CalmCon 2022 Wrapped: An Overview
We’ve recently wrapped up our 2nd year of CalmCon mental health & well-being festival for Asia, which took place on 6 - 9 October 2022, leading up to World Mental Health Day on 10 October.
This year’s festival tagline “Well-being for your whole being” sought to emphasise the importance of how the various aspects of our life influence our mental well-being: from sleep and exercise, to our finances and relationships, to work and finding purpose.
Through 3 themes of “Calm”, “Thrive”, and “Workplace Well-being”, CalmCon featured a host of talks and activities covering the entire spectrum of mental health.
Here’s what happened at CalmCon 2022:
1,100 people attended from around Asia
17 virtual talks were held over 4 days
43 different speakers joined us: from mental health professionals, business and government leaders, to people with lived experience
3 in-person events were held in Singapore, at 1880, WeWork, and Temasek Shophouse
CalmCon also partnered with 60+ community partners from across Southeast Asia, and received the support of event partners Banyan Tree, Lululemon, and Temasek Shophouse to help make the festival a success.
While we shared our top 5 things to look forward to ahead of CalmCon, here are our 5 highlights from CalmCon 2022:
1. Discussed how to support workplace-wellbeing
One-third of our adult lives are spent at work, and at Calm Collective we hope to promote a sustainable way of working that is conducive to our mental health. We discussed practical strategies around practising self-care, drawing healthy boundaries, dealing with difficult emotions & setbacks, and how to make sleep your superpower.
Learn more about Workplace Well-being here
2. Engaged corporate leaders to normalise mental health at work
Fostering mental health-friendly workplaces starts from the top. Corporate leaders have tremendous influence to impact workplace culture, and to drive efforts to support well-being at work. At CalmCon 2022, we hosted the Well-being Leaders Roundtable for 20+participants, and were joined by corporate leaders such as Ernest Lee (Head of HR, Shell Singapore & Indonesia) and Eunice Yap (CMO, The Esplanade Co.) at our CalmCon Workplace Well-being conversations.
We hosted our Roundtable at 1880 Singapore
3. Learned more about how to find calm
Through the sharing of personal and professional experiences, we examined various mental health topics from an Asian perspective. Conversations we hosted include: “Unpacking Mental Health Myths”, “Why Asians Don’t Go to Therapy”, “Trauma and the mind-body connection”, “#ifeelyoubro: Men Talk About Feelings”, and “Caregiving & Compassion Fatigue”.
Learn more about How to Find Calm here
The panelists of “#ifeelyoubro: Men Talk About Feelings”
4. Discovered how to thrive
How might we rise above daily stressors, and develop our resilience to thrive? We explored helpful perspectives and practical strategies around how we work towards becoming our best selves, through conversations with folks like clinical psychologist Dr Lin Hong-hui, Mdm Rahayu Mahzam (Senior Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Health and Law, Singapore), and Navin Amarasuriya (COO, The Contentment Foundation).
Learn more about How to Thrive here
The panelists of “Change Your Self Talk, Change Your Life”
5. We connected with our community in-person
We had the opportunity to connect with 100+ folks from our community. We brought our Calm Circles peer support programme to “real-life”, and paired it with a talk on #StrengthInVulnerability and a movement workshop on 8 & 9 October respectively.
Learn about how our IRL events went here
What’s next?
Connect with our community at Calm Circles, our peer support programme to support mental health & well-being. Sign up at www.calmcircles.co
Bring Calm Collective to your workplace: Learn more about our mental health & well-being programmes, and connect with us here.