Health And Wellness Approaches Extend Into Schools And Work

Late last week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced the city’s commitment to student well-being. During the annual State of the City speech, Adams commented, “This year, we’re rolling out the biggest student mental health program in the country. We will provide our high school students with everything from telehealth care to community-based counseling depending on their individual needs.”

NYC is joining a list of municipalities and individual schools aiming to address the longstanding impact of the last three years on students and employees. The pandemic reset the health and wellness industry, extending formalized programs and professional providers into K-12 schools, colleges and universities, and work environments.

No longer isolated as a nice-to-have, health and wellness programs, and associated activities are growing in popularity and application across the globe.

Pundits to alternative health approaches continue looking for data points over time that supports full-fledged investment or semi-permanent alteration to current efforts to assist students and employees.

“Mindfulness, when delivered in a high-quality structured program, can be beneficial for youth,” says Erica Sibinga, a professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine shared with NPR. “We can’t immediately assume it’s effective when delivered in other ways.”

A constant challenge for employers aiming to support their respective workforce remains the lack of activation for the services allotted to employees across corporate environments. Gartner’s 2021 EVP Benchmarking Survey found that an overwhelming number of employees (87%) have access to well-being services, yet only 23% of employees utilize the suite of offerings.

A year prior revealed similar results across Gartner’s well-being survey illustrating that 46% of organizations increased their budgets [well-being] relative to 2019 expenditures, with 64% outlaying additional offerings to support employees.

Educational Efforts

Research in the UK looked at the efficacy of mindfulness training spread across five studies, implemented by 100 researchers over eight years working with 28,000 teenagers and 650 teachers in 100 schools. Professor Mark Williams, the founding director of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre and co-investigator at the University of Oxford, underscored the level of burden students currently struggle with and the subsequent need to find substantive interventions.

“The findings show that the idea of mindfulness doesn’t help – it’s the practice that matters,” Williams says. “On average, they [students] only practiced once over 10 weeks of the course. And that’s like going to the gym once and hoping you’ll get fit. But why didn’t they practice? Well, because many of them found it boring.”

Those in the industry of well-being and health and wellness contend that it is only a matter of time before regular application and practice impact adoption. A challenge that both sides of the debate agree on is the increased anxiety experienced by students before the pandemic and post-Covid-19. JAMA Pediatrics examined 5-year trends among U.S. children and revealed that the rate of child and adolescent anxiety increased by nearly 30% between 2016 and 2019. The research conducted on approximately 175,000 children found that over 5.5 million students in 2020 were diagnosed with anxiety.

Author and founder of Chakradance, Natalie Southgate, teamed up with youth yoga teacher and writer Anna Kelly and created Inamojo for elementary school children. Now in 14 countries, the soon-to-be re-released offering under the name Chakradance Kids has found participation high due to the movement aspect. “The secret, if there is one, is in the structure of the classes for youth. We spread music, stories, movement, and creative art through social-emotional learning (SEL), and the combination has resulted in incredible feedback from kids and parents,” says Southgate.

The program’s origination for Southgate was born out of an offer to come and teach the principles of Chakradance in Bear Cottage in Australia. The facility supported youth with HIV, and Southgate’s experience expanded her understanding of anxiety and stress across the continuum of one’s lifetime. “Bear Cottage was a defining moment for me as a person and a practitioner. The engagement I experienced propelled the next 10 years of my life.”

Next Phase of Intervention

The line demarcating work, school, and home continues its respective journey toward complete assimilation. The days of separation appear in the rear-view mirror of life, making the balance variable in the ever-popular work-life balance discussion even more pressing in 2023.

Corporate environments are touting resilience training as the new directive linked to a happier and healthier workforce.

Educational institutions across the country can look to California as a benchmark of substance over style, urging schools across the state to add yoga to the school day. Actively integrating alternative health and well-being activities into the school day communicates consistent messaging of support to students, faculty, and parents. Further research will be needed to see the long-term effects on identified health outcomes giving credence to the UK study whereby intermittent application led to lukewarm results.

Southgate sees a melding of personal and professional practices as an indicator that adults and their children seek lifestyle changes, not interventions that come and go. “I go back to the early days of my work when Deepak Chopra invited me to teach in California at his Chopra Center. I was a party of one. Fast forward to today, and I’m proud to have trained over 1,000 facilitators in over 60 countries. That only happens when we address the whole person,” says Southgate.

The concept of tradition and practice, especially in the places of learning and work, can bristle when alternative approaches are introduced. This becomes feasible when implementing one’s value proposition puts established practices into the audit process. School days have been structured for decades, and wedging in new offerings that are semi-permanent can challenge foundational structures. Mayor Adams has crossed a threshold of influence for other major metropolitan cities to replicate from the classroom to the cube farm and beyond.

The same can be said for corporate environments steeped in procedural legacies. The result reveals kids and adults looking for lifestyle interventions that are a part of daily life and practice. Deepak Chopra’s Chopraverse is another example of the digital and physical worlds uniting to bring calm into people’s lives through what he and his co-founder Poonacha Machaiah call Digitial Therapeutics.

The sheer volume of well-being offerings and solutions indicates a new path of common interest, whether in the metaverse or classrooms and boardrooms. Southgate believes that the connection between the proliferation of opportunities and education boils down to education. “My work is about education and facilitating the next generation into states of healing that are substantive,” she says. Acceptance of accredited healing approaches like Chakradance, and others, indicates a positive direction forward.

Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.