A lockdown with… Ben Channon, Director at Ekkist and Co-founder of the Architects’ Mental Wellbeing Forum

My hope in writing this is there will be some shared experiences that other architects will empathise and connect with, but also some lessons I’ve learned personally (often more by luck than judgment!) that might be helpful to people who have found things more difficult.

For me, this third lockdown has felt very different to the previous ones. For a start, the weather has largely been awful, which I find has a big impact on how I feel. Living in a tiny flat with no balcony or garden has not made this easier, and some weeks I have spent almost all of my waking hours in one room, which at times in the last year has been my office, kitchen, living room, dining room, gym, meditation space, yoga studio, laundry room, painting studio and even a bedroom too when my fiancée wasn’t well.

I have also experienced a sense of frustration and fatigue in this lockdown that wasn’t there in the earlier ones. Frustration because we have a vaccine to protect people from this virus, but the logistical challenges have meant it will take the best part of a year to protect everybody, and fatigue at just how long this has gone on for now. What initially looked like a three week lockdown has derailed our lives for a year. We have been collectively grieving for the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives for the best part of a year, and experts are now saying most of us are suffering with ‘compassion fatigue’ – which is why so many people describe feeling numb right now.

In spite of all of these challenges, I have personally found myself feeling more resilient this time around, and more able to withstand the storm of events the world has thrown at us (and this isn’t just down to the fact that Donald Trump is no longer in the White House!). For the most part, this is down to the fact that I have gone into this lockdown with a very different mindset to the previous ones.

I struggled particularly badly during the second lockdown, but thankfully due to the ABS I was able to have a few sessions with a counsellor to discuss some of the things I was finding difficult to process. I had just had to postpone our wedding for a second time and there was still no vaccine in sight, yet to me it felt like nobody was trying to follow the rules to get us out of this mess. This meant that every trip to the supermarket became a stressful, even angering experience as I saw people not wearing masks properly, or barging into my 2 metre circle – and this anger quickly meant that, not for the first time in my life, I noticed my mental health starting to dip.

However, I came around to the realisation that this was more about my own state of mind than the way others were behaving. I had let myself slip into a very negative headspace where I could only focus on the bad things I saw – meaning of course that I saw them everywhere I looked in some strange form of confirmation bias. Some angry part of me wanted to believe that people didn’t care, so that is how I experienced the world. Speaking to friends and family I have discovered that this has been quite a common experience, and it may even be something you have experienced yourself.

Since this realisation, I have made a really conscious effort to appreciate that I can’t change this lockdown or other people’s behaviour, which has honestly transformed my mindset in an enormously positive way. The only things that I can do to improve my mood are to try to follow the rules the best I can, look after those around me, and try to make the most of this very strange year instead of considering it ‘lost time’.

I have also found it really helpful to adopt a ‘one week at a time’ approach, as it helped to stop the bigger picture becoming overwhelming. I know that I can get through each week when it rolls around, and try to simply make it as good as possible in spite of the situation we find ourselves in.

A big part of avoiding the overwhelming nature of this pandemic has also been to stop checking the news – something I did around November time. I turned off all news and social media notifications, and allow myself to check BBC News once a day to avoid completely falling out of touch. Instead of this obsession with the wider global story, I have focused on self-care and care of friends and family, through speaking on the phone, meditation, weekly yoga, working out (when I have the motivation) and healthy eating (although I have still absolutely been having a glass or three of wine and a takeaway on a Friday night!).

Finally I made the big step of moving jobs during the pandemic, and now work for design for wellbeing consultancy Ekkist. I had a very happy nine years at Assael Architecture before this, but creating healthy buildings has been my real passion for some time now and being able to pursue this full time has been exciting and given me a real sense of purpose. At Ekkist I get to work with a range of architectural practices, helping them to design healthier places, and I’ve found that getting out of bed every morning to work on your passion really does make life that little bit more positive.

Now that there is (seemingly) an end in sight, I have noticed a similarly positive mood among almost everyone I speak to, which is really exciting. We have started planning more AMWF events for this year and the idea of a pint in a beer garden is one we can genuinely start to get excited about, not to mention hugging our families and seeing our best friends again.

I hope that I will look back on this last year as an experience that helped me to learn more about myself and strengthen my mindset – but if you haven’t done any of those things, that doesn’t matter either! The most important fact is that we have all found our own ways to get through this surreal experience, and have supported each other during unimaginably difficult times. My other hope for the future is that even after we have all been vaccinated, we can maintain some of the best aspects of humanity that we saw in 2020 – the fund raising, checking in on vulnerable neighbours, and keeping in touch with each other whatever the circumstances.