Supporting Employee Wellness

United Utilities supply and remove water across the North West of England. They supply water to 7.3 million people across Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Cumbria and Cheshire.

Motivated to support their 5,000 staff through the long months of lockdown they commissioned a series of 12 short films, that were distributed throughout the business to help employees understand all the many things they can do to get their brains working better on a daily basis.

Neuroformed Ltd wrote the scripts collaboratively with Blue Shift films, who provided directorial, filming and editing services, producing a successful series of films covering a wide variety of topics in a compelling and accessible fashion.

Below is a taste of the neuroscience-informed content covered by this series of short films.

Coping with Change

The human brain evolved to adapt our abilities to the changing pressures of any environment.

This film describes the concept of neuroplasticity, emphasising that anything we do regularly, intensively and keep up the practice in the long run can physically rewire our brains to help us adapt to new situations.

Practical tips were provided to help people understand what they can do to ensure they put themselves in the right environments and do the right things to ensure these changes are optimally helpful to improving wellbeing.

Control

This film outlined the importance to taking time to distinguish between matters over which a person has control versus those over which we have no control.

The first steps towards resilience are to avoid spending time consuming resources relevant to what is outside our control (e.g. doom scrolling on social media, excessive news intake) and focus on breaking down what can be controlled into bite-sized pieces.

Neuroscience of Anxiety

Fear is the brain's response to immediate danger.

Anxiety is the brain's response to possible future danger.

A better understanding of the neuroscience of anxiety can help people to develop better psychological self-management processes.

Stress

The stress hormone cortisol is extremely good for us, in small doses. Only chronically high cortisol is damaging to mental health.

Acute doses of cortisol help us deal with the root causes of stressful situations, making us feel willing and able to take the necessary steps to make the situation less stressful so that cortisol levels can be allowed to subside.

This film helped people to understand what cortisol actually does to body and brain to help us and more effective ways of managing stress to actively reduce cortisol levels.