Comment: How Harborough residents can take this chance to slow their lives down and get some peace

Alec and Stella Welton have run Archway Health Hub, a natural health centre based in Market Harborough, for more than 20 years and have been in the industry over 30. On a usual week, there would be hundreds of people coming through their doors. But in these unusual times they - like many others - are adapting to a new way of working.

Here is some advice from Alec and Stella on how to use this time to slow down.

Our centre is one of the largest of its kind in the country with 10 consulting rooms, a physiotherapy space, classes studio and a gym/rehab facility and we are an integral part of many people’s healthcare in our community.

Each week we would usually have hundreds of people through our doors so to be closed down and unable to offer our usual level of support is challenging for our whole team.

Covid-19 is undoubtedly a tragedy for us as a society and hugely challenging for us as an economy, but personally it isn’t be all bad. While we employ five part time staff, and there are 21 self-employed practitioners, tutors and coaches in our team, all of whom are

concerned about their clients and about their own businesses surviving, we more than most know the benefits of a slowdown.

Unfortunately, that slowdown is not happening for all of us. Our frontline NHS and emergency services are working harder and under more pressure than ever before so as a society finding a way to fund some downtime for them too as things ease should be a

priority.

As a practice though we know that in helping people with improving their health and well-being one of the commonest things we have to deal with is how to slow people down. We live in a fast paced society, surrounded by stimulus, governed by expectations, and we rarely find the time to take better care of our health until we have to.

A slowdown, a real slowdown which lets people off the hook for slowing down because its expected of them as a society is in many ways a really good thing. Few people have reached the age of 30 in this country without having the thought at some point ‘I wish the world would just stop for a month so I could catch up with myself’, well….

So while following the government advice and being socially responsible we would encourage people to take a breath, and not to feel too guilty about enjoying a little peace.

It doesn’t make you a bad person, or not compassionate to the suffering of others, or unaware of the challenges ahead, it just means you appreciated a moment of peace.

We have many stringent sterile process’s in place and will be open again as soon as we can, in the meantime for more information on the support we can offer during the lockdown please go to www.archwayhouse.co.uk