Mental Health Awareness Week is an annual event, taking place between 9th – 15th May this year.
One in four adults feel lonely some or all of the time. There’s no single cause and there’s no one solution. After all, we’re all different! But, the longer we feel lonely, the more we are at risk of mental health problems.
For Mental Health Week this year, we’re raising awareness of the impact of loneliness on our mental health and how we can support our team’s emotional wellbeing, this week and beyond.
The Mental Health Foundation announced the theme they would be exploring in 2022 is loneliness. Loneliness is a key driver of poor mental health, which with many of us working remotely is even more important to bring awareness to.
Our newly formed Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) team wanted to implement an activity that could support the mental health of our team by encouraging them to take practical, positive steps towards their wellbeing and taking care of themselves. We envisioned an activity that could be completed in a collaborative way so that regardless of whether they were in the office, or at home a sense of ‘togetherness’ could be achieved to combat loneliness. This gave rise to Remap’s Mental Health Awareness Bingo!
Conceptually, most of us are probably aware of what a game of Bingo entails. However, we swapped out the numbers for wellness activities and encouraged employee’s to complete a square each day with the aim to get five consecutive squares by the end of the week. Blank squares were also included to allow people the opportunity to choose something for themselves. The last element was to ensure that even though we may be performing tasks individually, we felt together. So, each person’s bingo card would be found on a sheet within one Excel document…for the super competitive this meant you could spy out who was leading the way to five squares before they’d even virtually called out ‘Bingo’ on the Teams channel!
As Mental Health Awareness Week draws to a close, we hope to have raised awareness of the impact of loneliness, and taken fun steps towards tackling it, together.
To explore more about mental health and loneliness, you can access the Mental Health Foundation’s new report ‘All the lonely people’ here.