A Message of Hope on the Longest Night of the Year (in the Northern Hemisphere)
A video of the words below will be added soon.
Today is the longest night in the Northern Hemisphere and once again I would like to share a message of hope on this day. This is the third year in a row I am doing this and I am delighted to share with you two resources I have created for the purpose of advancing hope.
The first is a non-profit organization and the second is this web site and mental health promotion hub.
The non-profit organization is the furthest evolution of my work in violence prevention and depression prevention. What began in Zurich in 2004 (with roots in Basel in 1997) is today the World Love Forum.
The mission of the World Love Forum is two-fold: to implement love as a public health intervention and to promote a citizen movement to increase love-informed actions in all spheres of our lives.
You can find details of this at the web site, and I invite you to sign up for the newsletter there so you can keep in touch. It is a global organization, anchored in Switzerland, and I am setting up a sister location in San Francisco which as you know is a hub for innovation.
Through technology, our reach is global and when you sign up, you can stay updated on the developments and join in a world-wide movement to promote love in all its forms.
Love is expansive. In addition to romantic love, it encompasses other types of love such as parental love, love between friends and acts of service and kindness toward strangers.
Teachers and firemen are just two examples of people whose work entails love in action. They are among the millions of people in various public service jobs, who do their work day in and day out so that others may have better quality of life.
It is important to recognize the multitude of acts of service that are in fact expressions of love that are all around us. When we recognize and bear witness to these acts, we live a richer and more meaningful life.
And in turn, this can inspire us to increase the number of love-informed actions, from small acts of kindness such as holding the door open for others when we enter a building to comforting someone when they are distressed.
We live in a world that is often times focused on money, but we must remember that love is another form of currency.
Obviously we need money to survive. But just as we have financial poverty, there is emotional poverty and love is something that can uplift people out of emotional poverty and misery.
The other development I would like to share with you is the launching of the first steps of this mental health promotion hub. This arises out of my many years of work in mental health promotion. Through this web site BrushYourMind.org you can subscribe to receive the newsletter called How to Stay Sane in an Insane World, (if you have not already done so.)
You can find more details on their respective sites.
For now I would like to share with you how the two are connected.
Brush Your Mind is a metaphor I created for something called self-regulation.
That is the scientific term for how we manage our emotions and actions. It is a foundational element in our emotional health as well as in our physical health (for example in terms of influencing what we eat, when and how we exercise and so on.) It is also an important element in our inter-personal relationships – at home, school, and the workplace.
The reason the newsletter is called How to Stay Sane in an Insane World is to highlight that our emotional health and wellbeing are not only inside our heads.
Yes, one part of it is. At the same time, external forces such as toxic workplaces, difficult living conditions etc. can have a negative impact on our emotional health.
For optimal emotional health, we can think of persons and environments like two parallel train tracks. We need to attend to both.
Speaking of optimal mental health, love is an essential psychological nutrient.
We know that infants cannot survive without love, care and nurturing. But the fact is that this need for love, care and nurturing does not end in childhood. It is important for our wellbeing lifelong. In fact, isolation and feelings of alienation and marginalization are factors that threaten the emotional wellbeing of millions of people.
So the more we increase love-informed actions and promote genuine connections, the more we will reduce isolation, alienation and marginalization.
And for us humans to be able to receive love from others and to be able to offer love to others – in big ways or small – we need to be at our very best emotionally.
The problem is that we can all get busy, stressed, overloaded and overwhelmed in the course of daily life. When that happens, our ability to be present to people is diminished. Research informs us that when we are stressed, our communication skills with our most important loved ones falls by the way side; and this can easily happen to such an extent as to damage our most cherished relationships.
To avoid inadvertently damaging our most important relationships from the fallout of stress, be they in our homes, schools, or workplaces – it is important to maintain our emotional balance.
Unfortunately, challenging and difficult life events can cause our emotions to fluctuate and throw us off balance. At such times, it is important to recognize when our emotions go off track, and learn to restore our balance.
So if we want to promote the quality and quantity of love in our lives, it is important in parallel to promote our ability to stay in a state of calm as much as possible and not get derailed emotionally.
And when we get derailed, we must bring ourselves back to the calm that is always within us. That is our natural resting state both emotionally and physiologically.
As we go through life’s ups and downs and daily hassles, and witness events in the world around us, it is easy to feel frustrated or even hopeless at times.
Whether we witness or directly experience challenging situations, especially ones that feel overwhelming, keep in mind that what is happening to you is also happening to large numbers of people. The end result is analogous to a situation where lots of car drivers are driving at the same time without the benefit of driving lessons and rules of the road.
This is one of the reasons there is social and emotional chaos.
But the good news is that we can teach people how to cultivate positive emotions and ways of promoting their emotional health, and we can also create healthy environments that promote people’s emotional health.
Did you know that thanks to psychological research, there are a variety of skills training that have been shown to promote harmony in families, schools and workplaces?
People can learn how to boost their mood when they are feeling low and they can learn healthy ways of managing emotions such as anger and frustration to keep them from becoming problematic.
There are proven skills that people can learn – which helps reduce conflict and violence within families and bullying in schools.
The science of loving and harmonious relationships is already in existence.
But what is not in place at this time is a system or method of bringing this information to millions of people around the world in a cost-effective manner so everyone can benefit from these essential skills*.
By everyone, I mean rich, poor and all in between. At the moment this is only available to a limited few who have access to funds and access to these programs if they happen to be available where they live.
Imagine how the world might be be if millions of people learned and applied skills for harmonious relationships. How might it be if millions of people regularly brushed their minds to manage frustrations and life’s ups and downs more effectively?
What might your life look like if all this information was put into practice?
What might your community look like when all this is put into practice?
I have spent the past twenty-five-plus years working out solutions to some of the most widespread psychological issues of our time – namely violence, depression, and related forms of emotional distress. All together they affect close to two billion people.
Along the way, I encountered numerous experts who expressed their pessimism to me in private; this was despite their access to a lot of financial and other resources. They told me the situation was hopeless and did not expect any change in these numbers.
Their pessimism spurred me to keep searching for workable solutions to these problems. Along the way, I encountered a lot of challenges and obstacles, but I never gave up on my quest and in the process developed innovations which are now ready for scaling around the world.
The World Love Forum and its projects – which include Brush Your Mind - are among my innovations that have a scientific base, and have been peer-reviewed and are now ready for large-scale sharing with people everywhere.
At the moment, according to authorities such as the World Health Organization, UNESCO and the International Labor there is a vast amount of suffering that is in fact preventable.
Did you know that one in every three women around the world and one in every two children around the world experience violence?
Did you know that one in every three school learners experiences bullying?
Did you know that over 20% of the global workforce has encountered physical, psychological or sexual harassment?
Did you know that it is estimated that about 50 million people are victims of modern slavery?
I could go on and on citing all kinds of dismal and depressing data.
But here is the essence of hope: Love makes the seemingly impossible – possible.
Love and love-informed actions are the best way to solve these problems.
And to be able to love at your fullest and best capacity, it is important to practice good mental hygiene which starts with brushing one’s mind regularly.
The relationship between love and mental hygiene is a two-way street, because love promotes our emotional health. And when we are in a state of optimal emotional health, we are better able to love and care for ourselves and others.
Lastly, I would like to share something personal with you.
I do this work because as a scientist, I feel a deep calling to advance the science and practice of prevention.
Additionally, on a philosophical level, I have long been drawn to the words of the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau, most especially his famous phrase “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” In 2005, in a private ceremony at Walden Pond, I took a vow to stop Thoreau’s Quiet Desperation.
My journey has been challenging and there continue to be many ups and downs. But what I can tell you with certainty is that the two biggest things that have sustained me on this journey are the love of caring people I am fortunate to know, and my own efforts at practicing healthy forms of self-regulation.
What I am advocating for in the world – more love and more self-regulation – is something I rely on myself. This is backed up by science and we can also observe these forces at work in the lives of many people who endure hardships and manage to continue onward nevertheless. Perhaps you too have experienced the power of love and self-regulation at work during your times of difficulty.
As we head into 2025, facing all kinds of challenges in the world, I invite you in whatever way you can – big or small- to promote love and brushing one’s mind.
This is a goal that transcends our individual differences. This is a universal good that goes beyond our linguistic, cultural, religious, political and economic differences.
To be loved and to experience emotional calm is something all humans long for and these are skills that can be learned. Now we have the science and technology to bring these skills to billions of people.
Whoever you are: parent, teacher, community leader, journalist, health care professional, policy maker, philanthropist or every day citizen.
Imagine the reduction in suffering – and the improvement in quality of life that we can bring about by increasing love-informed actions and policies. Imagine the reduction in suffering when large numbers of people learn to successfully manage negative emotions that lead to harm.
We can stop Thoreau’s Quiet Desperation. We have prevention science and the strategy to implement that science. All we need is you.
Please join the World Love Forum and together we will build the world you wish for yourself, your children and future generations.
Thank You and I look forward to hearing from you.
*Please note: In forthcoming posts, I will be sharing with you my peer-reviewed innovation framework which I developed while at Stanford, and which offers us research-based cost-effective methods to promote the world-wide diffusion and adoption of these prevention methods.
