Making advice work for you: The Five Ways to Wellbeing

Connect
Be Active
Take Notice
Keep Learning
Give

If you’ve spent time looking into wellbeing and mental health these ideas will probably be pretty familiar to you, which is a good thing. Each of these have got a body of evidence behind them supporting their role in mental health.

But how can they work specifically for us?

Connect

Connection means engaging with people you care about and who care about you. Even without mental health issues the life of an actor can make this challenging, but when you are already struggling it can feel extraordinarily difficult to maintain any kind of network or even cursory connection. Having said that, it’s also something we can do a lot about both as individuals and as an industry.

• Build connection opportunities into rehearsals and warm-ups. If you’re a director, ask how everyone is and give them all a minute to talk about what they’ve done since you were all last together, and how they’re feeling. It doesn’t take long and it reconnects the group, shakes out any issues that may be on people’s minds and gives you a chance to notice if there’s anything a bit more serious going on. You might also want to think about including exercises that incorporate safe touch (i.e. touch that you’re sure everyone is consenting and comfortable with) as physical contact can make a huge difference. Backstage teams benefit just as much from check-ins, though are possibly less keen on safe touch exercises ????
• Book calls from a friend or loved one. When you’re away from home or working crazy hours it can seem impossible to talk to people. Find someone you can rely on to take the stress off and call you at pre-arranged times – if you know you have a show on Monday at 7:30pm book a call at 6pm. It doesn’t need to be long, just long enough to make that connection.
• Talk to people you don’t know. No, I don’t mean harass random passersby, but even a small connection can be valuable. Conversations with people you don’t know well or have to work with can be particularly useful if you are having a difficult period and are struggling to engage with people closer to you.  Learn the name of the person you usually buy your coffee or lunch from and tell them yours, or, if you’re touring, take 5 minutes to chat to a member of staff at the venue you’ve arrived at. All these little connections are important and can easily get lost in the intensity of our work. Don’t let them!
• Use your tech. Apps like WhatsApp and Facebook can be a quick and easy way to have a group with you all the time. Start a group chat about something a bunch of you can join in with: football, shoes, Coronation Street. The important thing is that it’s something you all like and will want to talk about often.

Be Active

Anyone who has been stuck on set or in a tech for 12+ hours will know how challenging this one can get. Yes, there are those people whose drive to exercise seems unstoppable, but for the rest of us it’s hard enough on a day off let alone when working.

There are loads of resources online and in shops to help you if you want to pick up an exercise regime or count your steps, so I’m not going to repeat those. Instead, I will say that something is better than nothing. Walking up and down the stairs one extra time or offering to do a coffee run just to get you on your feet – anything like that gets you moving. These little things can also have the added bonus of giving you a breather if you’re feeling anxious or overwhelmed.

Take Notice

Mindfulness is a term that I expect many people are now familiar with. It is a practice that gets you out of your head and is proven to help with a whole range of problems, physical and mental.

It also can feel a bit hippy-dippy or religious, which may put you off.

Whilst you can do formal meditations at a centre or take a class if that works for you, it’s surprisingly easy to do day to day things with a bit more awareness. It still gets you out of your head and can be helpful to shut down negative or intrusive thinking. When you make breakfast notice the weight of the cutlery instead of just grabbing it, when reading a script take a few seconds to notice the paper or the tablet you’re working from. You can take notice at any time, anywhere and it does help.

This is something that can be built into rehearsals: do a body or spacial awareness warm-up; ask an actor to really explore their costume, helping them to both be present and engage with a character. There are loads of options.

Keep Learning 

For actors it can sometimes feel like we’re expected to have a bottomless pit of skills and be able to learn new things whenever they’re needed. We’re constantly adapting and pushing and, of course, learning lines, so the idea of learning as part of wellbeing might seem a bit redundant or even overwhelming.

While other members of our teams may be less likely to feel the need to know how to swim, crochet, horse ride, cartwheel, juggle, sing etc all the time there’s still a huge need for adaptability and to keep right up to date.

It’s fair to feel that constant learning is so built into what we do that we don’t need add it to our wellbeing. Just keep in mind that it’s healthy to have interests outside work and this can be a good vehicle for that. It doesn’t need to be complicated or stressful. It really can be just for fun.

Some potentially fun things to learn:

• How to play a new game on your phone.
• How to do a new hairstyle.
• The words to the song that’s currently at Number 1 (in whatever chart you prefer!)
• The birthday of each member of your cast and crew.
• The top three places to buy a muffin in your local area.

It really is a case of keeping your brain working and focused on things outside of your head. Plus, it’s amazing what weird and wonderful things you might be able to use on a job later!

Give

This was last on the list and the one I’ve struggled most to write.

People in our sector are constantly being asked to give: give our time, give our energy, give our stories, give our money, our voices, our skills, our talents…
And we often get little or nothing back so it’s problematic to ask us to give more, particularly ‘for our own good’.

Here’s what I think: when we are asked to give in our profession it is often in ways that we’re not really happy with but feel obliged to do and it often tips into being taken advantage of. What we’re talking about here is a different type of giving, one that builds our sense of value within our society, that proves we have something to offer. Maybe you have a cause that you can give time and/or money to, and that’s fantastic, but if not:

• Get your old clothes to a charity shop instead of putting them in the bin.
• Donate old magazines to a doctors surgery or other space with a waiting room.
• If you have old scripts in decent condition take them back to the place you trained and give them to the current students.

This kind of giving is not something that saps you, it’s something that makes you feel valuable and useful. Again, it doesn’t have to be huge so just do what you can, when you can. If it feels like too much then stop.

And there we have it! The Five Ways to Wellbeing incorporated into acting life.
Where there’s a will there’s always a way!

Post by Alice Brockway