A need to work on mental fitness - Dark world a real threat to wellbeing

That dog-eared dismissal “if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen” may have taken on a new, almost universal relevance.

After all, the whole world may have become a kitchen of sorts where the temperature is, metaphorically and inexorably, rising. Despite that, the get-out-of-the-kitchen options are as limited as they are unattractive.

For anyone of a glass-half-empty disposition these are challenging, fraught times.

That reality stands even if history shows our great grandparents faced two catastrophic world wars and many more life-changing challenges.

Whether a combination of all of those last-century pressures equate with the worst predictions around climate change remains an open question.

It is one though that creates uncertainty and adds momentum to doubt and fear.

Those fears have been recognised and labelled by medicine as eco-anxiety, a condition more and more a factor in episodes of depression experienced by otherwise healthy people.

As if that was not enough to discourage optimism, the IMF last week warned that the global economy risks a return of the Great Depression.

Speaking in Washington, Kristalina Georgieva said this dire prospect is driven by inequality and financial sector instability.

Current IMF research,which compares today’s American economy to the conditions that led to the Wall Street crash of 1929, reveals that similar trends are underway. Speculation around how our unequal, polarised world might cope with such a catastrophe is unlikely to lighten anyone’s mood.

Neither is last week’s statement, one that despite all the Conservative promises, presages a disastrous hard Brexit, from British chancellor Sajid Javid who warned there will be no alignment with EU regulations once the UK exits the EU. Goalposts moved, challenge darkened.

Then, if those grim realities have not made you flee the kitchen in despair, there is the prospect of US President Donald Trump beingre-elected.

That he might win a second term aided and abetted by an out-of-control social media that refuses to take responsibility for the lies it publishes is hardly a champagne moment.

Social media influence may be a relatively minor factor in our election.

Nevertheless, social media turns what might have been a half-civilised debate about our options into a tsunami of unrestrained diatribe. Hardly a champagne moment either as we move towards the carefully choreographed auction stage of the political parties’ campaigns.

These are just a few pressure points. There are many more — coronavirus anyone? — and all seem immediate because of myriad news conduits.

This all begs a simple but possibly easily ignored question: What can we do to maintain emotional and psychological equilibrium in a world increasingly out of kilter?

Earlier generations relied on religion to make the incomprehensible endurable but that path is not a popular as it once was.

It seems necessary to develop an awareness around protecting our emotional and mental health. It seems time to join some kind of a virtual gym where the mind, and soul can develop the robustness needed for today’s world.