The Good Vibes Experiment (GVE) is an active mental health campaign at Flinders University, co-designed with students, that focuses on 20 wellbeing tactics to cultivate positive mental health, encouraging practices like mindfulness, gratitude, and connection to promote emotional well-being, resilience, and life satisfaction.
If you were around Flinders in 2021, then the Good Vibes Experiment is probably old news to you.
But if you’ve joined the community in the last couple of years, you might be wondering what it is all about.
After a frantic few months in 2020 working in the background with a talented group of students, designers and managers (FUSA, Oasis, HCD, Student Ambassadors, Mango Chutney), The Good Vibes Experiment was launched in 2021 and is still active here at Flinders in 2025.
At the core of the campaign is the invitation, to all in the Flinders community, to experiment with different types of wellbeing activities in your life, as a way of balancing out the inevitable challenges of life.
The formal Launch (which feels so long ago now!) took place on Wednesday 17th March 2021 with activities across multiple campuses. My favourite was the big gratitude wall at the Hub.
The launch had:
Live music
A free activity book
An interactive gratitude wall
Art therapy workshops by FUMA
Free lunch at midday
Friendship bracelet making
Henna
Drop-in planting and flower-crown making at the Community Garden
Fairy floss at Law & Commerce
Popcorn at Tonsley
Early morning at the Bedford Park Campus Launch.
What is ‘positive mental health’ you might ask?
Commonly the discussion of ‘mental health’ focuses on mental illness. Mental illnesses are diagnosable conditions that affect an individual’s thinking, feeling, acting and interacting, causing significant distress and leading to significant impairment across multiple domains of life. Common mental illnesses include major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, agoraphobia and social phobia.
Talking openly about mental illness is important as mental illness is quite common. For example, in Australia, over a lifetime, 43% of us will meet criteria for 1 or more mental illnesses.
Given that, at best, only around 50% of those with mental illness seek out a health professional, we want to keep the conversation about mental illness alive and open, so more people can receive the help they may need.
But the conversation around mental illness, isn’t the only conversation we can have about mental health.
In the treatment of mental illness, the focus is on the alleviation of distressing, upsetting or disruptive symptoms. In essence we are trying to reduce certain experiences (e.g. less depression, less anxiety).
However, when people consider whether their life is satisfying, rewarding, enjoyable, and meaningful, they aren’t just interested in the absence of negative mental health; they seek the presence of positive mental health. People don’t just want to feel less miserable; they want to experience emotional well-being, resilience, and life satisfaction. This includes having healthy relationships, self-esteem, and physical health, as well as a sense of purpose, autonomy, mental clarity, optimism, and a balanced life that fosters overall well-being.
That is where the Good Vibes Experiment (GVE) comes in.
At the heart of GVE are 20 wellbeing tactics that are known to produce these kinds of positive states of mental health. They were inspired by the Be Well Plan (a mental health and resilience program here at Flinders) and the Greater Good In Action Website (a neat initiative cataloguing positive mental health interventions).
They are:
- Meditation and mindfulness. Learning how to be present and focusing your attention.
- Seeking out awe. Taking moments to bask in the amazingness of something or someone.
- Finding your meaning and purpose. Connecting to a purpose higher than you and understanding what you want to contribute to the world.
- Future orientation. Taking the time to visualise the future you want for yourself and setting things in place to bring it into reality.
- Understanding yourself. Learning more about the person you are, your strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes and personality.
- Developing and expressing gratitude. Cultivating a sense of appreciation of the people and things in your life and the experiences you’ve had.
- Building and supporting connections with others. Building and nurturing supportive relationships with friends, family, colleagues and even the a random stranger!
- Developing self and other compassion. Extending understanding and kindness to yourself and other people during difficult times.
- Forgiveness. Letting go of difficult thoughts, feelings and ideas about someone who has wronged you.
- Expressing kindness. Engaging in regular acts of kindness towards self and others.
- Seeking help. Knowing when and how to reach out for assistance.
- Learning and teaching. An ongoing willingness to learn as well as pass on the knowledge you’ve gained to others.
- Building a healthy lifestyle. Looking after your body and mind with healthy habits.
- Spending time in nature. Connecting regularly with the natural world.
- Having fun. Spending more time engaging in activities that bring a true smile to your face.
- Facing your fears. Pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone.
- Deliberate practice. Getting better at something through focused practice.
- Enhancing productivity. Learning to work smarter, not harder and increasing your productivity and efficiency.
- Expressive writing and art. Processing your feelings and reactions to things through writing and art.
- Thinking about thinking. Learning more about the role that your thoughts and beliefs play in shaping your world and how to change or challenge your thinking.
These tactics were then playfully explored in the GVE Activity Book. For example, mindfulness is explored with some mindful teeth brushing instructions. Values are explored using a find-a-word. Expressive writing is explored using our dedicated ‘rage page’.
In 2025, the campaign is still active! Keep your eye out for various merch items (pins, t-shirts, stickers) around the university during key dates like University Mental Health Day, RUOK day and the mid-year orientation. The pins are particularly popular. I think of them as simple ways to wear your values.
If you want to learn how to apply the ideas from the Activity Book in your everyday life, consider watching our Building a Good Vibes Plan video series.
And the books are still available on campus (e.g. at Oasis) and you can order one online via the website if you aren’t on campus much. You’ll also see the occasional poster or board around like this one (this one is actually sitting in my office)
Whilst engaging with the book is a core part of the campaign, the invitation here is really to think about your typical day and see if you can find space for some of the wellbeing tactics described above.
How about taking 5 minutes in the morning to text a friend and tell them how much you appreciate them in your life?
Or spending a little more in nature today than you might have otherwise?
Good mental health isn’t just about reducing stress, anxiety and depression. It is about cultivating the experiences in life that you want more of. Maybe the GVE will give you some guidance on how this is done.
Learn more in the video:
You can also see some other things I have written about GVE over the years as well, if the topic interests you.
Living life according to the principles of the Good Vibes Experiment
You might also be interested to know that as of the 10/3/22, the Good Vibes Experiment materials (i.e. imagery and copy) are open-source, meaning anyone can take what we’ve built and adapt it to their own setting. See the media release here. You might also be interested to know that other universities have used GVE in their own wellbeing focused campaigns. For example, Swinburne wrote us recently:
The Good Vibes Experiment has been fantastic for us and we have received a lot of positive feedback from our students. We have run two large activations under the Good Vibes banner so far. We had the launch in March and ran “Good Vibes in May” where we ran events every single day and focused on one tactic per week. We will be repeating this again in October.
We have used a number of the assets you supplied (most notably the activity book and the stickers) and staff and students have been loving them!
Here are some links to Instagram posts we have done for the events if you’d like to take a look:
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- Swinburne Student Life (@swinburnelife) • Instagram photos and videos
- Swinburne Student Life (@swinburnelife) • Instagram photos and videos
- Swinburne Student Life (@swinburnelife) • Instagram photos and videos
- Swinburne Student Life (@swinburnelife) • Instagram photos and videos
- Swinburne Student Life (@swinburnelife) • Instagram photos and videos
We have some more plans for Semester 2 and how to lift the profile of the Experiment even more.
All in all, GVE is alive and well in 2025 🙂