The EA Mental Health & Productivity Survey 2023
This survey is intended for members of the Effective Altruism (EA) community who aim to improve or maintain good mental health and productivity.
We’d be so grateful if you could donate ~10 minutes of your time to complete the survey! You will help both identify the most pressing next steps for enhancing mental flourishing within the EA community, and provide the interventions and resources you’d prefer. These can be psychological, physiological, and lifestyle interventions.
Take me to the survey now (~10 min)
Why this survey?
The mind is inherently the basis of everything we do and feel. Its health and performance are the foundation of any metric of happiness and productivity at impactful work. Good mental health is not just the absence of mental health issues. It is a core component of flourishing, enabling functioning, wellbeing, and value-aligned living.
Rethink Wellbeing, the Mental Health Navigator, High Impact Psychology, and two independent EAs have teamed up to create this community-wide survey on Mental Health and Productivity.
Through this survey, we aim to better understand the key issues and bottlenecks of EA performance and well-being. We also want to shed light on EAs’ interest in and openness to different interventions that proactively improve health, well-being, and productivity. The results will likely serve as a basis for further projects and initiatives surrounding the improvement of well-being, mental health and productivity in the EA community. By filling out this form, you will help us with that.
Based on form responses, we will compile overview statistics for the EA community that will be published on the EA Forum in 2023.
Survey information
Please complete the survey by March 17th.
We recommend you take the survey on your computer, since the format doesn’t work well on cell phones.
All responses will be kept confidential, and we will not use the data you provide for any other purposes.
Take me to the survey now (~10 min)
Please consider sharing this post in your EA network and upvoting this post to reach more people.
Thank you!
We are deeply grateful to all participants!
Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions or feedback.
Emily Jennings, Samuel Nellessen, Tim Farkas, and Inga Grossmann
Thanks for this. Just submitted my response. One small miss: When you ask what interventions people are interested in towards the end you’ve omitted coaching. I assume this is a mistake because you included it in the equivalent question around what interventions they have tried already. :)
When do you expect to publish the results? :)
Thanks for submitting a response and for your feedback Sebastian! We hope to publish the results by the end of May :)
Just a quick note that the numerical scale is 1-9 for some questions and 1-10 for others; I think this may be a typo & wanted to flag :)
Thanks for your work designing the survey!
Thank you for being that attentive. This one is intentional. We use standardized scales from different questionnaires.
(Making this the official errata thread) The deadline on the form and in the forum post are different from one another.
Not an error, but a few clarifying questions:
“For how many hours have you roughly been productive during the past 7 days?” <<this is in total over the last 7 days?
Does “productive” mean.. doing productive work for my job?
Fixed, thx!