Mental Health Awareness Week is next week, 18-24th May. These are, of course, extraordinary times and maybe this has come at a good time. After 8 weeks of lock-down, is it a chance to check in on that side of our health and take a moment to re-calibrate? Indeed, no one has had a holiday, and it doesn’t look like we can expect anything approaching a “normal” break for some time yet. It feels like there are plenty of questions to think about. Is this working for me? Put simply, am I OK? Is it workable long term? Now I don’t pretend to be an expert but I know, for me, that WFH 24/7, it is all too easy to take stresses from the laptop to the kitchen table, on to the bedroom etc. Without the natural home/ office partition, and without the usual social breaks, I find the cycle hard to break. I know that is not sustainable in terms of my mental health, but perhaps until now, in this new “bubble”, I have only just come to realise that.

Now an admission. Next week only came to my attention through my real estate laden twitter feed. It is fair to say I wasn’t expecting that scrolling my feed would instigate my own mini mental health “re-calibration”, and spur me to write down a few words. It is perhaps not the best way to manage that side of my health?! However, what is great to see is that the real estate industry is not shying away from what is such an important discussion around mental health. In fact it seems to be embracing it (particularly as part of a wider wellbeing focus), not only within the profession itself, but also in terms of how the industry has a wider part to play through the role of buildings. There are some super resources out there, and next week is set to host some great webinars etc. For the industry, here’s a snippet of what I have come across to date.