The happivator for Mental Health Day

A random-inspired exploration into a tool to help my mental wellbing

So apparently, it's World Mental Health Day today, and there I was going to write another post on my own mental health challenges and my journey navigating them. However, I feel like I have already written about lots of related things in the past and I felt I didn't have enough time to do justice to the importance of this subject.

And this week feels different. I had a bad Tuesday, before an amazing Wednesday yesterday.

Why was it amazing?

Well, I jumped into some creative practices ahead of

Dave Gray

's Project Studio: Inception kick off last night.

By the time of the awe inspiring kick-off, I’d already tackled a bunch of mini creative projects. With fun and a bit of random. It wasn't just 'doing through it', like it has been through much of September's sludge.

Today, I used Equal Experts /Matt Ballantine's wonderful 'Creativator' to come up with another challenge. Spinning the wheels of this morphological analysis style digital tool, using categories I set up yesterday I landed on a brief.

'Do something random for marketing for 10 min'

I couldn't tackle it right away due to being at an event around neuroscience, negativity biases, attachment, sex, and a lot of related mental health issues.

Later in the day, I was reflecting on the various interventions that I have been exploring to manage my mental health - anything from breathwork, through ADHD medication, exercise, coaching and therapy.

The hard thing for me is to notice in the moment that I need help, and to use one of the tools in my ever growing toolbox.

How could I make this easier on myself?

And then it occurred to me that it could be a little mini project in itself. Could I fuse it with my random marketing challenge?

Only if I kept in alignment with my sincere marketing frames (generated yesterday in a similar project), and offered something of value to people.

a 30 minute exercise in framing my marketing challenge

And so, I used my 10 minutes to come up with a version of the ‘creativator’ using a list of categories I could generate in ten minutes off the top of my head. Pretty easy. Imperfect. But hopefully you get the idea.

I came up with some mental wellness / happiness interventions I sometimes use, added some timeboxes that could fit into my day, and then, reaching for a third dimension, grabbed the five ways of wellbeing from Mind.

When I spun the wheels on my 'happivator' (bad name, can be improved), I got to 'learn a stretch for 5 min.'

I decided to use ChatGPT, then Perplexity to define a stretch that could help me, and then did the stretches. It worked. I felt better ahead of my coaching session.

I even had time to generate some (dodgy) graphics in ChatGPT and Midjourney. The former more usable.

Serendipitously, I decided to spin the 'happivator' again later and landed on 'Do something around marketing in a random way for 30 min'

And that's the timebox I used to write this and share it with the world. But now my time is up…