. After all, life is full of moments which we can learn from, so why not give it a try and see where it leads us? End of the way having a strong happy mental well-being is what we all need now during this cost-of-living crisis.