Looking after your mental health: why we love Spill
by Wing Hoang ✦ 4 January 2023 ✦ 4 Min Read
It goes without saying that everyone can have a tough time in life. Whether it’s in our careers, relationships or thoughts, you can never know, or control, what’s around the corner. Add to that the cost of living crisis, and social, economic, and political issues, and it’s no surprise that you might find yourself struggling.
Searching for a solution can be hard. Knowing where to start is even harder. You might just need to air out what’s bubbling inside you. Or you might need a sounding board to find your own solutions. Whatever it is, finding someone to chat with can definitely help.
Like many people, I’ve learnt how important it is to look after my mental health. In the same way we look out for our physical health, checking in with how you’re doing mentally is just as important.
Accessing therapy
It’s not always easy to find someone to chat with. Work, life and even our own anxieties can get in the way of seeking help. And that's before you encounter all the other barriers that can make accessing help uncomfortable, or in fact impossible. Like the fact that therapy is incredibly expensive.
That’s where workplaces can, and should help out. There are loads of ways workplaces can make it easier for their teams to get help when they need it. Spill is one of them.
When I joined Planes, I was grateful to learn that they used a mental health support service called Spill.
What’s Spill?
Spill is a support service that integrates with your Slack workspace as a plugin. Using this, you can book an hour-long therapy session from the moment you need it, free of charge as an employee.
There’s a range of days and time slots to pick from. And before the session, you get an email where you can clarify what you want to focus on during the hour. By the end of the week, you can be in touch with a professional therapist.
Spill's employee well-being survey can also be used before company meetings to check in on every team member. It gives everyone a chance to rate their mood for the week, and if anyone is having a particularly hard time, it’s flagged to someone in the company who checks in on that person (or people).
It really helps to catch things early on, so having this check-in mechanism integrated with Spill is incredibly helpful.
Spill's Pulse feature: a company-wide check-in
What’s using Spill like?
The therapist that Spill paired me with actively listened, let me discover my own insights, and repeated back to me what she understood I was saying. She was open, friendly and welcomed all of my thoughts.
I’d honestly recommend Spill to anyone. It reassured me that there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with us, we’re all just people trying to get through this thing called Life.
It’s okay to struggle, but you don’t have to do it alone.
What next?
Remember, there is no one-size-fits-all experience when it comes to therapy. Not only are there lots of different types of therapy, but there’s also a whole load of other factors that can change the experience for people; like whether you access therapy virtually or in person or how much you gel with your therapist. Sometimes you’ll get on like a house on fire. Most of the time it’ll be somewhere in between. And that’s okay.
There’s no right or wrong way to ‘experience’ therapy. And there’s no shame in having a couple of cracks at it.
Even when I feel like I don’t need to go back to Spill, I may still check in, just for a little mental health maintenance. I see it as important as going to the gym, or a walk, to maintain your physical health. Maintaining your mental health isn’t any different.
At Planes, we really care about our team's well-being. Our benefits are designed around giving our team the choice to design a work life that works for them. You can check out our full list of company benefits and open roles on Flexa Careers.
