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Wellbeing and Your Environment with Lee Chambers (E21)

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Happiness for Cynics Podcast

This week, we interview Environmental Psychologist and Wellbeing Consultant, Lee Chambers. He helps companies increase productivity, motivation and innovation by applying the latest research from psychology, neuroscience and physiology to the workplace. His philosophy comes from his own challenges and business journey, having had mental health struggles, being made redundant, losing the ability to walk, and yet despite all the challenges he has gained more clarity and managed to harness elements of the resilience bounce. 

About Lee Chambers

Lee Chambers – Environmental Psychologist, Wellbeing Consultant and Founder of Essentialise Workplace Wellbeing

Lee Chambers is a Wellbeing Consultant, Workshop Facilitator and Sleep Specialist. Having spent the last 10 years focusing on wellbeing and performance in the local government, corporate organisations, and in elite sports, he has now brought his experience and qualifications with the aim to impact the wellbeing of thousands of individuals and businesses.

Lee has qualifications in Performance Nutrition, Strength and Conditioning Coaching, and Advanced Sleep Consultancy, and he delivers multi-discplinary workshops focused on improving performance and productivity through increasing employee wellbeing. This is an issue very close to his heart, as after losing the ability to walk in 2014 due to autoimmune arthritis, he has battled back to achieve a positive health outcome, and is now on the pathway to become medication free. He holds an MSc in Environmental Psychology, with a focus on human interaction with workplaces and natural environments.

He also presents the Health and Wellbeing show on Ribble FM Radio, and speaks in Educational establishments about his varied career path, health challenges and having a resilient mindset.

Based in Preston in the North of the UK, Lee is currently working with business owners and employee teams to create culture change, wellbeing strategies and champions. He is a father of 2, coaches a disability football team, and enjoys eating good food with good friends. He is currently writing his first book, “How To Conquer Anything”, which will be released in 2020.

Transcript

M: You’re listening to the podcast happiness for cynics. I’m Marie Skelton, a writer and change and transformation specialist, and my co-host is Peter Furness. Peter?

P: Hi there. I’m Peter Furness, and I’m a remedial therapist, ex professional dancer and happiness aficionado. Each week we will bring to you the latest news of research in the world of positive psychology, otherwise known as happiness.

M: This week we have a special guest who’s here to talk to us about well-being and your environment.

[Happy Music]

M: Lee Chambers is an environmental psychologist and wellbeing consultant. He helps corporations increase productivity, motivation and innovation by applying the latest research from psychology, neuroscience and physiology. His philosophy comes from his own challenges and business journey, having had mental health struggles, being made redundant, losing the ability to walk. And yet, despite all the challenges, he’s gained more clarity and managed to harness elements of the resilience bounce.

M: Hi Lee, thanks for joining us today on happiness for cynics. I’m so excited to have you on the show.

Lee: It’s a pleasure to be on today, Marie.

M: What a story! We touched a little bit on it in the intro, but can you start by delving a little deeper into your background and journey and explain to us what you do.

Lee: Oh, yeah, I’ll try and condense it into a nice, digestible form. So, yeah, I grew up as one of three brothers. We were always fed, watered and had a roof over our heads. We didn’t have a typically fancy life. But what we had, what you could say was all our basic needs. I was the first one in my family to go to university and that again was seen is quite achievement by my parents, and they really pushed me in that direction. I then went into corporate finance and I, very quickly after six months, found myself in the middle of the credit crunch, so people above me started to be made redundant. But only a week later I was pulled in and made redundant myself.

So that really did change my direction and that led me on a path which took me through numerous jobs and brought in a video game business. So I went to the local government and then worked helping unemployed people to find direction, sharpen their interview skills, get more inner confidence and then go on and get themselves a new job on. Then I worked in elite sports which again showed me the cutting edge of performance. How much money and experimental elements I used at that level, both physiologically and psychologically also made me think, if this money and effort and time was spent on the ordinary person, how many millions of people it could help. And at that point in my life, I lost the ability to walk [due to] illness over the course of a week. Completely changed my world view.

M: So within a week you went from being completely healthy and normal to not being able to walk.

Lee: Yeah, So it was my 29th birthday. I was fully independent, fully mobile, playing team spots and doing pretty much whatever I wanted. My son was 18 months old, wife for six months pregnant, and all of a sudden I went from fully independent to not able to drive myself not able to feed myself properly and it was a, it was a major challenge. And I look back now and realise if it wasn’t for the people around me and the position I was in and I was lucky enough to, while I lost my job. I still was able to run the business, because a lot of it was digital.

What kind of happened is at first I was like, Why me? This seems really unfortunate. Chronic disease? I’m not even 30. I’ve looked after myself, that very quickly catalysed into well, you’ve been incredibly ungrateful for your mobility all these years. In fact, you’ve been incredibly ungrateful for all the people that are now caring for you. You’ve been incredibly, you’ve been so ungrateful for the simple fact that you grew up in the first world had a pleasant childhood on all these opportunities. This free education, all these different, all these different jobs that you’ve had all these different careers, you’ve had that, you’ve had the ability and the freedom to start up a business, which is now financing you through these difficult times and just really change my world view everything.

I need to be more grateful. But I also need to be resilient have a mind set and be proactive. Attack this disease as much as it’s attacking my body and that has lead me through to where I am today; helping people, so increase the health outcomes, increase the happiness in the workplace and really just to build a world where we’re all a bit happier and spread that happiness between each other and we go into work happy on we leave work happy.

M: That’s a huge ask, though, isn’t it? [Laugh]

Lee: No, well I see it’s a massive goal that I’ve smashed into so many little pieces. And I can do lots of those little pieces over the course of my lifetime and see if I can get.

M: It is such an inspirational story. I don’t think many people can even imagine what you must have gone through and the struggles that you faced since then. And to see you so proactively and positively attacking the next stage in your life. And what’s next is truly an inspirational storey. So thank you for sharing that with us. What I’m also came to understand now is you’ve taken a whole different direction career wise and started a business called Essentialise. And it says here that you’re an environmental psychologist and you work in regenerative environments. Can you help to explain what it is that that means and what you do with your day?

Lee: Yes, to really kind of explain Environmental Psychology. It’s a relatively new field and you can split it into three, so I have a lot of contemporaries across a lot of different disciplines. But if you split it into three and make it simple and digestible.

There are Environmental Psychologists who deal with urban environments, so buildings, transport, city planning, schools, hospitals.

Then a lot of my contemporary work in our interaction with nature. So how humans interact in natural environments;

And the third subsection of Environmental Psychologists look at environmental behaviours. So, why we see the world the way that we do, why we take sustainability measures, how some people believe climate change is gonna devastate us or some people believe it doesn’t even exist.

I’m looking at how their behaviours and people’s values and really how that then translates into the world and how environmental behaviour could be influenced. So my section is around regenerative environments in sleep and in the workplace. So the principle of regenerative environments is that when you’re in an environment, you have a lot of stresses, a lot of them are sensory, so if you can imagine you’re in an office, it’s noisy, it’s not well lit, there’s pollution coming in from the road. You’re in an environment also where you’ve got mental stresses, so you might not get on with the person sitting next to you, you might struggle with your boss. He’s not very good at communicating, so that kind of builds an atmosphere in the work place. Both physically and psychologically. It’s about looking how we can make the atmosphere more positive. So you leave work as energised as when you went in, as happy as you went in.

M: Mm hmm, and it’s really circular, isn’t it? The more you look after employees, the better they perform for you.

Lee: Definitely. And in some ways, it’s really a hidden performance advantage that isn’t often utilised, but the way the culture’s gradually moving, people are starting to see how important is.

M: Yeah, I heard someone talking a little while ago and they said for too long corporates have broken the employer/employee contract. They’re meant to borrow an employee for 40 hours and then give them back in the same state that they borrowed them in. And for too long they’ve been borrowing them for 50 or 60 hours and giving them back to their families broken. And I thought that’s a really different way of looking at it. And it really shows how we’re evolving our understanding of the role that a corporate can play in looking after employees.

Lee: Yeah, it’s quite interesting though. Because again I’ve got quite a similar analogy within business. So, if you lease a car, you’re expected to return the car in the same condition, minus wear and tear, and wear and tear, we all get physiologically as we live. Obviously, that wear and tear ends up in one day with us passing to the next realm. But if you take your car back and it’s dented it’s scratched, it’s not been looked after inside, you get charged and also the way that companies, especially production companies, building machinery, to be depreciated all the time.

Well, sometimes companies treat employees like a piece of machinery that’s going to depreciate and gradually become obsolete and then they chuck it out. For that same piece of machinery they spend thousands of pounds for thousands of dollars to lubricate that machine over its life. And yet they’re shy to invest in the development of the staff, to even ensure that the wellbeing is kept to a level where they’re able to perform and do the role because they’re the face of the company, they’re the people that quite often would drive in the company themselves and yet you wouldn’t want the person driving your company to not be psychologically or physically well. It doesn’t add up yet it’s so underutilised and finally it’s starting to make that move from humans being a resource to humans being the people.

M: I couldn’t agree more. As someone who’s been through burnout myself in a corporate. I’m a hundred percent aligned with you. What I am still really curious about is the concept of environmental psychology. So for those of us who are new to the field and you mentioned, it is a relatively new field, can you share any surprising or unexpected maybe research your information about your field in general? What does some things that people don’t normally know?

Lee: Yes, I mean, there’s lots of interesting things, and at the moment with Covid[19], strangely, suddenly but interestingly from a scientific perspective, this is like a big experiment that you can’t carry out. You can’t get millions of people across the world to have to isolate in a certain environment and then be able to get that qualitative and quantitative data about how that affects them. So Covid literally is an environment of psychologists dream, because it gives a massive case study and a massive amount of data.

But in many ways, the things that people are not so aware of is just how vital nature is in our regeneration. And as things like Ecotherapy and Attention Restoration Therapy [ART] start to gain traction. They are both cases where we’re given a significant amount of nature exposure, and it actually helps with mild to moderate depression, and it helps with attention deficit disorders. And it’s incredibly powerful to get that at a young age, which is why sometimes you imagine, you know, the outdoor activity centres that take disadvantaged children and go and give them a really powerful dose of nature. Because so many children now live in urban settings, not aware of where the farm animals that they might eat come from, they don’t really link to the understanding of a forest of trees or a field or even sometimes the sea and those [are the] environments where we’re fully ignited from a sensory perspective.

So if you imagine you’re in the forest, you can hear the birds you can smell the flowers, your feet are touching the ground, and you feel that mossy ground and you stood next to a massive oak. And that’s the feel, like a small part of something much, much bigger and the sunlight shines through your eyes and boosting your serotonin production, and it’s just so vital to get outside. And yet, in so many ways, our coming generations spend more time inside than they ever have before. And that is out in the western world people are more concerned about safety, about the increasing vehicles and children not being helped to be dependent and search, go and explore, go on an adventure in the same way that even my generation was 30 years ago and that, in its own way, is a challenge.

But it’s helping people link back and I kind of feel that what Covid has done, especially in the countries where you’ve got you know, your one period of exercise. These people have been walking and finding green spaces only a few minutes away from the house, but they had never taken the time from their busy life to go and explore and finding those foot paths and then going, really enjoying themselves and get themselves out, and we’re only really grateful for the environments we have access to when they’re taken away. In the same way that I was so ungrateful for my ability to walk until I lost it. We are not very good at preventing but we are very, very agile in a crisis.

M: It’s human nature I think. I have a similar story, I had an accident 2017 and couldn’t walk for a long time. And it truly, and there is a whole body of psychological research into the, what happens after you’ve been through a major trauma as well.

So, there is definitely what you mentioned there about going out into nature, is there any research about bringing nature indoors? Is there any benefit to having more plants in your indoor space as well? Or water features? Does that help at all? Or do you really have to get out and make an activity of it.

Lee: Yeah, so by incorporating natural elements into the design of offices and houses, it does increase your well-being, and it does bolster your ability to, you know, recover from anxiety and stress. It doesn’t confer the whole benefit that being outside in nature does because it’s not a full sensory experience. However, if you have a good number of house plants they don’t offer you that natural landscape.

We can see more shades of green than any other colour and that’s due not only to our evolutionary biology but where green lies on the spectrum and how our pupils and eyes work. But we have that affinity for natural environment. So if you have a room where you have house plants, you have items made out of natural materials that have a feel on a texture, a grounding. If you say have a landscape picture on the wall, even those really small elements all the time because you’re continually exposed to them you become slightly regenerative to your health.

And then you look at house plants and how much they clean certain pollutants out of the air it’s the natural purifiers and also the fact that you have to mindfully look after them, water them, make sure and in many ways what we do is we represent and we anchor into the fact that they grow as we grow. It’s something that’s only kind of starting to be in research now. But it’s our understanding that actually, as the world revolves around you and moves, if you could make a bit of progress and the things around you are making a bit of progress it actually compounds in your mind to feel like you’re actually generating that forward momentum. It makes you have more energy to wake up in the morning, and it really does propel people when everything around them is just growing. And that’s something that you won’t see if you have an urban environment, which doesn’t really have any natural features.

M: Yeah, so I was gonna ask you if you had any tips for our listeners about how to make practical changes in their homes or office environments to improve their well being. We just talked about plants, definitely. Is there anything else that you can share the secrets of that will help with well being?

Lee: Yes, I mean probably the most important thing is just to step back and have an awareness about how much your environment plays a role in your well-being and starting to just understand the basics that the stress of our environment, it does affect us.

So when you’re kind of working out actual tips and starting to think ‘Ok, so I’ve got my office, or I’ve got my home office and home offices are great, because you have more design flexibility. You just have to incorporate the elements that you work in, in an environment that was originally designed for something else. But you can start to work on that if you treat it mindfully.

So yeah, it’s kind of looking at, you’re working for roughly eight hours a day and sleeping for eight hours a day. So your workplace environment, your sleep environment, 100 hours over a week, two thirds of your life spent in those environments. So it’s important to look to optimise them. So you’re kind of looking at ways to, because of how we work and we have ultradian rhythms so 98% of ourselves have this smaller clock inside. Obviously we have the circadian rhythm that runs 24 hours a day ultradian rhythms run about 60 to 90 minutes and that allows us to really work deeply for that period. But then we need to have ten to fifteen minutes off, disconnected. So we can reconnect to work effectively again. When we continue to push that, that’s when we get burnt out.

So, what I do in terms of suggesting for offices were actually looking at what the environmental stress is.

First of all Noise.

Are you in the seat that’s next to the main road? Are people buzzing, are cars coming past all day? What we do is while we tune out, it gradually stresses you on a low level, and that builds up over time. Other things to consider are:

Density.

So we need personal space in an office we’re too crammed and that can be an environmental stressor. Yeah, we also need to be close enough to build, to socially connect with people so being sat in an office and being completely bereft of anyone else to speak to, is just as dangerous as being crammed in. So it’s about finding that, find that sweet spot. Some people’s personal space needs are larger than others, and that’s about where you become understanding of what your environmental needs are. Other things to consider are:

Temperature.

You can actually find out where people are comfortable and set them in the in the zone that’s best for them and that in itself is regenerative when they understand; Actually, I want to sit here in 16 degrees. He wants to sit there and 19. He feels comfortable. I feel comfortable. We switch places. We wouldn’t be comfortable. And it’s just about kind of understanding that we can use our thermostats in our houses to also create our workspace that is comfortable for us. And then finally, it’s really looking at things like

Lighting.

So thing is that everyone has their individual lighting need as we get older, our lighting need needs change, but you don’t want to be in that grey room yet you don’t want so much light to come through that it’s blinding you, blinding your screen and natural light is always gonna be better than artificial light. But artificial light can be and is increasingly becoming a little bit less invasive than it used to be in the old fluorescent strips, so you can get creative with that. They get that Connection and suddenly they’re more likely to stay, their less likely to go off sick, become more productive, more creative and just happier at work and it spreads.

M: I think that’s, that’s a great place to end with happiness spreading. I’m so upset that we’ve only gone through half the questions that I really wanted to ask you. So we might even invite you back on this show in a little bit to cover some more things if you, If you’re up for it. Before we go, how can people find out a bit more about you?

Lee: So you can visit my website at: leechambers.org, I’m on Instagram @essentialisecoach and Twitter @essentialise

M: Thank you. I appreciate your time and have a good evening. Have a good day, actually all the way from England.

Lee: Thanks, it’s been a pleasure Marie.

[Happy Exit Music]

Related content: Listen to our Podcast: Designing Happy Cities (E19) and Podcast: Enabling Happy Cities (E20)