Do-­‐It-­‐Yourself Happiness Overview “Why weren't we taught this stuff at school?" DIY Happiness participant Photos: Caro Swan Over the past ten years, there’s been a growing field of research that combines aspects of psychology, health and economics that is exploring what makes us happy – and what kind of things that we can do to improve our well-­‐being. It’s been partly fuelled by the rapid pace of social, environmental and technological change -­‐ and partly fuelled by a growing recognition that money isn’t buying us as much happiness as we thought it would. In 2007, the Mental Health Promotion Team at South London & Maudsley NHS Trust began to develop an 8-­‐week programme to explore some of these themes. Our aim was to create a space where we could learn together: to develop a better understanding of how to live happier lives and how to build a more sustainable future for us all. We based the programme on the principles of positive psychology and combined theory with lots of hands-­‐on activities to explore the concept of happiness from both individual (me) and collective (we) perspectives. As our 8-­‐week DIY Happiness initiative evolved, we designed our “wheel of well-­‐being” (WoW) as a framework to explore the component parts of happy lives from the perspectives of body, mind, spirit, people, place and planet. Each of the 8 workshops explores a theme from the wheel of well-­‐being and combines practical and theoretical learning activities. Each session builds on the previous so you get a deeper understanding and anchoring of key concepts. “The best training I have ever been on – I felt privileged to have been part of it” www.wheelofwellbeing.org The workshops are all linked to free downloadable resources. On completion of the training the WoW team provide web and telephone support to participants to adapt, co-­‐
produce and implement well-­‐being activities for their communities. Since the first DIY Happiness workshops in 2009, more than 400 people have taken part. It’s been so popular that in July 2015, we launched the Wheel of Well-­‐being website (www.wheelofwellbeing.org.uk) to make some of our tried and tested DIY Happiness resources freely available further afield. (We’ve been working locally with the SLaM Recovery College, nationally with Kent County Council and internationally with Wollongong University and Queensland Mental Health Commission in Australia to incorporate the WOW framework into a range of services and organisations.) Wheel of Well-­‐being The Wheel of Well-­‐being (WoW) is a flexible and creative framework for health promotion that consists of a series of colour-­‐coded icons that represent six universal aspects of well-­‐being: body, mind, spirit, people, place and planet. The WOW approach is the centre-­‐piece of a range of well-­‐being initiatives including DIY Happiness, and www.wheelofwellbeing.org which features range of free web-­‐based tools and resources designed to encourage innovative new approaches to improving well-­‐being at three distinct levels: individual, group/team and strategic/organisational level. ‘Such a fantastic range of ideas, very informative”
www.wheelofwellbeing.org