Mental health and wellbeing

Retreat to reset

By Samantha Tennent

A luxury resort in Waikato is giving rural women a safe haven where they can go to rest, recharge and gain the tools to make changes in their lives.

Struggling with her physical appearance and the pressures of juggling work and personal life, Joelene Ranby had a snap moment when she knew something had to change. But she needed to find where to start.

Nearly 10 years later she is helping hundreds of women every year learn how to make those changes through Resolution Retreats, a luxury health and wellness resort in Waikato for women.

“When I was on my own journey it was slow going, I didn’t have the skills to change overnight so needed to learn the basics and adapt what would fit my lifestyle,” Ranby says.

“But I focused on one thing at a time and chipped away at it, if I had tried to do everything at once I don’t think I would have succeeded, it’s just too hard to change that much that quick.”

The retreat offers the space, support and tools for women to uncover what they are lacking or need to change in their own lives and how to go about it. It came off the back of her own journey when, realising the process could be faster and easier for others, she wanted to share her knowledge to help.

“If something like this existed back when I was getting started it would have made a huge difference and that’s what we focus on now, inspiring people to make changes in their lives to help them feel better and give them some tools to reduce the pressures they’re facing,” says Ranby.

During her journey, she was working as a financial accountant but she felt incomplete. She also began studying nutrition and started sharing what she was learning with others. This grew and as a hobby, she started holding weight-loss and health retreats, where she shared her knowledge of health and wellness.

But the juggling of full-time work, study and the hobby mounted and she made the call to leave employment and let her hobby take over. This was the birth of Resolution Retreats, which has proven to be a great success.

“I felt a lot of self-doubt at the time but it really has paid off. What we’re doing here and what we offer is really fulfilling, I love helping others find their light,” she says.

The retreat offers a number of packages and women from all backgrounds come to get the space to reflect and uncover what they need to change in their lives and learn how the tools to make the changes.

“The environment at the retreat takes those pressures away, allowing women to reflect on how they can make changes for themselves.

“Although, for most people, those pressures they arrived with will still be

Juggling work, personal life and her physical appearance, Joelene Ranby snapped and made some major life changes. She started Resolution Retreat to help others who find themselves struggling.

“Rural people lead very busy and sometimes isolated lifestyles and we think both types of retreats have a lot to offer for the rural community.” Joelene Ranby

there when they get back, so it’s about chipping away carefully, making small changes and focusing on one thing at a time.”

Ranby explains the scale of pressure versus productivity or performance, how as pressure increases, performance increases, but only to a certain point and any further pressure once that point has been reached will reduce performance.

“The point is different for everyone but once they go over that point they go into a state of overwhelm or what I term the O-zone,” she says.

“And when people are in that space everything is hard and inefficient.

“But to come out, the first thing they need to do is acknowledge they’re in that zone and then find ways to reduce the pressure and in the future, it’s recognising when they’re approaching the O-zone and reducing the pressure before tipping into it.”

She explains the challenge is knowing what our personal signs are because everyone will respond differently to the O-zone. And we train ourselves to ignore the signs that we are there or that we are approaching it. So she recommends talking to family and friends, asking what signs they see.

“Our friends and family are good at recognising if we’re becoming overwhelmed and they can be a good checkpoint to help us see when we are approaching that space and to know what to look out for in the future.”

Resolution Retreat is a luxury health and wellness resort in Waikato for women and offers a multitude of different packages to help women get the tools they need to make changes in their lives.

Continued page 56

GIVE YOUR BOOTS A REST

WIN a luxury three day ‘Fresh Start’ women’s health retreat at Resolution Retreats, valued at $1,740!

Unwind in the peaceful settings of Lake Karapiro, and reset your health with the award winning Resolution Retreats, the only weight loss, health and wellness retreat exclusively for women in New Zealand. Your exclusive three day fresh start retreat prize includes: • A complimentary beauty treatment at the luxury, in-house spa. • Luxurious private chalet accommodation. • All nutritionist-planned meals.

Visitors to the resort can choose from a range of classes including a dance exercise class.

Are you facing burnout?

Answer with what best describes you – yes/sometimes/never

• You feel dread or anxiety about going to work. • You feel nothing is going right and cannot find hope that things will get better. • You are more easily irritated or more emotional than normal. • You are physically and/or mentally unable to do the things you normally can due to exhaustion. • You spend your days off with no plans because you are recovering from your days “on”. • You have trouble concentrating and are more forgetful than you used to be. • You feel you are making more mistakes than usual. • You find it difficult to break down and compartmentalise complex (or simple) problems. As a result, you get overwhelmed and find it difficult to achieve any progress. • You isolate yourself from the activities or people that used to bring you joy. • You turn to quick fixes to help you think clearly, relax or feel better. • You’re finding your sleep is disturbed by worry. • You require more sleep to feel rested but may have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep.

The signs of burnout are different for everyone but if you answered yes to three or more of the questions, consider getting help. The most important thing is to reduce the pressure you’re feeling.

The Resilience Retreat team recommends the following as first steps: • Be honest with those around you, particularly those who rely on you.

This will make them aware they need to back off a bit. • Remove yourself from the environment(s) that are contributing to pressure for at least three days - stay with a friend, go camping, or go to a retreat. While away, switch off from any connections to the pressure (for example, log out of your work email app). • Find someone impartial to talk to.

Counsellors have relevant training and can help you compartmentalise overwhelming problems or feelings so you can see a path forward.

Recognising that being in the O-zone is only the first step. Next the pressure needs to be reduced, but for many, it can be overwhelming to know where to start. And that is exactly why many women go to a retreat.

“We have women come for a huge range of reasons, including health, needing a break, stress, sleep problems, or a combo of all of those.

“Some want inspiration in the kitchen or to move their bodies, others are just lacking motivation, which is happening to a lot of people at the moment.”

There is a team who work alongside Ranby and guests are offered a range of activities and workshops. It is a balanced approach, focusing on the elements of a “wheel of wellness”.

“There are four elements we need to balance for wellness and those are nutrition, movement, sleep and happiness.

“Our guests leave with ideas to support all of those areas but we encourage them to focus on one main area initially to keep their journey progressing.

“Many find their number one is meal planning, being able to implement the good things they’ve learnt about nutrition by forward planning because it can be hard to make good nutrition decisions when you’re hungry.

“And we find the second most common focus is having a happiness project, finding things people can do to give them joy and sparkle.

“Sometimes people don’t actually know how to answer if you ask them what they do for fun because it’s been that long since they’ve thought about it or felt it.”

Alongside Resolution Retreats, Ranby has also launched Resilience Retreats, which cater for men and women and could be a great opportunity for farming families and teams to learn some tools to support life and business management.

“Rural people lead very busy and sometimes isolated lifestyles and we think both types of retreats have a lot to offer for the rural community.”

But the biggest advice she can give anyone who struggling and feeling overwhelmed is to have a conversation with those around them about they are feeling.

“Tell them you’re overwhelmed and that you need to reduce the pressure, but it’s ok not to have the answer on how to go about it yet, just get it out and recognise your feelings.” n

Farmers take a seat

By Cheyenne Nicholson

Growing up on a dairy farm and seeing farmers struggle with mental and physical wellbeing, a PhD student is working towards improving life on the farm.

Waikato University Master’s student Cathleen SchriberHannah has seen first-hand farmers’ struggles with mental health. Now she’s on a mission to improve the state of rural mental health.

Schriber-Hannah grew up on the family dairy farm in the Waikato, which her parents are now in the throes of converting to dry stock, an acknowledgment of their need to slow down a little as they get older.

“They love farming, and for a long time I always thought I’d end up being a farmer too. Once I finished school I worked full time on the farm for a time. It soon became isolating for me, and I ventured into off-farm work.”

Many moments in her life led her down the study path of psychology. She has dyslexia and received little support while at school. Instead, she had appointments an hour away in Hamilton with a psychologist.

“It wasn’t easy working that three-hour minimum trip around the farm, and it just seems absurd now that we had to travel so far to get help,” says SchriberHannah.

On the farm, she can clearly recall many times when her dad put his physical health on the back burner in favour of keeping the farm ticking over, including one incident where he was kicked in the face but went on to finish milking before seeking any form of help.

“Farmers tend to be a bit like that, and their mental health is no different. I’ve watched my dad and other farmers suffer from depression and do nothing because the farm comes first. I think a big part of this is the availability and resources when it comes to mental health services.”

While working at her local community centre, she recalls a clinical psychologist who operated out of the centre each week who would regularly have a full schedule, but often only a handful of patients would show up.

“While it was great to see the attempt to provide mental health services in a rural area, I think sometimes it’s a big ask for people, farmers in particular, to come to such a public place to seek help. It speaks to the stigma that exists around mental health, especially in rural areas.”

She was working as a dental assistant when news of a double suicide sent shock waves through her rural community, and it had a lasting impact on many people.

“I’d experienced so many things that made me realise how much of an issue rural mental health is and how badly rural communities need better access to mental health support. So after working on a bunch of off-farm jobs in my 20s, I decided to enrol in university as a mature student in 2018 and I’m now working on my Master’s degree.”

She hopes to delve deeper into the issue of rural mental health and embark on research that she hopes will help improve things.

Her research is focused on farmers’ coping strategies when it comes to stress and how they wind down and destress. She acknowledges from personal experience that farmers aren’t always the best at making time to get off farm and engage in off-farm activities they enjoy, and says that she’s interested to learn if there’s something that could be done in this space to encourage and facilitate more farmers to get involved in off-farm activities.

“Again, it comes back to the availability of things, everything from the availability of mental health services to the availability of recreational things for farmers to get involved with locally. In town or the city it’s easy to pop to an event or whatever. In rural communities, those opportunities can be limited.”

She has put together a questionnaire she’s putting out to all types of farmers to collate information in the hopes of being able to produce something at the end that will help farmers in this space. Long term, she wants to continue working on improving rural mental health by going on to complete a post-doctoral programme and eventually getting out into the community.

“I’d love to act as a sort of roaming rural clinical psychologist and take that mental health support to the rural communities one day. For now, there’s a lot more research that can and needs to be done in this area to better understand the gaps in resources and what rural communities need to thrive.” n

Waikato University PhD student Cathleen SchriberHannah is researching rural health care.

MORE:

If you would like to complete the questionnaire, check out her advertisement on page 62. Please follow the QR code to fill the survey or contact Cathleen by email: ces25@students.waikato.ac.nz for a link.

Matt Chisholm was at the top of his game in television but walked away. Now he’s spreading the mental health message to farmers.

Unticking the box

By Tony Benny

A popular television presenter suffering from depression and burnout chucked in his successful career. Now he’s encouraging farmers to get help.

Matt Chisholm thought he had it all but when his world was turned upside-down by a crippling bout of depression he realised he needed to make some fundamental changes if he was to be the man he and his family needed him to be. Now he’s sharing his experience, hoping to help country people look after their mental health, too.

“I had everything I wanted in my life, I’d ticked all the boxes I wanted to tick but I’d never been so unhappy,” the

TV presenter recalls.

“On the face of it I might have looked like I had a fantastic life. I was one of five current affairs journalists left on television, arguably, I was hosting TV2’s big budget reality show, I had a lovely house on Auckland’s North Shore, kids, lovely wife, I had everything I ever wanted, but I was driving myself into the ground and I didn’t do anything to look after myself.”

Chisholm realised he couldn’t carry on as he was so he opted for a radical change, one that upended the lives of his wife and three children as well.

“I resigned from TVNZ without having one hour of work lined up. I had no idea what I was going to do, that’s how radical it was, but probably one of the best moves I’ve made, I’d say,” says Matt.

Nowadays the Chisholm family lives on a 30ha block at Chatto Creek near Alexandra, where they run a few sheep and cattle. Matt still does some freelance television work but it’s his new job as inaugural ambassador for the Rural Support Trust that he’s more excited about.

He kicked off the job with nationwide tour talking to rural communities about mental wellness and resilience, where he openly shares his own mental health struggles. Previously he’d always said no to public speaking but after posting a social media post about his experience, that changed.

“It wasn’t really because I wanted to become some sort of poster boy for men’s mental health, I just wanted to honour my mate [the late] Greg Boyd.

“I was sort of burnt out and dealing with grief when I eventually left television full time but when I look back I was obviously depressed in other parts of my life and instead of just pushing it under the carpet, I decided to speak out.”

The social media post got the attention of Taranaki Rural Support Trust chair Mike Green, who “about 150 years ago” had worked as a stock agent with Matt’s father. Green had followed Matt’s career and knew of his struggles.

“He got in touch and said ‘We’re doing this big fundraising dinner, 320 people, it would be great

if you told your story,’ and I said, ‘No, I won’t do it mate.’ But he was a very persistent, determined man and in the end I thought I’d better do it,” says Matt.

“I told my story for the first time in that venue in New Plymouth and it went down reasonably well.

“It was kind of funny in places because that was my default setting, and it was very emotional and raw in other places because I’d never told my story before and it seemed to work.”

It worked so well that Mike raised funds from businesses to pay for Matt to become an ambassador and travel rural New Zealand to get people talking about mental wellness.

“I don’t particularly like telling my story. There’s only one or two skeletons left in my closet so I’m very honest about the things I’ve got up to, whether it be booze or drugs or womanising or whatever I’ve used to try to deal with my depression and anxiety.

“I think most people can probably relate to some of it, whether that’s being a rugby-playing country boy or alcohol or mate-ship or whatever because there’s nothing really much different about me apart from the fact I’ve been on television.”

Matt recognises mental health is already a serious issue in rural NZ and worries it will get worse as the country comes through the covid pandemic and faces a potentially serious economic recession.

It’s vital, he says, that mental wellness is taken seriously.

“I want people to be more proactive and to think about their mental health and for it to be a thing before they

get in the shit like I did and like my mate Greg Boyd did. That’s my key thing: that this isn’t left-leaning, bed-wetting, tree-hugging mumbo jumbo, this is very real and it can bite anybody.”

Looking back, he realises depression had always lurked in the shadows even as he threw himself into partying, as young men do.

“There’s a lot of peer pressure and we all think we have to play these roles and it takes a lot of guts to turn your back on your mates and go, ‘This isn’t for me anymore.’ And I was one of the worst and I was particularly unhappy living that life as well – I was depressed.”

Matt’s life-changing mental health crisis came in 2018 when he was juggling two high-pressure jobs and had a young family living in a small rental, having recently sold their house.

“I kinda knew I was in a bit of trouble but I had all these deadlines I had to hit and then as I hit the last couple, something happened at work and I just snapped, I blew up, both barrels blazing.

“I went home to my wife and she said I think you need to see the doctor and at that stage I was pretty desperate and for the first time in my life I said, ‘I think you might be right.’ I went to bed and I cried for a couple of days. I don’t have any qualms about talking about it.

“I put so much pressure on myself and I worked so bloody hard because I didn’t think I deserved to be in any of the positions that I was in, I didn’t allow myself to have much joy or fun or do anything for me, just trying to be a good TV host, a good journalist, a good father and husband and there was just no joy in it anymore.”

Four years later Matt has more peace and loves his family’s life on the land.

“I tell farmers to get off farm for their medicine, to look after themselves. For me, being on this little bit of land is actually my medicine.

“If I’m at home, I make sure that an hour a day at least I come down here. I call it work and I’ve been feeding out this morning but some days it takes me two hours when I could probably do the job in half an hour. I walk around the place, the Grahame Sydney-like hills, good-looking stock I’d like to think, and just listen to them munching away on their hay or whatever.

“I’m looking for positivity, for what’s good in my world, with a whole lot of gratitude now, which seems to work a whole lot better for me.”

Speaking of his ambassadorship role, Matt says, “I like the good work the Rural Support Trust does, largely behind the scenes. I want people to understand how the trust can help them in their communities, so more people can access their services when they need it most.”

He says his key message to anyone struggling with such pressure is to ask for help.

“Instead of having a conversation with yourself, go and talk to someone. Take that first step and life will change.” n

“I don’t particularly like telling my story ... I’m very honest about the things I’ve got up to, whether it be booze or drugs or womanising or whatever I’ve used to try to deal with my depression and anxiety.” Matt Chisholm