In March 2023, The Royal invited the community to participate in its second annual Mental Hygiene Challenge.
The Mental Hygiene Challenge encourages individuals to dedicate ten minutes every day to their own mental hygiene for an entire month.
Mental hygiene is a form of preventive maintenance that can be likened to other hygienic practices. Just like we spend time every day on our dental health, there are also simple, research-based activities that can support our mental health.
This year’s registered participants had free access to a new-and-improved toolkit, which included 16 expert-approved mental hygiene practices with how-to videos, progress-tracking calendars, worksheets, links to special limited-series podcast (SoundCloud / Spotify), and more.
A program evaluation is still underway but early results are promising. On average, participants of the mental hygiene challenge who filled out surveys before and after the challenge indicated a greater sense of mental wellbeing upon completion of the challenge. This is indicated in both the WHO-5 wellbeing and the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing total scores.
More detailed survey results will be shared in the coming months.
Although the challenge is over for another year, the resources are still freely available for anyone who’d like to try it for themselves.
Some of the testimonials shared on the Mental Hygiene Challenge Facebook group:
“Today was a tough day and instead of turning to junk food to comfort the feelings of stress I used self compassion and ate my healthy snack and gave myself a high five.”
“I'm discovering that I look forward to my meditation time now. I set up a little corner in my room with a chair and I light a fake candle and incense when I'm in the mood. I see subtle but significant changes in how my life is going and my attitude…. it's a place I can go anytime and I like that idea. I'm grateful to this group for putting ideas like this at the front of my mind.”
“Today, I have several medical [appointments] booked, and one was an MRI. I am claustrophobic and usually have to press the panic button at least once during the process which was leaving me really stressed. This morning I used the breathing techniques that I have seen on here and made it through 30 minutes without hitting the button. It was the first appointment of the day, and after conquering that one, I am good for the rest.”