The Arthur Ellis Bananas & Doughnuts
We developed the Arthur Ellis Bananas and Doughnuts as a starting point to begin helping you look at what you do that helps your well-being and what might negatively impact it. The bananas and doughnuts can be used to help you get in control of your mental health and well-being rather than feeling that it’s controlling you!
Well-being must not only be a priority but it needs to consistently evolve throughout our lives. Our bananas and doughnuts can help us see what areas of our life are contributing towards our well-being and keep us wary of those behaviours that might be taking away from it…
Bananas
Imagine if you were to have a banana every day…you would only get healthier!
Each day your body is getting all of those amazing nutrients, vitamins and minerals that it needs. You will have more energy and over time your health will only improve.
This is exactly the same when it comes to our mental health and well-being. How we spend our time is like what we are eating. If we are spending our days doing banana behaviours, it’s not only going to make us feel better but it can help us gain back control if we begin to struggle.
Doughnuts
Let’s be realistic…we all love a doughnut now and then.
A bit of indulgence can’t hurt. However, let’s look at this in the same way as our bananas. If we were to have a doughnut every day…what would happen to our health? Slowly but surely, we would begin to experience sugar crashes, feel more sluggish, maybe put on weight and generally become more and more unhealthy.
Plus…if you’re anything like us…one doughnut would turn to two and before we know it we are having a dozen at a time!
Behaviours are exactly the same. We all have those things we like to do as an indulgence, whether it is scrolling through social media, binge watching our favourite series or cancelling social events even with our drinking. If our doughnuts begin to overtake our bananas, and become our main behaviours then our well-being and mental health will suffer.
What is Well-being?
Well-being is how comfortable, happy, and healthy we are throughout our lives. It’s not just how we feel day to day, it’s much more than that.
We like keeping things simple here at Arthur Ellis and our own well-being can be broken down into five areas of behaviour that help us to build and protect our well-being. Like how brushing our teeth helps our teeth keep nice and healthy, there are five types of behaviour that goes towards keeping us in that state of feeling comfortable, healthy, and happy.
These five different areas of well-being have been researched a huge amount to understand their benefits. The New Economic Foundation reviewed over 400 scientific papers to see what are the typical trends that helps people get their mental health and well-being back on track.
At Arthur Ellis, we use these different areas of well-being to help companies and individuals manage their emotions and mental health.
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How to manage your Well-being
Our well-being can and will be impacted as we go throughout our lives, we all experience those ups and downs, even if what we are facing is positive like a wedding, house move or holiday. Why is it that those positive life events can cause us so much stress?
Put very simply, The Arthur Ellis Five a Day that contribute positively towards our well-being, we all do things within these five areas. When we experience any life changing event, these five areas may be disrupted.
Move
Focus
Discover
Communicate
Help
Have you ever become really busy at work and missed that lunchtime walk? Maybe you have had a really long week and when we put our feet up on a Friday, the last thing we want to do is exercise so we order a takeaway and question why Netflix are asking us if we want to ‘continue watching’…OF COURSE WE DO! But, something that simple can begin to have a negative impact over time.
When our lives become disrupted by these different life events, we aren’t often able to keep these positive Five a Day well-being behaviours going. We call these our banana behaviours. If we have a banana every day, we will only get healthier over time. If our bananas become disrupted, they can be replaced by behaviours that can slowly turn to being negative, like missing that lunchtime walk or binging a TV show.
We are by no means saying that this is a bad thing to do, but these are our doughnuts, those indulgent behaviours that are fine from time to time but if we are having them every day, we will start to see our health decline.
By first understanding what we do as our Arthur Ellis Five a Day, we can begin to see where things might be missing in our lives that may be contributing to how we are feeling. When we have all of these Five a Days in place, we can then adjust them when those life events are coming up. They may lower in effort, they may change completely but we are keeping consistent which is the most important thing. Then, we begin to really gain control over our well-being and start to see incredible benefits.
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