Why it's good to talk On World Suicide Prevention Day, 10th September, I had the privilege of talking to residents and organisations of Redbridge at a Mental Health Awareness event hosted by Sky Sharma Foundation. It's fair to say that mental health awareness is on the radar … [Read more...]
Anxiety: What’s happening in your brain?
Let’s think of anxiety as the body's natural alarm system. If the house were our body, the back garden our environment, and the alarm system our brain, we would expect an alarm to ring loudly if a dangerous intruder were to enter the back garden of our home. After a while, when … [Read more...]
Coping with Grief and Loss
Bereavement is a complex and very personal experience. Losing someone you love or care deeply about can be extremely painful, leaving you with difficult emotions that are hard to understand – the pain and sadness you experience feels like it will never ease. Grief is a natural … [Read more...]
Practical skills to help reduce anxiety, worry and panic
We all need to worry. Whether your thoughts are more niggling - a comment you shouldn't have made, or a looming deadline at work - to the bigger things, such as health concerns or being in debt, worrying is completely normal. To try to stop worrying is challenging, and in some … [Read more...]
What Makes a Good Life?
The psychiatrist Robert Waldinger conducted one of the longest-running and most complete studies of adult life to determine what factors make us truly happy. Tracking the lives of two groups of men (724 in total) for over 75 years the conclusion was essentially this: it's not … [Read more...]
TED Talk – The Power of Vulnerability
The dictionary describes vulnerability as '...the state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally'. It's no wonder then, that the idea of being emotionally vulnerable instills in us a need to protect ourselves from harm; we … [Read more...]