Crafting for Mental Health Awareness Week
At the Mindful Craft Company we offer a range of Mindful Craft Sessions, all designed to bring teams together to craft and create messages of positivity, gratitude, values and connection. Our sessions not only allow time for mindfulness, but it’s a great way to connect teams. So, when we were asked to support multiple teams during Mental Health Awareness Week, we jumped at the chance. Here’s a round-up of the sessions that we delivered throughout the week.
We kicked off the week with a mindful painting session with the Herefordshire & Worcestershire Chamber of Commerce. We worked with their Wellbeing Champions to get the team expressing themselves creatively. We started the session by asking everyone to write down the things that made them anxious - those small things that build up, or our never ending list of things to do, or the negative things that we say to ourselves. We then painted over the words, and visualized rubbing those words away. We used paints to express ourselves, creating our own piece of unique abstract art.
This year the theme of Mental Health Awareness Week is Anxiety. Tapping into creativity can be such a powerful tool, for when we are feeling anxious. By taking the time to craft, or be creative it can help to ‘switch off’ from the pressures and stresses of daily life, and focus entirely on the craft - the perfect distraction tool, that can reduce stress, and improve your overall sense of wellbeing.
Around half (48%) of British workers do little or nothing to relieve work-related stress, according to research from educational website Obby.
Workers in professional services struggle the most to do anything to relieve stress, with 58% saying they don’t do anything, closely followed by those in education (55%) and healthcare (53%).
“As well as reducing stress this can positively affect an employee's focus, concentration and efficiency in the workplace. We see this time and again; employers who provide workers with healthy and stress-busting ‘perks’ like yoga, meditation or even arts and crafts workshops reap the rewards in a more productive – and satisfied – workforce.”
Our second session during Mental Health Awareness Week was with Edgbaston Stadium. We worked with their internal team, to think about their WHY. We spoke about their purpose, and used clay to bring their WHY to life. The teams spoke about family, belonging, friendship, connection and goals and these were created into a variety of plaques, bowls and even clay roses to represent their WHY. We loved the creativity of this session, and it was great to see so many unique outcomes.
The Mindful Craft Company was founded by Fiona Lock, after using crafting as a tool to overcome mental health issues, so we understand first hand how beneficial creativity can be on your mental health. After becoming a first time mum, losing her ‘dream’ job, and faced with a global pandemic, it was crafting that helped Fiona find a moment of calm and deal with negative thoughts. Realising the powerful effect that creativity had on her in such a short space of time, Fiona knew that craft could help so many people, and so The Mindful Craft Company was born.
We finished the week off by hosting a drop-in lunchtime session at The Kiln Co-Working in Worcester. It was great to offer something a little different for people to pop into on their lunch break, and unwind with something a little different.
We loved working with so many teams over Mental Health Awareness Week, and if you’re interested in a session for your team, then please get in touch. Have you got something planned for the next wellbeing days?
Wellbeing days coming up…
World Mental Health Day - 10th October
National Stress Awareness Day - 2nd November
