Mental health and fitness advocate Jimi Hunt is literally walking the walk when it comes to showing Kiwis how to keep their mind in shape - all the way from Cape Reinga to Bluff
New Zealand’s attitudes to mental health and fitness have come a long way in the last decade, but there’s still a fair way to go - that’s why motivational speaker Jimi Hunt is lacing up his hiking boots and hitting the Te Araroa Trail next month.
He hopes to walk the length of the country in about 100 days in order to spread simple ways to stave off mental health decline by connecting to nature, other people and yourself.
He’s setting out on his odyssey as Kiwis' mental wellbeing has now been on the decline for more than three years, with Stats NZ data showing a significant increase in the proportion of people with poor mental wellbeing, up from 22 percent in 2018 to 28 percent in 2021.
On top of that, recent research by health insurance company nib New Zealand and the Employers & Manufacturers Association show some pretty damning figures when it comes to how happy Kiwis are in the workplace.
The EMA and nib-helmed Workplace wellbeing survey found 87 percent of Kiwi workers have experienced negative emotional impacts from work at least once in the past three months. These impacts included irritability (66 percent), anxiety (63 percent) and excessive worrying (62 percent).
In response, nib New Zealand has partnered with Hunt, calling him its first mental fitness champion.
nib CEO Rob Hennin hoped the partnership would get his brand of practical mental fitness tips out to a wider audience.
“To welcome Jimi as part of the nib whānau, and to share his knowledge with the wider community complements our mission of supporting Kiwis’ better health and wellbeing,” he said.
Hunt’s first job as mental fitness champion for nib will be tackling the long kilometres of windswept and hard-packed sand that make up Ninety Mile Beach. He said he’s been getting his beach walking muscles ready to go in the Mexican coastal town of Puerto Escondido, where he spends around nine months of the year.
During his slow trip down the country, he’ll be inviting Kiwis out to join him for a little or a lot of the hike, and giving out simple lessons to help people start reforging their connections to themselves, the world and others - connections that have been found to increase feelings of mental wellbeing.
These start simple and then build up, he said. Three days of spending five minutes staring into the garden without any distraction slowly builds into the kind of regimen he keeps for himself, which includes meditation, journaling, and grounding yourself in nature.
His location will be accessible to all via his website, and rather than money, he just wants people to come and learn things. It may well end up like the scenes of Forrest Gump running across America once he leaves Cape Reinga on November 18.
You’d be forgiven for thinking a bearded man walking across the land and bringing lessons of inner peace sounds vaguely messianic - however there aren’t too many Christ-figures who hold the Guinness Record for building the world’s longest waterslide, as Hunt has.
Taking on the Te Araroa Trail is relatively pedestrian compared to some of Hunt’s past stunts such as taking on the length of the Waikato River on a lilo back in 2012.
However, the focus of his message has changed since then.
Nowadays, rather than just raising awareness for the country’s mental health crisis, he wants to move from talking about health to talking about fitness, and shifting from binaries to nuance.
Hunt was drawn into the world of mental health advocacy after his own rock bottom, back before the days of the lilo, when depression and anxiety had him considering ending things.
“You either leave or you do something different to try and get better,” he said.
So he did a bunch of work, eccentric pool toy adventures and the more mundane, everyday talking and processing needed to climb out of the pit. And out of the pit he climbed.
But it was then he found that doing the work wasn’t a one and done proposition.
“I did a bunch of work and got better and I thought I'm good now… but I wasn’t,” he said. “That's when I turned the brand around from mental health to mental fitness.”
He likens short-term approaches to mental health interventions as like training for a marathon but then abandoning all training once you cross the finish line.
That’s why he talks about mental fitness instead of health, where the shape you’re in is dependant on a little bit of daily maintenance.
“In order to break some of the stigmas and myths around the things, the understanding thing is a big one,” he said. “The idea is to flick people's switches and realise they have agency over their own health and fitness.”
But despite some figures indicating wellbeing issues in New Zealand workplaces, Hunt said we have come a long way since he started talking about mental fitness.
“Ten years ago people used to usher me in the backdoor and say can you please help our people but not tell anybody about it,” he said. “But in the last 10 years I have seen an absolute 180 flip in the way New Zealand culture has looked at this.”
Indeed, nib’s creation of the role of mental health champion does seem to be the polar opposite to smuggling a motivational speaker in and out of the backdoor.
“To be truthful Im actually quite proud,” Hunt said. “Ten years isn’t that long a period but the change I’ve seen is quite significant. We were going in the wrong direction. We’ve stopped and started heading back but there’s still a long way to go.”
Although mental health may be a bit more at the front of people’s minds, the events of recent history have not necessarily been conducive to good mental wellbeing.
Almost two-thirds of respondents said their wellbeing has been impacted by understaffing at their workplace, a problem that has become rife over the last year.
A whopping 91 percent of respondents said they had experienced negative physical effects like fatigue, problems sleeping and headaches as a result of work over the last three months.
Hunt said with numbers like that, we can begin to see that it’s not an individual problem, but a systemic one.
The same survey showed around half of people think their company is proactive when it comes to wellbeing, although that number could be about to shoot up - 80 percent of the 386 workers with influence over human resources said they intended to invest in wellbeing benefits over the next year.
Meanwhile, Hunt will be out on the trail with followers online and in-person, passing on the little ways he found to gradually reduce the pain and build up his mental fitness.
“The greatest human motivator is past success,” he said. “So the problem with so many people when they have low mental fitness is they feel stuck. You don’t just go try and yank people out of waist-deep mud with full force, you have to do it bit-by-bit.”
