Health and wellbeing of our team, the end of the beginning

Since last summer we have been writing about our SuperWellness project at Charterhouse. The programme was initially implemented to help with the health and wellbeing of our staff. We have always prided ourselves on the emphasis we put on our people and this was an important step in helping them improve both their physical and mental health.

Little were we to know when we started the programme that the world was going to change and how the physical and mental needs of our team were going to change.

Since the Covid-19 crisis has begun, we have adapted the programme to ensure the team were still supported and continued to have the motivation to look after themselves.

We recently held the last session for this stage of the program covering a range of areas and we wanted to share some of the lessons we learnt from it.

Brain Health

This session was about making the right food choices that can influence our brain chemistry and change the way we feel and boost our brain performance. The session also covered how exercise can affect our mental health. Fit in body, fit in mind is a saying that is used a lot and this session demonstrated just how important it is to keep your body fit to help keep your mind strong.

Food for the mind

Over the program we have discussed how bad food choices can contribute to stressful thoughts, anxiety, depression, poor concentration, and poor memory and can create brain fog. We have also talked about the “mind melters” to avoid which are bad fats, smoking, drinking and caffeine.

More importantly we have learnt that our second brain resides in our gut and communicates with the central nervous system, triggering mood changes and affecting our thinking and memory. Good gut bacteria is essential to help many psychiatric conditions as well as your learning and memory and to care for our gut we need to have a diet that is high in fibre, includes pre-and probiotics, fermented foods, resistant starch and try to consume only non- processed gluten.

Exercise and mental health

SuperWellness’ Magdalena explained that research has proved that exercise can help slow or reverse the brain’s physical decay, improve memory, alleviate pain and elevate our mood. Our brain is a muscle and it also needs “exercise. The best type of exercise for the brain is to increase our heart rate with exercise that has rhythm, coordination challenges, thinking challenges and is engaging, such as Zumba.

The next step for the team will be to implement their new, healthy habits. For us as business, we are now looking at what we can do for our team going forward and how we continue with the SuperWellness philosophy.

One last snippet of information, did you know that the healthiest job in the world is an orchestra conductor as this includes all the above.

If you want to find out more about why we work with our team on health and wellbeing and what SuperWellness has done for us as a business contact us.