Securing a Calm Mind for Uncertain Times
World Mental Health Day is on October 10thEvery year, World Mental Health Day, celebrated on October 10th, reminds us that mental health is a foundation for how we live, lead ourselves and others, and remain engaged and productive at work.
The external world has its own pace, and in it, often unpredictable events can happen. This can lead to rapid changes and economic uncertainty on both individual and macroeconomic levels. Additionally, the modern world and workplace are filled with constant digital noise, and these further boost stress and anxiety if you lack proper intrapersonal education and self-leadership skills.
We can 100% control our own inner domain, but have very limited power over the external world.
Keeping a calm mind is 100% your own responsibility; however, securing good mental wellness is both a personal responsibility and an organizational priority.
The President of the World Federation for Mental Health, Tsuyoshi Akiyama, stated, "The theme of this year’s World Mental Health Day is 'Access to Services – Mental Health in Catastrophes and Emergencies'. This theme seems highly opportune to the current global situation. The world news reports countless catastrophes and emergencies. How are these catastrophes and emergencies affecting the mental health of human beings? Is there sufficient access to services to sustain, if not improve, mental health?"
Emergencies around the globe and even in your neighborhood can happen, but it is your conscious choice to stay calm. Being the calmest person in the room can be seen as a superpower, but let us remind you, it is a learnable inner power.
So truly, it is up to you to sustain a calm mind and remain productive even if things don't go your way or situations aren't supportive of you, your family and work.
Mr Akiyama also stated that, "To counter the untoward effects of these essential natures, we need to mobilize the other fundamental natures of human beings that facilitate support, healing, and care for others."
Achieving this requires a shift from a reactive mindset and your reactive inner state, constantly worried, anxious, and stressed, often experiencing some stages of burnout, to a proactive approach that builds resilience and prevents problems before they arise.
And for sure, it is time to act, as AXA Mind Your Health report has stated, „25% of people are potentially affected by anxiety, stress, or depression at severe or more extreme levels, vs. 23% in 2023.“
As we have now communicated for 10 years, the focus must move from “treatment” to “training,” from “fixing the broken” to “strengthening the healthy.” Treatment is still needed, but priority should be keeping every mind fit and well. Otherwise, stress and anxiety levels keep rising.
We kindly remind you that prevention is better than cure, and this proactive approach starts from learning and applying practical intrapersonal skills.
Proactivity and Prevention are the New Strengths
In most workplaces, mental health is still viewed through the lens of crisis management. We talk about stress leave, mental health first aid, therapy, or medication after people have already reached the breaking point. While these interventions are valuable, they all represent a reactive approach; one that allows for decline before taking action.
This allowing in you and around you is itself a result of subconscious inner reactivity and lack of intrapersonal skills. No one is making conscious decisions to become ill. However, when you lack self-monitoring skills and a psychologically safe work environment, things turn sour quite easily.
Work-related mental problems never happen overnight. Most (mental) health issues develop slowly due to wrong lifestyle choices and constant inner noise and worry. Most of us just never notice the subtle negative changes that take place day after day.
A proactive mental wellness approach looks different (see the right side of the graph). It begins with the understanding that the mind, just like the physical body, can be trained. The result of training brings the outcomes that are listed on the right-hand side of the graph above.
You can strengthen your focus, lead your thoughts, imagination, and emotions at will. It is also about proactivity and prevention. Knowing where you focus is proactive; not letting your mind wander and worry is the prevention of mental health issues.
You can also learn how to keep your inner calmness by knowing your True Self and being connected with the Joy of Life.
Also, your self-observation matters. You have awareness, and you can use it to observe yourself and the situations around you. A conscious reflection on the observed allows aware choices.
Training your mind by learning intrapersonal skills allows you to change reactive patterns and habits. Knowing how to remain calm and reduce stress and anxiety lowers the likelihood of burnout and helps you remain steady when unexpected challenges arise.
The goal then is no longer to eliminate all stressors, but instead to learn how to notice and regulate your stress reactions. Stress may sometimes be part of life; your aim should be to train your mind to respond with calm clarity rather than panic or avoidance.
When people have tools to regulate their emotions and lead their thoughts and imaginations consciously, at will, they make better decisions, communicate more effectively, and recover faster from setbacks.
Why Prevention Matters More Than Ever
In today’s (digitally) interconnected work and life patterns, the demand for constant availability and productivity can easily outpace our natural capacity for rest and renewal.
The result of such inner speed and exposure to outer events isn't just exhaustion; it’s often disconnection. Not only from others but from our own True Self and inner calmness.
When your mind is overloaded, you lose contact with your intuition, creativity, and sense of purpose. You lose access to creativity and insights.
Preventing mental health issues doesn’t start with external fixes; it starts with understanding what awareness is and how to use sensing. You, as a person, need to learn how you can use those two intrapersonal tools.
Recognizing your own thought and imagination patterns, becoming aware of your emotional triggers, and understanding your own energy level allows you to intervene early.
Most of our worry, stress and anxiousness is internal. Yes, strange things and events happen around us, but you don't need to react to most of them.
Watch less news, listen more to silence. Be less in a busy city environment and more in the calm countryside, if you can. Take a walk instead of screen time. Sit silently in the candlelight instead of listening to the news.
You need to calm your own inner being. You need to do it every day. Also, you need to train your intrapersonal skills before stress becomes burnout or your anxiety turns into anxiety disorders.
Workplaces that adopt prevention as a strategy see measurable benefits. Reduced absenteeism, improved focus, and stronger engagement all come from investing in securing excellent mental wellness proactively. Proactive mental wellness programs that improve resilience are your risk management strategies that protect performance and profitability.
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Training the Mind: A Core Skill for Modern Leaders
If you are in a leadership position, CEO, manager, or team lead, your own mental state sets the tone for your staff.
Teams mirror their leaders.
A calm, grounded leader earns trust and fosters stability; a reactive, stressed, or anxious one amplifies uncertainty.
Training your mind isn't about pretending to be unaffected or hiding your negative emotions by suppressing them. It’s about cultivating the ability to notice and lead emotions without being controlled by them. This inner steadiness allows you to respond intentionally rather than react impulsively.
3 simple daily routines that can build good intrapersonal leadership capacity are:
- Mind check-ins and self-evaluation. Start every day by taking 10-15 quiet minutes observing your thoughts, imagination, and emotional state before the day begins. Understand that your thoughts, imaginations, and emotions aren't you. As True Self, your mind is naturally calm. Learn to (re)find this calm every morning and during work breaks.
- Plan and take pauses. Schedule short breaks to reset your mind and use full breathing during intense workdays. If it is in your power, establish a quiet room in the office, where people can enjoy a glass of water or a cup of herbal tea, which relaxes the physical body. If you work from home, step away from the computer and tasks and just sit in the quietness for 10 minutes. Keep your eyes closed for a few minutes to get away from visual stimuli.
- Reflective summary of workday. End each day by writing down what challenges you solved and what you need to do the next day. Then you can forget it. While you do this, notice how you reacted or consciously responded. Also, using journaling can work if your mind can't stop thinking. This helps to step away from work and strengthen self-awareness and adaptability.
Over time, these 3 small actions secure a calmer mind. When you combine those with using intrapersonal skills for self-leadership, it all compounds into a fit mind.
You are the one who needs intrapersonal skills to remain able to perform well under pressure, be creative under constraint, and compassionate amid conflict.
Reducing stress is the key to mental wellness and improving your inner calmness. It truly matters as 9 out of 10 employees tend to be stressed.
Calm Minds in Uncertain Times
No one can predict the exact future, but everyone can prepare mentally to act calmly in the present moment.
When unexpected events occur, be it economic downturns, team or customer conflicts, or even the ongoing global debt crises, your best asset is your calm mind.
Calmness isn't passivity; it’s a state of readiness. It allows you to perceive situations clearly, manage risk effectively, and act with integrity rather than fear.
A calm mind doesn’t appear overnight; it’s cultivated through consistent mental wellness training and self-care. By slowing down your thoughts and letting go of negative emotions and unnecessary worries, you create inner space to notice how to act, think strategically, and lead wisely.
In workplaces where inner calmness and a peaceful work environment are valued, creativity thrives. In such environments, people feel psychologically safe to share ideas and take calculated risks.
The collective emotionally calm climate becomes one of collaboration rather than competition. This shift builds sustainable productivity rather than short-term performance spikes that lead to burnout.
From Awareness to Action: How Employers Can Support Proactive Wellness
On World Mental Health Day, mental health awareness campaigns will circulate everywhere. However, awareness about mental health without action to secure mental wellness and calm minds often changes nothing. When the campaign ends, old habitual patterns kick in.
The busyness continues and ruins business. Stress keeps pushing people towards burnout, and talented people leave as they can't cope with noise, reactive demands, and toxic leadership. Even leaders themselves burn out and leave.
Business and HR leaders play a crucial role in transforming mental health awareness into daily practice. They need to train their own minds. Also, they are the ones who have the power to give their team access to mental wellness trainings and become adequate examples of how applying intrapersonal skills makes them calmer and more focused.
Here are a 7 steps to make proactive mental wellness a strategic part of your organization:
- Model calm and accountability at the top, demonstrate that training your mind makes a difference. Leaders must show that taking care of their own mental wellness is part of effective leadership. When executives talk openly about life-work integration, emotional regulation, keeping focus calmly, and being purposeful, it allows others to do the same.
- Integrate mental wellness training into the work schedule. Allow everyone to take one or two paid hours per week for mental wellness training.
- Move beyond compliance-style workshops. Offer practical training courses on stress reduction and securing mental and overall fitness. Value self-awareness, inner calmness, and secure silent space(s) for relaxation and creative work. We remind you that creativity and insights are accessible only through silence.
- Allow employees to self-monitor their inner states (all Wellness Orbit e-trainings have self-evaluation tools built in). Only when people learn to recognize early signs of fatigue and stress can they reset their mental state before productivity declines.
- Encourage pauses and reflection. Building a culture that allows short, restorative breaks throughout the day helps prevent overload. Even a few minutes of conscious breathing and taking 10 minutes to sit in silence between meetings can make a measurable difference in focus and mood.
- Reward long-term focus. Replace constant urgency with strategic reflection. When teams are rewarded for focus, sustainable results, and creativity rather than quick reactive responses, the entire organization becomes calmer and more resilient.
- Support a safe environment and radical open-mindedness. A psychologically safe workplace encourages people to speak up about challenges before they escalate. Early conversations about stress or workload can prevent more serious mental health issues later. Honesty about challenges can secure a more solution-focused mindset where people support each other.
Building Resilience Through Connection
While training your mind is individual (as all skills are personal), proactive mental wellness is a team journey. Supportive relationships at work strengthen resilience, helping people handle uncertainty together.
When teams genuinely care about each other’s mental and physical wellness, they become stronger and more adaptable in times of pressure.
Even a small gesture, like a friendly check-in by a manager, an encouraging message, or a moment of aware listening, can make a profound difference. They remind people that they are seen and valued, reducing isolation, stressors, and overall anxiety from not knowing what comes next.
In this sense, training your mind is also about training your heart. A fit mind is empathetic, full of patience, and can stay kind even when under stress. These are the valuable human qualities that technology, no matter how advanced, can never replace.
A Call to Rebalance: Technology and Humanity
As digital tools continue to reshape our workplaces, it’s easy to mistake constant activity and blinking screens or AI tools as progress.
Innovation doesn’t come from constant noise or urgency. Creativity and insight surface only when the mind is calm and quiet enough to listen. That inner silence is the birthplace of new ideas.
While AI can combine old ideas in various ways, it is still the calm human who is creative, innovative, and insightful.
The highest value in your business is still people. It is easy to forget that as society and markets bet on the AI revolution.
All overhypes fade. People who are fit and well are those who thrive both when markets rise and fall. So train your brightest minds, they are your most valuable asset.
Your most valuable asset isn't any physical possession; it is your calm and fit mind and your healthy body. Without health and experiencing wellbeing, there is no productivity or good employee engagement levels.
This year's Gallup study indicated the actual hidden potential of employee engagement, as in best practice organizations, up to 70% of employees are engaged and thrive, while in most workplaces, this number remains just 21%.
Balancing digital efficiency with actual human presence is essential for long-term mental wellness. People who are fully present and operate with a calm mind are engaged and can thrive at work.
Encourage boundaries, both digital and emotional boundaries, so people can recover and reconnect with their natural inner calmness, which is what truly matters. It is what secures personal sustainability.
Personally sustainable, calm-minded people create and drive sustainable and thriving businesses.
When we lead ourselves and manage technology consciously rather than letting it run us on a subconscious and reactive autopilot mode, we create environments that are both productive and psychologically healthy.
Conclusion: The Future Belongs to the Calm and Conscious
As we observe this World Mental Health Day, remember that prevention and mental wellness are not one-day campaigns; they are lifelong practices.
The ability to remain calm, clear, and compassionate amid uncertainty will define the most successful individuals and organizations of the future.
Training your mind, supporting your team’s mental wellness, and embedding proactive wellbeing into your culture are good ethics and a thriving business model. A resilient workforce is a competitive advantage in any economy or amid any market challenge.
True strength lies in how calmly you can navigate a world full of endless external stressors.
When you lead with a peaceful mind, you create ripple effects of calm that transform not just your organization, but the people within it. Thriving and fit-minded, calm people are still the key to success!
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This Mental Health Day blog post is contributed by Kaur Lass