A mental health campaign that I commonly point people to is the Big 5 from MindSpot. But that campaign isn’t alone in its focus. In this post from Khushi, a public health student on placement with BetterU, she explores a similar long-running mental health focused campaign from Western Australia called Act, Belong, Commit. Check it out, including her own reflections of assessing her online student life against the core recommendations of the campaign.
Hi reader! My name is Khushi and I am a third-year Bachelor of Public Health student. I wrote this piece as part of my placement with BetterU.
In my first year of university, I studied on campus, and without even noticing it, the environment was doing a lot for my mental health. The walk to class. The coffee run with someone from my course. The quiet comfort of being surrounded by other people who were just as stressed as I was.
None of it felt significant back then.
When I moved to online study, I realised how much I had been taking for granted. The noise was gone. The people were gone. And the version of me who used to bump into someone and end up talking for forty minutes was gone too.
I’m still figuring out what studying online looks like for me. Some things I’ve got right: having a dedicated desk that tells my brain it’s time to work. Getting dressed before sitting down. Making coffee before the first class. Small rituals, but they help.
What I’m still learning is how to set boundaries. When your bedroom is your campus, there’s no clear line that tells you the day is done. No gate to walk out of. No commute to decompress on. Without deliberately drawing a line, the mental load of being a student just lingers. It follows you into evenings, weekends, and the spaces that are supposed to be yours.
Discovering the Act Belong Commit campaign gave language to a feeling I’d been sitting with for a while. If any part of this feels familiar, keep reading.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
What Does Mental Health Really Mean?
Most of us only think about mental health when something goes wrong. But mental health isn’t a crisis you manage, it’s a state you actively build.
The World Health Organization (2022) defines mental health as a state of wellbeing that enables you to cope with life’s stresses, realise your abilities, learn and work well, and contribute to your community. In other words, mental health is not simply the absence of mental illness.
It’s dynamic, personal, and something every one of us can work on day by day.
Online study comes with a specific set of challenges: isolation, blurred boundaries, and the slow disappearance of everyday human connection. They’re easy to dismiss one by one, but together they can take a real toll.
Act, Belong, Commit
That’s where Act Belong Commit comes in. It is an evidence-based mental health promotion campaign developed through Curtin University in Western Australia, which was presented at the NNMHPP February 2026 meeting hosted by Prevention United. The campaign now operates across 26 countries, with over 600 partner organisations, including 125 schools.
Its central message is simple: Better mental health doesn’t just happen. You can build it.
The campaign is built around three practical pillars: Act, Belong, and Commit. They were designed for whole communities, but for online students, they hit differently.
Here’s how.
ACT
Move your body. Engage your mind. Break the loop.
A bad online study day can look like this: wake up, open laptop, attend class, eat at your desk, scroll for a while, do assignments, go to bed. Repeat.
No movement. No fresh air. No separation between “study mode” and “rest mode”. Just one long, undifferentiated blur and at the end of it, you feel inexplicably exhausted without having done anything that felt alive.
This is the trap of online study. When your home is also your classroom, library, and office, the boundaries that protect your brain simply disappear.
Act is the antidote. It can mean going for a walk, stretching before class, cooking a proper meal, gardening, cleaning, dancing, or doing something active. A 2025 study of Western Australian adults (Pollard et al., SSM – Mental Health) found that everyday protective behaviours — walking, spending time in nature, engaging in a concentrating activity, and chatting with people outside the home — were all associated with better wellbeing outcomes.
None of these require a gym. None of them cost money. They just require you to deliberately break the loop.
Research also shows that spending just 120 minutes a week outdoors is associated with significantly better health and wellbeing (White et al., 2019). That’s 17 minutes a day. Step outside. It counts.
BELONG
Connection won’t come to you. You have to go to it.
This is the one that hits hardest for online students.
When you study on campus, belonging happens almost accidentally. You see the same faces in tutorials. You grab coffee with someone after class. You overhear a conversation that makes you laugh. Campus life creates opportunities for social connection, whether you plan for them or not.
When you study online, none of that happens by default. Every connection has to be intentional, scheduled, and actively maintained. And when you’re already juggling assignments, work, and the mental load of keeping up, reaching out can feel like one more thing on an already impossible list.
But here’s what the research says: belonging isn’t a luxury, it’s a biological need. Act Belong Commit defines it as staying connected to friends, family, community, and culture. The data consistently shows that activities like meeting friends, visiting family, and participating in community events correlate directly with higher wellbeing scores.
For online students, belonging requires a different strategy. It means building connections into your week the same way you build in study time, deliberately, and without waiting until you feel like it. Because the truth is, you rarely feel like it when you most need it.
One genuine conversation a week is worth more than a hundred passive scrolls through someone else’s highlight reels.
COMMIT
Find your anchor outside the degree.
Here’s a question that might feel uncomfortable: if you took away your university enrolment tomorrow, what would give your week meaning?
For a lot of online students, the honest answer is not much. When your entire identity is organised around your degree and your degree is something you do alone in a room, on a screen, it becomes easy for your sense of self to shrink down to your grades, deadlines, and GPA.
Commit pushes back against this.
It means doing something meaningful, important, and personally valuable beyond academic obligations. That could be volunteering, learning a new skill, taking on a challenge, helping a neighbour, or joining a cause that matters to you. It gives you a reason to show up that isn’t graded.
Why does this matter so much for online students? Because purpose is a psychological anchor. When the isolation of remote study starts to weigh on you (and at some point, it will) having something meaningful to return to gives you ground to stand on. It creates a version of you that exists outside the degree. That version of you is more resilient, more grounded, and frankly, more interesting.
Ask yourself honestly: Outside of study and work, what am I doing that feels genuinely significant to me? If the answer is unclear, that’s not a failure. It is an invitation to explore.
Before You Leave: Know Where You Stand
Before you scroll past this, take thirty seconds to be honest with yourself.
This week, did I ACT?
Did I move, create, or engage, even once, in a way that had nothing to do with a screen or an assignment?
This week, did I BELONG?
Did I connect with another human being in a real, meaningful way?
This week, did I COMMIT?
Did I do something that felt personally significant beyond my to‑do list?
If you answered “no” to one or more, that’s not a reason to feel bad. It’s simply your starting point.
If you want a more detailed analysis of where you’re starting from, I highly recommend taking the free Act Belong Commit Mental Wellbeing Quiz: https://actbelongcommit.org.au/
The quiz takes about ten minutes, provides a breakdown across all three pillars and offers personalised suggestions based on your results.
And if you are wondering if these small shifts actually work. Evidence suggests they do. The Act Belong Commit December 2025 population survey found that 40% of people took action to improve their mental health as a result of the campaign, and 63% felt it helped reduce stigma around mental illness.
And if there’s room for improvement, try starting small.
To build these habits, choose one simple, intentional strategy:
ACT: Build one non‑negotiable daily activity into your schedule that has nothing to do with your study, such as a walk around the block before your first class, ten minutes of stretching, or cooking a proper meal.
BELONG: Actively schedule one real social contact per week (not just reacting to a post, but an actual conversation). Form an online study circle with a classmate or engage with university virtual student groups.
COMMIT: Dedicate one hour a week to something meaningful that isn’t graded such as volunteering with a local organisation, learning a skill with no academic purpose, or joining an online community built around something you care about.
Start with one thing this week. One act. One connection. One commitment. Build from there. Your degree will be waiting. But so will your life, and it deserves some of your attention too.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Reality Note: My Results
After writing this, I took the quiz and my results were a reality check.
I went into the Act Belong Commit Mental Wellbeing Quiz expecting something dry and clinical, since it’s based on the Warwick–Edinburgh Wellbeing Scale, a validated research tool. What I got instead felt uncomfortably accurate.
My overall score was 55, which puts me in the 50th percentile. Not a crisis, but not exactly thriving either. My Act score came back at 12, which I’ll accept because I do like to keep fit. However, my Belong and Commit scores both came in at 8, which the quiz flagged as having room for improvement.
I sat with that for a minute because, honestly, those two things are exactly where I’ve been slipping since moving to online study. My social world has shrunk to a very small circle, and anything that isn’t a deadline has quietly dropped off my radar. Seeing it measured and named made it harder to keep ignoring.
The quiz takes about ten minutes and gives you a breakdown across all three pillars, along with personalised suggestions for each. But the website has more than just the quiz. There’s also an activity finder that surfaces practical, local ideas based on what you want more of, as well as a section called How Do I Keep Mentally Healthy? that’s worth a proper read rather than a skim.
My suggestion is to start with whichever pillar you scored lowest on because that’s where the campaign has the most specific and useful advice waiting for you. For me, that’s Belong and Commit, and writing this article was my first deliberate attempt to do something about both.
If you’re an online student reading this, I’d genuinely love to hear how the quiz felt for you. Share your scores in the comments, tell me which results felt the most confronting, or even just let me know what it brought up for you. Sometimes that small act of responding is its own kind of connection.
And when you’re showing up from behind a screen, those moments of honesty and interaction still matter.
In fact, they count just as much.
References
Act Belong Commit. (2026). Act Belong Commit: An enduring proposition [ Webinar presentation]. NNMHPP February Meeting, Prevention United. Curtin University https://vimeo.com/1165199514?fl=ip&fe=ec
Pollard, C. M., Alati, R., Lawrence,D., Clary, M., Walton, A., Dunne, J., Burns, S., & Millar, L. (2025). The association between participation in mental health protective behaviours and mental well-being: Cross sectional survey among Western Australian Adults. SSM-Mental Health, 100441. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560325000532?via%3Dihub
Prevention united. (2026, February 11). NNMHPP February meeting 2026 [ Video]. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/1165199514?fl=ip&fe=ec
White, M. P., Alcock, I., Grellier, J., Wheeler, B. W., Hartig, T., Warber, S. L., & Fleming, L. E (2019). Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing. Scientific Reports, 9 (1), 7730. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-44097-3
World Health Organization. (2022). World mental health report: Transforming mental health for all. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240049338
Unsplash images:
Shallow focus photography of person walking on road between grass photo – Free Woman Image on Unsplash
Please stay on the path signage photo – Free Red Image on Unsplash
A group of people holding hands on top of a tree photo – Free Forest Image on Unsplash