Feeling satisfied with ourselves depends, to a large extent, on many factors, biological, psychological and contextual, and necessarily involves good body and mental health.
He emotional well-being it was like, using the metaphorical expression, having a giant elephant in the middle of the room. He was there, but we didn’t want to see him. He was running around all over the place, shaking vigorously, changing his mood, jumping from one room to another, not leaving us alone. Until one day the pandemic came and we had to face it.
“What COVID-19 has done in those two years of restrictions has been to uncover a mental health problem that we already had”, the psychologist Silvia Álava Sordo makes clear almost at the beginning of the meeting.Health and emotional well-being, in the spotlight‘, organized in Seville by the Joly Group in collaboration with BBVA. Already in 2019, before the pandemic broke out, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that 25% of the world population was affected, “what happens is that we did not talk about it,” says Álava.
We were getting by, more or less, with small emotional regulation strategies —I meet a friend if I have a bad day at work, I go on a trip if I feel very stressed—, until the health crisis blocked those escape routes. And everything blew up.
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“We understand the concept of well-being not as a dichotomy between disease and health. Our approach is more holistic and takes into account biological, psychological and contextual factors, be they social, economic, labor, life expectancy or difficulties derived from the transition to adult life”, describes Beatriz Martín Padura, general director of the FAD Youth Foundation. In the end, it’s about whether the person is satisfied (or not) with his life, he summarizes.
“Half of Spaniards believe that our mental health could be better,” says Francisco Rey Blázquez, commercial and business development director at BBVA Seguros, according to a Sanitas survey. But the uncertainty — aggravated by the increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the energy crisis, which have been unleashed by the Russian invasion in Ukraine — has not helped much to improve the outlook.
HEALTH & WELLNESS
Self-esteem is a key factor in our lives. Such is its value that the quality of our lives depends, to a large extent, on the quality of the relationships we create. Knowing what self-esteem is, how it is created and what can be done to improve it has an impact on the well-being of people and on their professional performance. BBVA Tech Women had the collaboration of Silvia Congost, a psychologist specializing in self-esteem and relationships, to address this issue.
Are you sleeping well?
Álava says that one of her first questions in therapy is: “Are you getting enough sleep?” Lack of sleep causes irritability and reduces the ability to control emotions. “We have to take care of our body and our emotions,” he stresses. Doing sports, having a good social network of friends and family, eating healthy and consciously, “losing the fear of looking within”, learning to stop, and to better manage what we feel, and to live in the present, and to ask for help …, like this, all mixed up because everything adds up to capture that intangible that we call well-being.
“Physical and emotional well-being are totally related, especially when we talk about self-perception,” Padura emphasizes. A disability, an illness, an illness, a lifestyle and an incorrect diet have an impact on emotional well-being, and conversely, what goes through the mind affects the body.
Feeling bad physically and emotionally limits the lives of those who are in that situation. Many, according to the data: in mid-2020 there were in Spain 2.1 million people with a depressive picture (5.25% of the population over 15 years of age), according to the European Health Survey. Some 230,000 of them had fallen into serious depression.
The groups most at risk are women and young people, the latter having faced a perfect storm of economic and health instability, unemployment, uncertainty about the future and loss of social relationships due to the pandemic. And in the elderly, loneliness problems have taken their toll, according to the Mental Health Working Group of the Spanish Society of Primary Care Physicians (SEMERGEN).
HEALTH & WELLNESS
Self-esteem is a key factor in our lives. Such is its value that the quality of our lives depends, to a large extent, on the quality of the relationships we create. Knowing what self-esteem is, how it is created and what can be done to improve it has an impact on the well-being of people and on their professional performance. BBVA Tech Women had the collaboration of Silvia Congost, a psychologist specializing in self-esteem and relationships, to address this topic.
In the last Health and Well-being Youth Barometer of the FAD Foundation (2021), 50% of the young people interviewed declared having stress, eight out of ten had experienced some symptom of emotional discomfort in the last year (sadness, apathy, concentration problems). and 16% acknowledged suffering from mental health problems “very frequently”, 10 points more than in the previous barometer, from 2017. In parallel, the self-perception of their own health has darkened: the percentage of those who say they enjoy a good or very good health has dropped from 86.7% to 54.6% in four years.
In the opinion of the director of the Fad Juventud Foundation, the solutions go through offer the affected population self-help tools and greater public resources to attend to health, like this, without last names, both physical and emotional. And he concedes that the pandemic, at least, has served, if not to make progress in removing taboos or giving mental disorders the importance they deserve, then to raise awareness of their importance.
Although much remains to be done, Spanish families are increasingly better informed and, above all, they are asking for help from experts. To display a button: Health has been the segment that has grown the most within the insurance industry, highlights Francisco Rey, which in his opinion shows a rising demand.
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