How are we really doing?

Areas of focus

The areas you think are the most important to focus on:

1. Stress and wellbeing
2. Our immune system
3. Memory and concentration

The area you give the lowest priority is beauty, which actually makes us rather glad. If we can prioritize health, beauty tends to come along for the ride.

Well then, naturally we became very curious, and we decided to dive deeper into your answers.

Negative stress

Hold on tight — are you sitting down?

As many as 65% of us experience negative stress in everyday life. Almost 7 out of 10 people feel stressed in a way that affects them negatively. We do not know how that expresses itself, but perhaps we can draw a few conclusions a little further down. One definition of stress is that you feel the demands of your surroundings, or your own demands, are greater than what you can cope with. So we can create negative stress for ourselves.

Low mood

Low mood means, put simply, that you are down in spirits or feel sad and subdued. In our screening we asked you how you experienced your mood, and once again these are not figures we cheer to read:

36% of you feel low all the time

33% feel low sometimes

That gives us a total of 69% of you who feel low, always or sometimes.

Worry & anxiety

The trend we note above naturally continues when we come to worry and anxiety:

33% of you experience worry & anxiety very often

53% experience it now and then

Adding that up, it comes to as many as 86% who experience anxiety to varying degrees.

Sleep

There is one more point we want to include in this “wellbeing article”, and that is our sleep. The optimal number of hours of sleep for adults is between 7 and 9 hours according to various sleep researchers. Newborns need the most sleep and older people need less, but spending 8.5 hours in bed is good for us. According to our analysis, almost half of us (45%) sleep less than 6 hours a night. This of course affects us both mentally and physically. Just as many often felt tired and exhausted; we cannot see, however, whether these are the same people — that is, whether it is those of us who sleep too little who experience these symptoms.

Screen time

Here is the last point we take from the analysis regarding our wellbeing, and that is screen time. Researchers have shown that a lot of screen time has a negative effect on our sleep, our stress levels and our mental health. So there are only upsides for our wellbeing in putting the phone aside as much as we possibly can. It is positive to see that major phone manufacturers such as Apple have built in tools for pausing and switching off the phone and focusing on time for yourself.

Conclusions

It is fairly easy to draw conclusions from the statistics above, even if they are perhaps not entirely scientific ones. But it may not take an Einstein to establish that it all hangs together — our level of stress, how much we sleep, worry and anxiety — and that all of this drags our wellbeing down. It becomes a downward spiral: something happens in life that creates anxiety and we sleep worse. We feel stressed and we worry, and our mood is affected. Stress, worry, anxiety and low mood are all symptoms or causes that pull our mental health down.

What can we do to change our wellbeing for the better?

Oh, there is so much we can do, and I could list a whole host of measures.

The question is how YOU are doing. Which area is the biggest challenge for you? What do you need to prioritize?

There is general advice that can be given which helps in a positive direction, and it is the following:

1. If you feel low, have trouble sleeping, dwell and brood, and are stressed, you may be depressed. A visit to the doctor is recommended, since the sooner you tackle the problems the better, so that you do not sink deeper into a depression.

2. All the symptoms above that affect mood, sleep and stress levels can also be signs of an illness, a deficiency or an imbalance in the body. Ask your doctor for a blood panel that can rule out an underlying cause. A body struggling with a nutrient deficiency, or perhaps with thyroid problems, or going through menopause, can produce symptoms similar to depression.

3. Exercise! Cycle, run, walk, swim — it does not matter what you do as long as you move! Especially if you have a sedentary job. Running for 30 minutes three times a week works wonders for both body and soul, for your mood and for your sleep. Getting your heart rate up matters for the body's circulation and for the heart, and it is part of being human to have the fitness to cope with a little exertion. The couch-potato life really does us no good at all.

4. Eat well and take your supplements. The food we take in is our fuel, and we can choose to fill up on good food or on junk. Unfortunately, stress and anxiety mean we often soothe those symptoms with chips, sweets or alcohol, and we do ourselves such a great disservice. The body's stress signals are calling out for peace, for help, and it is easy to misread those signals. If we fill up on things that feed more anxiety, it does not get better — it often creates a vicious circle of guilt, more anxiety and more stress.

5. Take breaks in everyday life. And by that I do not mean taking a 5-minute break at lunch where you look at your phone; I mean taking a proper break from everything. From your colleagues, the children, the phone, the house, the laundry, all the have-tos. Plan breaks where you can be completely undisturbed, preferably sitting out in nature looking out over a wheat field or a lake. Or go for a walk in the woods and leave the phone at home. Leaving the phone behind is, for many of us, actually the same thing as a break — that for a while we break up with our tough reality and give ourselves time and priority.

Hugs!

Shama Persson, author of the book Kantstött & Väldigt Värdefull