Under the weather? Here’s a social prescription.

There seems to be a lot of talk at the moment about “social prescribing”. Instead of, or perhaps as well as, prescribing medication and medical interventions, doctors will start to prescribe social activities, from visiting galleries to playing the drums. And, from my perspective, this could not happen sooner.

There is an abundance of research and evidence about the benefits of doing something which has no purpose other than allowing us simply to be. Something into which we can submerge ourselves, losing track of time, and something outside of or other than the material and the physical. Something which Émile Durkheim referred to as “sacred time”, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explores as “flow”; being so engrossed in an activity that one loses a sense of time, and the reward is the activity itself.

Assuming that prevention is better than cure, what could you be doing to improve your well-being? How will you have sacred time, and find flow? Whatever you find which takes you away from the material and the physical, make sure it becomes a part of your daily, weekly, monthly and yearly life, one step at a time. And you know that it makes sense, don’t you?