Wellness can mean a lot of different things to different people, but in 2020 staying healthy has become a priority for all. That’s why this year Movio joined in with Vista as they held their annual four-week Wellness challenge. Shaping this year’s challenge proved… challenging, as it was to be held remotely and on a global scale with teams joining from around the world. Below we take you through the different elements and some of our highlights from our 2020 challenge.
Te Whare Tapa Whā
For our Wellness Challenge, we built around a model called Te Whare Tapa Whā—a model designed by a leading Māori health advocate, Sir Mason Durie, in 1984. The model describes wellbeing as a meeting house with four walls: taha tinata or physical wellbeing, taha wairua or spiritual wellbeing, taha hinengaro or mental and emotional wellbeing, and taha whānau or family and social wellbeing, and whenua—our roots—forming the foundation.
The notion of Te Whare Tapa Whā underpins New Zealand’s Mental Health Awareness Week, which coincides with our Wellness Challenge and is now more important than ever for many of us this year.
Taha Tinana (Physical Health)
Managing our physical health is the most straightforward wellness challenge on the surface, but when the world is largely homebound and isolating, we’re getting a lot less exercise—and opportunity for it—than usual. Step challenges (with 8,000 per day as a goal) was one way we encouraged participants to get active again, as well as aiming to spend 30 minutes a day exercising in a way other than walking. Whether it was working out, cycling, yoga, or something else, putting some variety and intensity into the challenge was the goal!
Kai (Nutrition)
Healthy eating can easily slip the mind, so we included a goal of drinking 2L of water a day as one of the challenges, as well as helpful reminders to stay hydrated and keep that goal in mind. Eating healthy provided one of the easiest ways for us all to stay connected with our Wellness Challenge around the globe. After all, who doesn’t love some beautiful food pics?
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Taha Hinengaro (Mental Health) & Taha Whānau (Family Health)
Mental wellbeing, and especially social wellbeing, is challenging for many during isolation.
We created Teams and Slack channels to give everyone a great communal space to help people get to know each other and share their progress. People shared all sorts of fun wellness creativity, and we encouraged everyone to find some fun and engaging ways to change up their day-to-day; whether that was changing up virtual meetings with some crazy hats or increasing their social time among their teams.
The Wellness Challenge isn’t just about well-being with work—even when it’s hard to separate work from home by location. Dedicated time without screens or calls, and spending time with loved ones and family—family time with the kids, board games with the flatmates, or some alone time with a book or music, are all great ways to take a break, refresh, and look after your mental health.
Playing Along At Home
Since it can be harder to have that direct connection with each other as a team, with various countries around the world in lockdown and working from home, we created a points system to game-ify the challenge.
Completing the step goal for the day, having healthy food, spending 30 minutes of dedicated time away from the screen, and everything else all contributed towards your team’s point total. It’s a great motivator to see how you’re helping your team, to remember you’re doing this challenge together, and of course to celebrate what you’ve achieved.
Something we hope this whole experience has shown is that personal well-being is important and worth working hard for and that seeing the value of taking time to look after mental health in the points challenge, highlighted that it’s just as important as your greens or your day’s worth of steps.
If you’re interested in learning more about Mental Health Awareness Week in New Zealand, or the World Federation for Mental Health, visit https://mhaw.nz/ or https://www.mentalhealth.org.nz/
