#270 Gaming And Mental Health

We unpack what the research actually says about video games and mental health, including when gaming can support focus, mood, and connection and when it starts to work against your wellbeing. Dr. Veen Wong joins us to explain how her Bold Sky project uses a video game to challenge harmful gender norms as a prevention tool for gender-based violence.

• Why we built Wellbeing Wednesday to make hard mental health topics easier to hold
• A journaling prompt centred on what your best self does today
• Why cost and access push us to look for scalable mental health supports
• Evidence on cognitive benefits from commercial video games
• How role-playing games can challenge rigid thinking patterns
• The real risks of overuse including injury, sleep disruption, and addiction concerns
• Why prevention matters in intimate partner violence work
• What gender transformative approaches mean in practice
• How a single-player game can reduce stigma and improve access
• The meaning behind the name Bold Sky and what it signals about change

Tune in weekly to Wellbeing Wednesday with Gurjeet Gill on The Universal Radio Network, 97.9 FM in Edmonton, or globally at www.theuniversalradio.com

IG: @theuniversalradio

Transcript

Welcome And Why This Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to the Universal Radio Networks Podcast. My name is Gurjee, and in today's episode, we're discussing video games and mental health. This is something that's really close to my heart because mental health is kind of my professional life. And one thing I'd love to do in my personal life is wind down with some video games. But I've always kind of grown up with this idea that video games are bad for your health. But let's look into what the modern-day research shows about video games and mental health. We also have a wonderful interview with a researcher from the University of Waterloo. Her name is Vien Wong, and she's doing amazing work in the field of gender-based violence by creating a video game to try and challenge people's idea around gender to hopefully reduce gender-based violence in the future. So, some really cool things that we talk about today, and I hope that you enjoy everyone, welcome to the Universal Radio Network. Today is Well Being Wednesday, and I am your lovely host, Gergit. If you don't know, Well Being Wednesday is a show that hasn't been reintroduced in quite some time. I've kind of just taken for granted the fact that everyone has just kind of been around and has been paying attention on socials as well as tuning in. So I thought I'd kind of share the whole point of what Wellbeing Wednesday is. And I think today's episode is a really great example of that. So I thought of Wellbeing Wednesday and said I said I want to do a show about mental health, but I am in no way, shape, or form a qualified mental health professional. So how do I talk about really hard topics, but make it conversational, make it easy to understand, but also kind of take these concepts that exist within the mental health field and bring them to people so that you can get bite-sized pieces of information without having it be watered down into trying to sell you a product or trying to like convince you to align with me in a lot of the ways that people in different industries will take mental health information and use it to sell themselves. I'm just here as a vessel of information to put my opinion into things. And it's always going to be about your mental health and general well-being. And of course, when I mean general well-being, we do focus a little bit more on the mental aspect of things. But I'm a big advocate for taking care of your physical health. And you don't have to do anything crazy fancy to do that. Just get enough sleep, eat healthy food, monitor any recurring health symptoms, go to your doctor regularly, get your blood work done, and just pay attention to what's going on in your body, listen to it, and follow the instructions it gives you. As always, let me know what topics you'd like to see discussed on air. You can DM us on Instagram at the Universal Radio and give us a follow while you're there as well. One thing I do want to share is we always start off with a journaling prompt. Actually, before I get to the journaling prompt, I haven't even told you about today's topic. How can I do that? Because today's topic is near and dear to my heart. We're talking about video games and mental health. So I had the opportunity to sit down with a really cool guest. Her name is Vin Wong. She's a researcher at the University of Waterloo, and she is making this video game that is meant to change people's idea around gender in an effort to reduce gender-based violence. If you don't know, gender-based violence is violence that happens because of someone's gender identity as a woman or a gender minority, and with video games as a really cool medium, she is trying to create preventative measures to make sure that the violence never happens in the first place, as opposed to band-aid solutions, where we're trying to navigate supports for people who have already experienced violence. So we get into this discussion as well about preventative versus getting to the root of an issue, and it's super, super cool. And I know I got a journaling pomp for you for you guys today, and I'm super excited to share it, but I am gonna do a little bit of a teaser. We'll talk about it later today. But what would the best version of you do today? What would your dream version of who you want to be, what would they be doing right now? For example, if you're driving home from work, would that dream version of you go home and go to the gym? Would that dream version of you go home and work on a project that you put off for a really long time? Would you be sitting and maybe procrastinating studying a little bit? Because uh finals are coming up in mid-April, and instead you're like, oh, the best version of me would probably be studying right now. Think about what the best version of you would do and let me know what that best version would be doing right now. For me, the best version of me would be doing a radio show, so I'm kind of ahead of the curve, guys. Not the bag or anything. But afterwards, the best version of me would be, hmm, let me think. I think it would be eating something light right before bed because I don't want to eat anything too heavy and then have that disturb my sleep cycle. And then I would just wind down. I would not force myself to do any last-minute tasks because I know they end up taking longer than they should, and then I go to bed later, and then I'm tired the next day, and it's just this recurring cycle where I just keep pushing my bedtime, but trying to do like one more task, one more chore, one more errand, one more whatever I gotta be doing. And I think I should just call it, just call it and go wind down appropriately. So let me know what the best version of you would be doing right now, and tell me what that best version would be at Instagram, at the Universal Radio, and make sure you give us a follow. So, given that mental health care is just getting increasingly more expensive, for example, psychologists are charging$235 an hour in Alberta, and that is a price that has been steadily going up, and I don't ever see that price going down, to be honest. And mental health care is expensive, the state of economy, everything is expensive. So there is this increased demand for accessible and cost-effective methods to prevent the occurrence of mental illness and to promote mental health and general well-being. But how are we meant to do this? So, a lot of the times we do this through things like groups, where we can apply therapy concepts to a large number of people, thereby reducing the cost of individual therapy because you're doing it in a group. The cost is shared between you and the other people and your group members. But some people are exploring video games as an option for that. So, with this increasing need for appropriate mental health care services that are cheap and easily accessed, because let's be honest, having to drive to appointment can be challenging. Having to schedule it in and have it be a regular standing appointment can also be challenging. And if anyone has known, sometimes therapists have really long wait times in between sessions where it can be up to three weeks or even a month before you can get your next session in, just because of how many people are clamoring for mental health care. So, to address some of these demands of having cost-effective and also accessible mental health care solutions, some people have explored commercial video games. Commercial video games have actually been shown to impart cognitive benefits by playing them regularly. For example, attention control, cognitive flexibility, and information processing. And there's a growing body of recent evidence that suggests that there are benefits related to the use of commercial video games for things like socialization, cognition, motion regulation, and mental health. Now, this goes against a lot of what we hear about in old school mentalities of video games being bad for you. They promote violence, they promote antisocial behavior. And I do think that there is some merit to both sides of the coin. And it comes down, I believe at least, to how you interact with video games. What is your relationship with video games? How often are you playing them? Do you have other things going on in your life that supplement video game usage, or is video games like kind of it? Video games can be super addictive too, so we're gonna talk about the negatives of video games as well. So don't worry, your mom is listening to this or your dad is listening to this, and they're thinking, man, I don't want that girl on the radio telling my kids it's okay to play video games all the time. And I mean it's okay to pay play video games some of the time. I myself play it quite a bit. I play both console as well as PC games, and I play some handheld games as well. And I don't do too much mobile gaming just because I'm if I'm on my phone, I'm glued to Instagram. So, role-playing games, which is a certain type of video game where you play a customizable character or a character in a certain world, you're playing as that person, they can actually serve as a therapeutic tool to challenge and even change in-grain patterns of thinking, making people more flexible in their thinking. They can also promote generation of positive alternatives. So trying to create more hopeful thinking, introduce more problem solving, and pole-playing games act as a means to question self-schemas among patients undergoing cognitive behavioral treatment. If you're unsure what a self-schema is, a schema is basically like a structure or pattern of thinking. And by playing as a role-playing character in a game, it teaches you to be flexible in your thinking. It teaches you to put yourself in the shoes of others and it compares your existing thinking to the thinking of others, thereby creating an opportunity for you to challenge your thinking. Because let's be honest, a lot of the time we're spending time alone in our heads. Nobody is there challenging those thoughts. All right. These benefits are also super similar to what we see in this increasingly popular medium of therapy titled play therapy. So, use of commercial video games is also super beneficial in treating anxiety management, effectiveness of reducing anxiety in pre-operative pediatric patients, meaning they got a bunch of kids to play video games before they underwent surgery and their anxiety levels went down. However, there is mixed research about how these cognitive benefits apply to outside of games into the real world. And we're gonna talk about the negatives of video games as well. Don't worry, we're getting to that. We're talking about the negatives of video games and mental health because there are some positives. I myself have found some positives. For example, it connects me to a social group of people. We're bonded by a common hobby. So no matter how down and out I get, I can always rely on spending time with my friends in this shared common hobby. I also think it gives me a sense of competence and competence because I can go ahead and adjust the rating of my game difficulty or I can go into skill-based matchmaking and I can have a challenge, but also I can succeed in those challenges, showing me that hey, I put my mind to it. I can be good at what I want to be good at. I can succeed throughout hard times and awful teammates, I can do amazing things. However, some of the negatives include overuse injuries, for example, eye strain from staring at a screen. When I'm at work and I'm at my work screen, but all I want to do is come home and look at my small screen. It's just bad. You're just staring at screens all day. It can cause headaches, it can cause uh eye strain, which can be really uncomfortable. There's also overuse injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome or what's called gamer's thumb, which is actually, I believe, pronounced that's another name for it is cravane, tenosinovatis. I probably butchered that pronunciation, but I actually had a physiodiagnose with that once. Um low-key, probably related to gaming. Um, not the best, but that can lead to swelling and limited movement and pain. So take it from me. And if you well, you can't see me because I'm on the radio, but I just pointed my thumb at myself and I thought that was a funny joke. But no one's here to see it. Uh so sad. Gaming can also be associated with obesity in teens for two reasons. One, increased inactivity, but as well as the fact that there's increased food intake during gaming sessions. Specifically, SEDI looked at healthy male adolescents and noticed that either the signals that indicate fullness are impaired or the mental stress involved with playing video games, because your brain can't tell what's real or fake. It genuinely thinks that you are trying to diffuse the bomb within eight seconds. That can lead to increased food intake because of its activating reward centers. There's also psychological problems like video game addiction or internet gaming disorder. However, that one's kind of on the fence where it's kind of ambiguous, treatments are still in progress, and the disorder isn't fully agreed or understood. So there are some negatives that come with gaming, but again, everything in moderation, guys. Up next, we have this interview with Vien Wong that I did. She is so gracious enough to spend some time with me and explain to me all the genius, brilliant research that she's doing. I have had the most fun speaking to her. She talks about how she's creating a video game to combat gender-based violence in a preventative way by kind of looking at how do we get ideas about gender challenged in young men. Today I'm very, very lucky to have the amazing Vin Wong with me. If you haven't heard of her before, she's doing really amazing research with video games and gender-based violence. And I thought it was such a cool topic because I do a lot of work with gender-based violence and domestic violence. And I also really love video games. So Vean is just the marriage of two of my favorite things in one person. Um, Vean, would you like to introduce yourself and your work?

SPEAKER_01 15:40

Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. Um, hi everyone. My name is Vean Wong. Um, I am a practitioner researcher, um, social worker by practice and profession, um, as well as a uh human-computer interaction public health researcher as well, too. And yeah, the um a lot of my work within the social work practice has actually been within the intimate partner violence and gender-based violence sectors. And so I have at this point about 15 years of um both clinical, frontline, and community-based uh experience within this area. And so this is a topic that is very near and dear to my heart. Um and uh I've been throughout my journey within my practice been wanting to find ways to be able to try to address some of the um root causes of these forms of violence. And uh I am now in the last year of my PhD in public health at the University of Waterloo and just had a really amazing opportunity to be able to merge um both my passion for violence prevention, especially within the intimate partner violence sector, as well as uh being able to merge video games and how do we use technology to engage um populations in violence prevention.

SPEAKER_00 17:09

Yeah, I thought it was really interesting the fact that you have that dual experience of both being a practitioner, but also a researcher. Because oftentimes you'll find that there's like a separation between the two fields, and maybe information from both those fields isn't really crossing over to the other side, where it is really important to have that cross-practice knowledge transfer. And I'm I'm really glad that you were able to get that opportunity to do this because this is really, really cool work. One of the things that I'm curious about is what made you choose gender-based violence as like the topic to address with video games?

Why Prevention Must Come First

SPEAKER_01 17:44

Yeah, that's an interesting question. Um, like I'd mentioned, I have a a lot of practice experience. And one of the things that kind of kicked off the idea of doing prevention, and the idea initially wasn't specifically just with video games, but it was just we need some sort of preventative work. Um, there is a lot of programs and great programs out there, um, but they often only kick in after a violent incident has happened. And so my thinking was like, is there some way that we could be a little bit more upstream? Can we can we try to prevent this type of violence from happening in the first place? Um, and a key part of that was I was working for a nonprofit organization in the Greater Toronto area and had a really difficult, and at that point I was doing um individual therapy, trauma therapy. And I remember having a very difficult um intake assessment. And after that assessment had gone over to my colleagues' office to debrief, to talk to them about it. And as I was uh sharing some of the things that this um new client of mine had been sharing of what they had experienced, uh my colleague suddenly popped up from her chair, ran over to her computer and started typing something into our system and was like, oh, is your new client so-and-so, this person? And I was like, no, no, like this um individual has never accessed any services before. This is the first time they've reached out um to try to get support for the type of abuse and violence that they had experienced at the hand of their um ex-partner. And my colleague was just like, I swear I've heard about this before. And so we spent a bit more time and and dug in a little bit more, and we realized they the person, um, the reason why the story was so similar was that it was actually the same individual who had the same partner who had been causing harm um to two different women across, I think at that point it was, it might have been about like five, six years difference. Um and so that really knowing that and then have, I think having that practice experience in there really solidified of like, okay, we are providing a lot of great work and supports to um individuals who have been experiencing this form of harm, um, especially if they also have children. The nonprofit that I worked for also supported um children who had experienced or witnessed intimate partner violence, but there really wasn't any sort of interventions or supports to um address the uh individuals who were causing this form of harm. And so that was where I started thinking about well, what else can I do? What else can be out there? Um, and I started considering more research and policy-based uh approaches. And like I mentioned, um when I uh applied for the PhD, I had an idea to connect both, uh, as you mentioned before, the the silos essentially between um social work, between public health, between the tech or human-computer interaction fields, and really wanted to see if there was some way to be able to merge these types of interdisciplinary approaches uh to address this. And so eventually, with some more research and literature reviews, um, we decided on uh applying a preventative lens within video games. Um, and mainly because the video games piece was we wanted to be able to have the video games be geared towards young men. Um, and so specifically around the ages of 18 to 25, because we realized that based off of the data from Statistics Canada, the peak rate of perpetration uh of intimate partner violence are males between the ages of 25 to 34. But we also then realized that there's a large gap in programming service. Support for young men between between ages 18 to 24 to 25. And so we wanted to be able to use this opportunity to address that particular gap.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

And I really like this kind of violence prevention model that you take in on in terms of there, there are some frustrations with waiting until violence has occurred or an incident has occurred before the supports that are meant to support someone step in to like police or legal repercussions. Oftentimes they don't step in until, you know, someone's life has been transformed through a violent or traumatic incident or multiple incidences over many years. So I really, really love this idea of how do we bring these ideas to people to kind of reduce these chances of violence occurring, kind of introducing these ideas of, I don't even know the word for it. Maybe you're a better person to put it into words, but these ideas of like nonviolence, of gender equity and understanding kind of the power dynamics that exist in the world. One of the words that uh you've used previously when we had a chat was gender transformative. Would you mind kind of sharing what that approach is like in your research?

SPEAKER_01 23:16

Absolutely. So gender transformative approaches is um part of something that's called the gender integration continuum. Um and so what it is is that it's either programming interventions or approaches that explicitly look to address the gender inequalities, um, remove structural barriers, and um empower traditionally disadvantaged populations. And so applying this approach in intimate partner violence, uh, one of the things that I'm doing within the uh video game research, which uh the project is called Bold Sky. Um, so within the Bold Sky project is to use the video games as a way to try to shift some of these social and gender norms that lead to intimate partner violence. Um, and so this gender integration continuum goes from uh like gender discriminatory, which means that it kind of follows a bit of that status quo where gender um uh, let's say programmings or interventions are more disunequal, really favors one gender over the other, and it deepens a lot of the gender inequity. Um, like I mentioned in uh working in the sector, a lot of the interventions in there would fall somewhere in the middle of like something called, let's say, gender-sensitive or gender responsive. Um, so gender responsive would be being able to both identify and address some of the different needs based off of gender. Uh, and so I think a lot of uh really great examples would include things like um domestic violence shelters. So many of these shelters are specifically have mandates that specifically only support um women uh and their family or their children as a understanding that um this form of violence disproportionately affects women, queer communities, and um their family and their children. And so that would be a response, but because it doesn't necessarily remove the structural barriers or address root causes of this form of violence, it would be considered somewhere along the lines of like gender-sensitive or gender responsive. And so with the Bull Sky project, I wanted to move it into the gender transformative aspect to again address some of these root causes based off of social and gender norms.

Why A Video Game Reaches Men

SPEAKER_00 25:45

It makes me so happy to see this emphasis on prevention and kind of getting to those root causes to avoid this harm happening to other people. And of course, nobody goes into any relationship or any life thinking that they're gonna be someone who causes harm to others or will end up causing harm to their partner. So I really like this approach. One thing I found really interesting is that you're using the medium of video games to do this, and especially with this kind of old school like idea that video games are bad for you, that they cause people to be violent, that they introduce ideas of aggression, um, and they make it okay and normalize it and it exposes it to younger people. And so I really like this idea of using video games instead of, you know, banning it and like stopping kids from playing it. How do we introduce healthier ideas into video games so we can make positive changes in society? And if everybody's screen time or hours played is like mine, you spend a lot of time absorbing these ideas and being subconsciously exposed to different things in video games. So, what was the decision like to use video games for this? And then kind of did you experience any barriers with like old school video game bad for you ideals in your research?

SPEAKER_01 27:06

That's quite an interesting question. I I think um again, the reason why we were thinking about video games, especially for the target population of um young men, cisgender, heterosexual young men, 18 to 25 range, is that many of those men already are playing video games. It's a it's a thing, um, a piece of their potentially day-to-day or at least weekly lives that they quite enjoy and is something that isn't um, I think like a lot of the current uh approaches to engaging young men are often in these like, come join a group and let's talk about um intimate partner violence or let's talk about uh gender inequality. And oftentimes it might be we'll come in once a week in in this group and we'll we'll run this group for about six to eight weeks. Um, I don't know about you, but I know running a pretty busy schedule myself. I'm not sure I, as someone who is very interested in this, have the time to actually commit to a six to eight week group on a weekly basis. Um, and I also understand that there is a lot of potential stigma for, especially for young men to join groups like this. There might be a lot of worries about, you know, if I'm interested in a group like this, or if I go to a group like this, would I potentially be blamed as a perpetrator of violence, right? Will I be seen in that way? Um, and so one of the other pieces we thought was, well, in a video game, especially if it's like a single-player video game, nobody really knows that you're playing this. You can do it on your own time. It's it can be quite um more accessible um and potentially like a stepping stone because these programs where men meet on a weekly basis are quite transformative. But I think the biggest barrier to that is actually getting men into these groups so that they have a safe space to be able to talk about um gender identity, social and gender norms, um, you know, hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy and how that might be impacting um their lives in a negative sense as well, too. And so, yeah, the video game was a uh a way that we thought not only would this be um quite an approachable medium to yet to young men, uh, but is is something that they're already familiar with. And to your point about the debate essentially between are video games good, especially with um, you know, there there's going to be coming out the uh Grand Theft, the newest Grand Theft Auto. And we know just even if you haven't played that game before, if you've heard of it, of just how violent that game is and um chalk full of very negative um social and gender norms with within that. And obviously, I think there's a range um of games between that. But yes, there is some, there has been some pushback in terms of well, could this game that you're creating um be something that might not be either effective or could turn a lot of young men off? Because maybe, you know, if the game is very preachy, who would want to play a game like that, right? So there definitely um is uh there there definitely was a lot of like concerns around are we using this medium, this uh type of video game in the right uh way, and also in a way that young men would be receptive to it.

Where Bold Sky Got Its Name

SPEAKER_00 30:39

Yeah, and just like any form of media, video games already do have messaging. A lot of video games talk about like class-based differences where you're the good guy fighting this like billionaire overlord or like a fascist regime, or even like some like cuter themes or more like feelings themes. Like, for example, game of the year 2025 was Expedition uh 33 Clair Obscure. I said that backwards, but whatever. That game is all about family and grief and navigating grief and like child like whimsy. Um, no spoilers though. Uh and that game had such great subliminal messaging about how people grieve and what letting go looks like. And why can't we have games that have similar themes like that, but the themes are non-violence, they're gender equity, they're gender transformative in nature, and they battle real-life issues like gender, um, gender-based violence. So I I really like that idea. And those themes, it's not like it's new, it's not like you're trying to like mind control people or like plant these ideas. All media has these underlying themes. So why can't we change what the theme is and then make a good game and get people to play it? I do have a question though. The name Bold Sky, I really enjoy it, and it makes me think of No Man's Sky, because that's the Sky game. Um, how did you come up with that name?

SPEAKER_01 32:08

So I can't take any credit for the name um Bold Sky. Um, the Bold Sky project, we actually have a couple of phases. And so one of the first phases that we did was we had gathered a community-based advisory committee. And so this included um uh like game designers and developers, we had um intimate partner violence experts, we also had um folks that specifically engage men and boys in gender equity and violence prevention, um, product managers, behavioral architects gonna come in. And um, one of the persons who was a key figure in helping me kind of be able to connect and facilitate uh this advisory committee had suggested the name Bold Sky for this particular project. And it's because um the of the recognition of how much courage and strength it takes to try to go against the usual norms that young men are pressured into, right? Like if we think about again the hegemonic masculinity, um being like hyper-masculine, being strong all the time, stoic, um, and breaking some of those social and gender norms and expectations that are quite harmful to young men. Um and so he thought that bold would be a great idea to include in the name. The sky is kind of that like unlimited potential that once you take that first step, once you are courageous enough to explore this other side, that there's almost this unlimited potential uh for for growth, for change, for transformation. And so um, we uh the committee loved the name, I love the name, was like, yeah, if you're okay with this, like we would love to incorporate this as the project name. And so that's what's stuck.

Self-Care While Doing Heavy Work

SPEAKER_00 34:08

That is so beautiful. It's got such a like a big message of hope. And I really like this like no blame, no finger pointing. There, you're allowed to pursue the game. And of course, like once the project is finished and it's out there, you're not forcing people to play this game. It's not like necessary, but people who are open and are accepting and willing to just try it out can be exposed to these ideas. And hopefully it does make a very real change in people. In terms of yourself, like dealing with this content and having to read about like gender-based violence very often, it can be quite a heavy subject. And you also, being a practitioner, you probably deal with a whole spectrum of different people's stories, the traumas that they've been through, the inequities that they face every day. How do you take care of yourself and what do you do for self-care?

SPEAKER_01 35:03

Great question. I think it depends on what I am doing. Is is, you know, uh I like to kind of separate this a little bit into is this more of self-care for something that's very acute? Um, like the story that I had mentioned about the really difficult intake and it's like having those supports and very thankful to have had that support um among colleagues and and friends to be able to go and say, I'm struggling with this. Can we do can we do a debrief? Like, are you available for that? Right. And that's a bit more of that, I think, acute type of immediate self-care. Um, there's a lot of I think maintenance self-care that goes into um my day-to-day life and very stereotypical things of like trying to get enough sleep, like trying to have um make sure I eat enough and regularly and with nourishing food when I'm able to, uh, being able to um engage in like physical exercises and things like that. And so the very typical standard things that I'm sure many people will see on the internet and in social media. Um, but I find one of the pieces too, because I also run my own private practice in psychotherapy, in supporting clients who have gone through and experienced trauma, as well as both doing research and teaching within the social work and health sectors in different post-secondary institutions. One of the things that I really enjoy about this particular research is I have a avenue, I have an outlet to be able to do both the micro level work in my private practice. Um, I'm also able to do some more macro level work uh and a little bit of meso in terms of like the teaching. But for things like this in this uh research project, it's something that I, even though it is now embedded within my PhD, it's something that I'm going to be continuing even after I'm done the PhD program. And it helps in my sense of self-care, broader sense of self-care, of I'm able to support myself and well-being, knowing that I can try to make a difference in an issue as serious as intimate partner violence and gender-based violence.

SPEAKER_00 37:24

It's a beautiful reminder that having purpose and knowing what you want to do can bring such a big sense of self. But also that, you know, self-care doesn't have to be complicated. It is sometimes just getting eight hours of sleep. It doesn't have to be something big, like you don't have to sign up for like a yoga class or like a anything over the top, complicated. If you're feeling down, going back to the basics, it's a lovely reminder. If people are interested in getting in touch with you or reaching out or have any questions about your work, how can they reach you?

How To Reach Vean And Wrap Up

SPEAKER_01 37:56

Absolutely. Um, you can find me online. Um I have a website, vnwong.ca, that you can reach out to me at, um, as well as um being able to connect with me on um social media and um through email as well, too. And all of that information you can find on my website at venewong.ca.

SPEAKER_00 38:18

Perfect. All right, thank you so much for your time, Veeam. This has been such an amazing conversation. Every time I've had a chance to talk with you, I feel like I've left smarter and wiser and brighter, and also just a little bit bubblier because you bring such an energy to the room. I feel like I could accomplish my own goals. So thank you for infecting us with that hopefulness, really.

SPEAKER_01 38:38

I and thank you so much for having me on here. This has been absolutely amazing. And yeah, thank you so much for having this show because I think this is something that a lot of people um really would benefit from hearing more, and even if it's if it might be information that uh listeners have heard before, but just a reminder of it is really helpful. And so thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 39:06

Thank you everyone for tuning in. Stay up to date with all of our podcasts on our socials at the Universal Radio and stream us wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check us out live on FM Radio at 97.9 if you're in the Edmonton region. And you can also stream us online if you're not within the Edmonton region, but you still want to tune in while we're live and contribute to the conversation. My name is Grigit, and keep turning it up with us.