Are you aware of mental wellness training benefits?

What are the benefits of training your mental wellness and your brain? The simple answer would be your wellbeing and productivity.

When we feel well and are mentally well, we work well. Whenever business leaders or employees experience stress, burnout, worry, anxiousness, or even work-related mental illnesses like depression and anxiety the productivity drops, they lose their ability to drive results. Either partly or fully.

Poor mental health and stress are scientifically proven to affect negatively:

• Capacity to stay focused on the task at hand;
• Job performance and productivity;
• Engagement with one’s work;
• Interpersonal communication both within teams and with customers;
• Physical capability and overall health.

Basically, every workplace that doesn't address mental wellness proactively faces actual loss that ranges annually between £702 ($915 or 780€) and £3,353 ($4,370 or 3,710€) per every employee. Those numbers originate from the Deloitte UK study, which we have covered in one of our previous mental wellness blogs.

Besides avoiding loss, we remind you that the proactive mental wellness approach can have an ROI that is even up to tenfold (see the old blog link above). So, the first clear benefit is financial.

Ability to adapt with constant change as a benefit from mental wellness

Are you aware that the human brain is wired to adapt to constant change? In nature and our life, change is the only external constant, and thus our brain is wired to adapt to changes subconsciously.

The constant change involves learning and this, in turn, produces constant neurochemical and molecular changes in our brain cells known as neurons.

Neurons can be seen as messengers that communicate by transmitting electrical signals between them, and these signals are activated by the exchange of chemicals in the synapses. Such learning and re-learning are constant and the human brain can be seen here as a sophisticated communication network. How we react is saved in our subconscious mind that manages all of the systemic processes that we don't have to think about and that occur for us seemingly automatically.

What we often fail to notice in a work context is a simple aspect. Are those learned in 'automatic' inner reactions and patterns supportive and healthy? Do those reactions strengthen our work and our interpersonal relations or not?

We very seldom question what we have learned as 'automatisms'. At least we don't do so until we have learned to use our minds consciously and lack practical awareness-based intrapersonal skills for self-leadership.

Once we take our control back from our reactivity-based subconscious mind we can start to develop an ability to see all change as an opportunity.

How can I bring on conscious change?

Intrapersonal skills need to be learned as this enables us to bring conscious change into our habitual patterns that sequentially will give us more inner freedom and puts us back in the driver's seat of our life.

Now our intrapersonal skills allow us to develop different and healthier neuronal patterns. This is possible as our brains are neuroplastic.

If we want our new neural activity patterns to drive learning, we must achieve three objectives:

1. We need to encourage new neural activity patterns to form and thus face the learning opportunity;
2. We need to detect or become aware of new patterns;
3. We need to notice that those new patterns directly cause the new behavioral capacities, that in turn can support our daily life and work. 

Such benefits are proven scientifically. For example, in the scientific paper entitled "New neural activity patterns emerge with long-term learning". So, the second benefit is our ability to adapt and make conscious decisions due to training our neuroplastic brain.
 

Innovation focused mental wellness benefits

We managed to show that training our brain and mental wellness can bring clear business and behavioral pattern benefits. But let us explore one more important domain.

Today businesses discuss the need to innovate and adapt themselves. Adaptive employees are here one supportive aspect, however, innovation also demands a second component – access to qualities like creativity, insight, intuition, and ability to describe in detail what new you discovered to others, preferably in an easy-to-understand way. Here again, intrapersonal skills, such as the conscious ability to choose the right words and direct your thinking at will, play a huge role.

There are many misconceptions about creativity. Many speak about the need for creative thinking, but this impression is wrong, because, in real life, there is no such thing.

There is creativity and there is thinking, but there is no creative thinking. You either are creative as you have access to your own intuition and inspiration or you think instead. While you think automatically and combine what you already know, your access to creativity remains blocked.

Do you prefer innovation or re-combination of the old?

Thinking is based on what we already know. Such knowledge is the repetition of the old that we learn in schools and from books, movies, or even from our experiences and relationships. There is nothing new in this old knowledge. At best, we can only combine those different bits of knowledge in an unseen way. Such a combination may appear fresh, however, lacks the fundamental quality of innovation. That is why A.I. isn't creative and is only combinative (and it can develop such combinations already much faster than any human brain ever could).

A.I and other self-learning programs can only combine the known stuff, in this sense, it is like a subconscious human mind wired to use old neuronal and behavioral patterns. That is why there is such a huge struggle in creating self-driving cars. Even A.I. can successfully combine all that it has 'learned', it can't adjust to new unseen human interactions without learning it first.

We humans, on the other hand, can access and use our awareness. Our awareness allows us, to use our free will that, in turn, allows us to escape preprogrammed subconscious behavior patterns when needed. A.I. and all programs lack such capacity.
 

Human awareness is the opener of the new pathways

In new solutions, we humans always use our awareness as the primary tool to learn and respond. However, because we use our subconscious repetition, it easily replaces such insightful moments with our own inner 'autopilot' mode when we lose our full mindful/aware contact with the present situation. Such subconscious patterns aim to keep us safe when our full access to consciousness is switched off, due to our untrained minds. Training our brain and mental wellness simply hasn't been taught to us in schools.

Innovation demands a different approach than combining the old. It requires first becoming conscious and learning how to use our own awareness as a tool, in the active form (see the illustration by Ingvar Villido on the link). Awareness allows observation and discoveries.

Our awareness is the most basic intrapersonal skill that then, in turn, can grant us access to insights, intuition, and other marvelous inner skills. So, the third benefit of mental wellness is a sustainable doorway to innovation.

This doorway also gives us individual freedom and the ability to integrate our work and life into a holistic one.

Conclusions

The three main benefits of investing in mental wellness are:

1. Clear and proven financial ROI as mental wellness boost business and improves interpersonal relationships (both within your team and with your customers);
2. Ability to adapt to changes and make more conscious decisions;
3. Opening the doorway to innovation and creative solutions.

And then as a side effect, people also feel well and can thrive at work and in their personal life.

We hope that this isn't your first visit to our webpage and you already know that your investment into mental wellness online training on this web page is reasonably priced. That is what this mental wellness revolution is all about – giving your team access to intrapersonal skills that allow them to be well and work well.