Oaklan came on the 5th October. He’s almost eleven weeks now and things are slowly starting to feel a little easier. I’m still pretty tired – and I’m writing this with him feeding on my lap – so please excuse any typos, half-formed ideas or clumsy phrasing. I wanted to get down some thoughts about…
Tag: Mindfulness
The Regret Tape and the I’m Not Good Enough Mix – new metaphors and thinking tools for managing anxiety and depression
I’ve recently come off Sertraline after 15 years on various SSRIs. It’s been a long and tricky journey but I think I might be almost there. I’ve written a bit more about that here. Using metaphors to identify, share and understand my mental health During this period I’ve found two metaphors very helpful. I love…
The mindfulness of dogs – a #mentalhealthselfie for Mind
Mind asked me to created a #mentalhealthselfie, a video blog about my mental health, for Mental Health Awareness Week 2015. The theme was mindfulness. “He reminds me to be curious” – how Watson helps me practice mindfulness As I blogged for Mind about my Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy course in 2012, I decided to do something…
How Headspace helps (or why Giles Coren is wrong)
Techno smegma? Giles Coren just called mindfulness ‘cynical, capitalist, techno smegma’ in Time Out. Now while I know it’s not only Katie Hopkins who is paid to spout controversial and potentially damaging opinions and these things are usually best ignored, I still wanted to write something in reply. Since my Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy course in…
Festive comparisons and the Facebook effect
An article exploring how the media forces us to make damaging comparisons in the festive season – and how we often magnify the effect with our own social media activity. A friend and old colleague Holly was recently published in the Vagenda. Her article was a spectacularly cynical but very funny piece called ‘How to…
What exactly IS Mindfulness? Chatting with young people on TheSite.org
Earlier this month I found myself back at YouthNet Towers, this time as an expert for one of their expert chats. The Engagement and Support team at YouthNet oversee the running of a number of types of online chat. These include support chat (I also moderate support chats as a volunteer), general chat, film and…
Social media, mental health and mindfulness
Exploring the potential damage that social media can cause; promoting unrealistic representations of daily life and encouraging us all to make unhealthy comparisons with our internal experience. It was only a few years ago that the idea that Facebook and other social networking sites could diminish happiness or affect wellbeing was still a relatively new…
What dogs can teach us about wellbeing and mindfulness
How my dog helps me remember to be mindful through acceptance, curiosity, living in the moment and pure joy. Be more dog? O2’s recently launched ‘Be more dog‘ campaign got me thinking. Their emphasis is on finding excitement and joie de vivre in a world too bored and their aim is to sell their services….
Happify yourself?
Want to be happier every day? Well who doesn’t? Personally I am interested in exploring ways of helping me manage my wellbeing as I try to cut down on the anti depressants I have been on for the last 12 years (a process that seems to have stalled around the 20mg mark). I’ve also recently…
Christmas, comparisons, media and mental health – thoughts on having a more realistic Christmas this year.
Internal comparisons Do you have an internal picture in your mind of how your life ‘should’ be? When you are feeling low, do you ever find yourself judging your experience as ‘not right’ and comparing it to how you feel you ‘should’ be feeling or what ‘should’ be happening? By this I mean thinking thoughts…
Finding a breathing space – eight weeks of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy
Over the past month I have been working on a series of posts for Mind about my experience of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). My own original post about Mindfulness – ‘Keeping the beast asleep’ is by far my most popular – and Mind are interested in how users of their services can develop resilience…
My thoughts on exercise and depression
Bad journalism The BBC headline ‘Exercise ‘no help for depression’, research suggests’ (note – the BBC have quietly changed this headline now!) – and indeed Guardian headline ‘Exercise doesn’t help depression, study concludes’ (note – this link has since broken and I can no longer find the article) – really frustrated me today. It’s classic…
Keeping the beast asleep – Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy and my experience of how it can help prevent relapse
Recurrent depression I recently found something I wrote a couple of years ago, while trying to make sense of a particularly difficult period of depression; “Recurrent depression is cyclical. It comes and goes in longer periods than just days or weeks. Each low episode can last months, and within that time it can make everything…