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I have always been quite an anxious person and would regularly have negative thoughts taking over my mind. I had tried meditating briefly before as I had heard it was a good way to clear the mind. However, meditating isn’t about pushing away thoughts or feelings but of acknowledging them for what they are and not getting caught up and reacting to them as if they are happening. Meditation helps us to learn how to look at these feelings as if we are a third party, to be able to observe them and realise that, just as waves come and go, so do our thoughts and emotions. The way I had looked at meditation and meditating might well be one of the reasons why I hadn’t stuck to it. More recently though, with a more accurate view of meditation, I have challenged myself to meditating for just 10 minutes every day.

My negative thoughts used to be consuming and I would worry that the worst things that could happen would happen, and I could physically feel my whole body tensing at the thought. Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to move and sometimes I would catch myself holding my breath. I know that most of these thoughts weren’t based on fact or in reality but in my mind they were. I would shout like a banshee at my son riding on his bike too far away from me, worried that some disaster was just about to happen. The thing with this though is twofold – Firstly I was imagining something terrible happening rather than enjoying seeing my son riding his bike on his own for the first time, and secondly, I was stopping him from enjoying the feeling of riding his bike too. Worrying about things will not protect me if something bad does happen and it is robbing me of enjoying the time I spend with my family and friends. 

Trying to resist these thoughts has only led to more tension in my body. I have migraines more than I care to realise and my shoulders are permanently stiff. However, since I started meditating every day, I have noticed how the deep breathing helps to relax the body, and how I am less physically affected by my thoughts and emotions. 

Have a go yourself: Take a deep breath in through the nose and then exhale through the mouth (so it can be heard). Do these breathing exercises a few times and see how your body naturally starts to become a bit softer, or calmer and starts to relax. 

Also, just by simply taking some time out of your day to just sit there and relax and breathe can be enough to help you to relax and rest your wandering mind enough to feel better and at peace for a moment.

Meditation has taught me how to develop an awareness of what I am imagining or thinking. To acknowledge that I am having a negative thought, to be able to ask myself if it is based in reality and then to be able to let the feelings and thoughts come and go. This is not a quick fix process and negative thoughts do still come into my head but day by day I am learning to acknowledge them for what they are and to let them go that little bit more.

By Lindsey

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Mental Health Awareness week will take place from 10th – 16th May and this year the theme is nature, so I thought I’d write a little about what nature means to me and what impact it has on my mental health.

For a long time, that is as far as I got with this blog because I couldn’t quite put into words the impact being in nature has on me. I couldn’t just write “It makes me feel good / brilliant / fantastic”. I wanted to delve into it more, what do I get out of being in nature?

Today is May Bank Holiday so to explore this feeling a bit more, earlier on today my family and I set out to the beach. I have to say, it nearly didn’t happen, looking out of the window, the rain was driving sideways, and leaves were being blown up the road, but needs must.

I’m not sure the kids felt that eager to support the quest but off we went, dodging puddles on the road and the build-up of traffic from more cautious weather impacted driving.

Arriving at the beach car park I wouldn’t say there was an eagerness to exiting the car, more like a “shall we just drive about for a bit, get some chips and head back home?”

But we didn’t give in and with some more persuasion we were all out and heading over the sand dunes to the beach.

The tide was as far out as I had ever seen it and the beach seemed to go on forever, so the mission was to reach the sea. The beach was largely deserted, just a few hardy souls taking their dogs for a walk, oh and an ice cream van, obviously.

At first, we were a little cautious with our steps, my wife and I encouraging the kids to avoid the water pools and streams of water running down the beach. That soon changed and suddenly having dry shoes didn’t matter, being wet through and cold didn’t matter.

What mattered was that we were outside laughing, shouting, running, and jumping, it was a massive emotional uplift. We were out of the house, away from electronics, notifications, jobs and the four walls.

Making it to the waters edge we whooped and shouted, knowing we could be as loud as we liked, and nobody would be bothered. We had the freedom from the restrictions everyone has felt so much of in this past year with the pandemic.

I didn’t just feel the sense of happiness, it was like a huge release of pressure was bursting out of me. A pressure that I hadn’t really noticed that had been building up inside. I spend my life talking about self-awareness, so it really caught me out knowing how much pressure I had felt.

Happiness is what remains

As we turned around to head back up the beach, the wind and rain were now against us, making it a proper slog. Our hands started to get cold, and we were all soaked to the skin. The streams of water that we had jumped over on the way down to the water’s edge, we now just walked through with full abandonment.

When we finally sat down in the car, wet clothes stripped off and the heater blasting out, the one thing that was remaining from the beach was happiness – happiness and sand. You can never get rid of the sand.

And that’s what nature gives me, an emotional uplift. Mental health is a barometer of how we think, how we feel, our self-esteem, how we see the past, present and future.

Wherever I am on that barometer, being in nature is a shift up the barometer, it is one of my main protective factors. It is something I am lucky enough to have all around me that I can use as a coping strategy for all the stresses and challenges that life throws at me.

Even at my lowest ever point when our first child was still-born, the one thing my wife and I felt like we wanted and needed to do was to walk. We found a woodland close by which we hadn’t explored before. We walked its paths every day, it was the start of a routine, doing something we enjoyed that helped us through the grieving and healing process.

Studies have shown how spending time in nature can help with depression, anxiety, and many other mental health problems but there is also the physical side to spending time in nature.

Over the last year I’ve spoken to many people who have told me they have no intention to go back to the gym as during the pandemic they have found a new love of exercising outdoors.

So, what does nature give you? Notice how you are feeling before, during and after connecting with nature. Is there somewhere new can you explore for the first time, what’s round the next corner?

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Motivation does exist but it is not what gets you up in the morning and raring to go, nor is it what makes you start creating that new business or keeps you working hard in a job.

So, what does?

Well – ACTION. The more we do, the more we want to do. Action leads to rewards and success which then leads to motivation which leads to action….and so on.

But what can stop us? In short – procrastination. Procrastination is the act of putting things off and it is what can stop your goals from coming to fruition. In a way, thinking about motivating ourselves to do something can lead to procrastination, we can talk ourselves out of the doing or come up with reasons why we can’t take action.

Moving past procrastination

Sometimes we don’t feel we can reach our goal, or don’t think it matters, and if this is the case then we won’t feel motivated to pursue it. This is when creating processes will help. We need to stop looking at the distance between where we currently are and the place we want to get to. To make the move from procrastination to action, and to help with our processes, we can start by asking ourselves a few questions.

• Why do you want to achieve this goal or task / why is it important?
• How can you achieve this task?
• What are the steps/processes you need to do to achieve it?
• What action can you take today?
• How will it feel if you do this, or don’t do this?

These questions can be applied to almost anything you want to achieve in life, no matter how big or small. It lets you know if it is important, the steps you need to follow to get there and how you will ultimately feel once it is done.

How can we help ourselves to act?

Firstly, it is important to recognise where you currently are, and be specific. There is no point in lying about how you are feeling and where you are, as this will not be a true starting position in your quest to act. If we aren’t being truthful to ourselves, we may start to feel like we are further away from our goal before we have even started.

So, what steps can we take to get to “There”?

Forget about the end goal and focus on each process. Break it down into manageable pieces. Think about what can you achieve today? Try writing down one task that matters that you want to accomplish today. Make it small enough so the thought of doing it is not overwhelming.

Another important lesson to learn in the quest for action and motivation is to manage your expectations. Some goals are impossible to do in a day, but the smaller processes can be achieved. This is why it is important to focus on the processes and not your end goal. Recognise what can be done today and not what you imagine you must do to make that end goal come true today.

Changing behaviour and habits

Always remember to take stock of what went well throughout the day – celebrate your wins no matter how small. Create a virtuous cycle. Be kind to yourself and reward or recognise a good job done. We don’t encourage ourselves or others enough. Write down what you have achieved today and what you are proud of. When we celebrate our wins each evening, we will wake up with renewed desire to act again the following day.

The next shift in our behaviour is to interrupt and replace our negative thought process and get our pre-frontal cortex making the decisions and stop ourselves from relying on our auto pilot. Sometimes instead of sticking to our plan we go back to our old ways of doing things, this is our autopilot taking over, our habits, and often we don’t get the outcome we wanted.  We need to interrupt this process and tell ourselves there is a different road we can take.

Mel Robbins in her book The 5 Second Rule discusses the science behind stopping the brain before it starts sending us down the well-travelled habit road. If we count backwards from 5 to 1 and take action on the 1, this will stop us from talking our way out of the task and help the pre-frontal cortex to make decisions. On 1 tell yourself to get out of bed, get that job done etc… There is no time for your brain to try and stop you, and in the words of a famous sporting ad, you “Just Do It”.

Could it really be that easy? Well, yes, but you must want to do whatever “IT” is. You won’t take action if you are not bothered whether you do the task or not. Therefore, it is important that “IT” is something that matters to you. It could be financial, to be promoted, to start that business, to lose weight, anything, but it must be valuable to you. I don’t have to know your reason why, nobody does, but it has to be important enough to you that you will take action.

So, now is the time to get out there and achieve your goal. Just follow the processes, forget the greater end goal, and focus on what you can do each and every day and just keeping doing it. Create your own motivational cycle – take action, create your successes and create motivation to take more action and before you know it you will have reached your target.

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Over the last few years, I’ve seen an increase in organisations promoting remote working. For some employee’s remote working at least two days a week is the new norm. One thing I’ve noticed however is that because it is a fairly new concept, it is not necessarily that well managed.

We now have the Coronavirus to contend with. More employees are being told to stay away from the workplace and work from home.  I have a sneaky feeling that this outbreak may cause a little shift in the way we work over the long term and not just whilst the world deals with this outbreak.

With the constant media attention of the virus and our accessibility to this media, it can lead to an increase in anxiety which can become overwhelming. The health and safety of those close to us who are more vulnerable due to the outbreak, our finances and the world economy, when is it all going to end? The negative thoughts we have can spiral.

Work as always can be a great distraction and way to have a positive impact on our mental health. It gives us something to concentrate on other than the news. It gives us a purpose and helps with keeping a routine.

We can still do this from home but there are certain things we may wish to take into account:

1. Connections, or at least the lack of them. One of the great things we get from going into work is the social side. The simple things like greeting colleagues in the morning, the chat over a brew, the ability to share the things that are going on in our lives.
2. Lack of routine, I mentioned it before, but we tend to love routine. In work at a certain time, out of work at a certain time, lunch at a certain time.
3. What does it look like (framework) from the managers point of view? What are the expectations and how are they set and met? Is the employee even able to remote work?
4. What does it look like from the remote workers point of view? It’s not just up to the managers, the remote worker needs to take responsibility and make sure they communicate effectively with others. This could be via the phone or web based meetings.

Under the current climate where parents may be at home looking after children, working the normal hours would be tough to do. I know full well that when my children are at home working without being distracted is tough.

Even without the Coronavirus, remote working really isn’t the jolly I think some see it as, it brings up different issues for everyone concerned and as always needs to be managed well. 

How is your organisation managing the wellbeing of your remote workers?

We now have our brilliant resilience and mental health trainings available via interactive webinars, including:

• Resilience for remote workers
• Managing remote working and mental health
• Mental health awareness
• Resilience for employees
• Resilience for managers

For more information on how you can help support your remote workers not only during the current climate but also for the long term please contact me via LinkedIn

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