Tobey and I recently took our son Will to a talk at the Entertainment Centre by a chap called Hugh van Cuylenburg and his organisation ‘The Resilience Project’.
I didn’t really know what to expect. I thought it was aimed at teenagers. In reality, it was for anyone and everyone. It was inspirational, funny, thought-provoking and quite empowering.
Hugh’s message came from his experiences working as a teacher with a community in Northern India and discovering that despite their abject poverty, they were the happiest people that he had met.
Despite having no running water, no electricity, sleeping on the dirt floor of a mudbrick hut. No devices, no social media. No overseas holidays. But very happy.
It made Hugh think to himself – ‘there is something that these people are getting right. I’m not sure what it is, but there’s something…’
And this was followed by ‘there’s something that we, in our privileged worlds, are not getting right. I’m not sure what it is, but there’s something…’
Three Key Pillars to Happiness
He realised there were three things that these people practiced every single day, and he wondered if that was the reason.
When he returned, Hugh got stuck into the literature and found that there has been plenty of research over recent decades that supports these three principles.
To cut a long story short, the three things that these people practiced every day were gratitude, empathy and mindfulness.
Gratitude – being thankful for what they had, not thinking always about what they didn’t have. Or what more they needed to be happy. Being grateful for running water, electricity. A nice soft bed. A beautiful day. A lovely sunrise.
Empathy – compassion, random acts of kindness, helping others (it makes you feel good when you do something nice for someone else with no strings attached to it)
Mindfulness – enjoying the moment that you are in. Being present. Stopping to smell the roses.
I can’t remember the exact figures (this is my best recollection), but the research that he quoted to say that people spend about 51% of their time thinking about the future, about 33 % of their time thinking about the past which leaves only about 16% of their time thinking about the present.
And yet we are 100% living in now.
That really hit home with me.
What has this to do with physio?
Well, it so happens that our patients also happen to be people.
Our patients are much more than just a musculoskeletal problem. Apart from their back problem, knee problem, headache problem, they are people.
And we know that pain is a multifaceted thing with contributions from the tissues and biological stuff, but also psychological factors are important, as are the influence of society and interactions with others.
We know that psychological health affects biology and also the way that we interact with the world.
And our biology and the way in which we interact with the world affects our psychology.
Being happier and less anxious affects the pain and distress that we experience.
And being in the country with the second highest rate of anti-anxiety medication (which blows my mind), we would do well to learn any lessons that helps us to be psychologically healthier.
You can read more about The Resilience Project here https://theresilienceproject.com.au/
Their YouTube channel has lots of good stuff on it too – check it out here
Here is a short summary told by Hugh himself. As you can see, they can get involved in schools, sporting clubs, and organisations.
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