It's world mental health day on the 10th of October. This blog is a day late, but I'd like to use it to discuss one of the aspects of mental health that can be overseen. We tend to view mental health as an internal issue - feeling our feelings, learning to regulate, to communicate and ask for help. These are all improvements we can make from the inside out, but, what more can we be doing as a society to help facilitate better mental health?

We know intellectually that the spaces we inhabit play a large role on the way we feel. This is why decorated rooms, houseplants, and art all make a tangible difference on the way we feel about a space! But what about novelty of space?

The remnants of the pandemic and a rise of remote working entails more and more people being cooped up in one space. The term "touch grass" has become internet fodder, but the sentiment actually makes a good point. We need to be experiencing new things in order to not just feel content, but actively happy and secure.

Doing something new, something different or exciting or challenging slows down our perception of time, because we're actively creating memories and storing new information in our brain. Repetition and routine does the opposite. The lack of accessible third spaces is making us genuinely lose time.

I mention time as it is such a marker of productivity. In our jobs, at school or even in our home life lost time is mourned. And we think that the remedy to that is doing less to make time for doing more of the same thing. But is it? Instead of doing less, we need to do more varied things which is where the need for third places is so important.

I mentioned at the beginning of this blog that mental health is becoming associated more and more with individualistic effort. While that's important, we need community. We need a stranger to ask us how we're doing, a person to make small talk with in a space other than home or work. It's a shame that so many of the things we can do outside of work and home require a payment of some kind. We sneer at groups of teenagers in mall, or parks, but where else can they go? Adults need places like these too, that don't require you pay for a beverage or food or tickets. We need to be able to exist as communities again.

Cities used to be built with this in mind! But zonation laws have made it nearly impossible for a visit to a third place to be a casual, necessary activity especially in the US and Canada. Walkable cities is a term thrown around a lot, but another benefit to them is that they make the existence of easily accessible third spaces possible.

So in honor of world mental health day go for a walk, or treat yourself to a sweet treat, or try out a new skill you've been wanting to try! The world has so much more potential than what we make of it.

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