Taking a step for your mind – shifting your mindset
For Day Two of Mental Health Awareness Week 2024, we are thinking about what we can do to shift our mindset for better mental health, wellbeing, and quality of life. Small steps often lead to a happier future, so try to break down your goals if they are feeling a bit overwhelming.
There are lots of different ways we can think about this, but we have tried our best to compile a range of useful resources that will get us thinking about how we function, and then what we might need to do or learn in order to shift our mindset. Hopefully one or some of these will be relevant and useful for you!
General tips from health organisations
Some tips from the Mental Health Foundation: The Mental Health Foundation have developed a short guide to help us think about some easy and fun ways to boost our mental health. While they stick with the theme of movement, we think most – if not all – of these ideas are also relevant to helping us shift our mindset. Whether it’s by connecting with others, setting small goals, or planning things to look forward to, we encourage you to read this short guide to see if there is anything here that might help you shift your mindset and support your mental health.
NHS top tips to improve your mental health: The NHS have similarly compiled a list of things to think about that might help boost our mental health, from reframing negative thoughts to getting good sleep. Even better, there are some great videos for each of their tips, so there’s lots to get stuck in with and learn on this page.
Making space for arts, creativity and other hobbies: It is so easy to deprioritise the things we enjoy when work or life gets too pressured and stressful. Looking after ourselves is often the first thing that goes when everything gets a bit much. You can already see from the resources above that movement hobbies have a positive impact on our mental health, but so too do creative hobbies. Check out this article on ‘Why being creative is good for you’, and this page on ‘How arts can help improve your mental health’.
Self-learning and understanding resources for if you want to go a bit deeper
Managing stress using the stress container: Rebecca Reed, founder of Siendo and all-round wellbeing warrior, wrote this brilliant article about the 'stress container'. This visual model brings awareness to both our stress levels and the ways we choose to respond, getting us to think about some of the best ways that we can support ourselves in times of stress.
The Route to Resilience: In this 30-minute video from last year’s MHAW, Dr Jennifer Wild, Visiting Professor in the Department of Experimental Psychology, discusses how certain people can overcome enormous stress and anxiety, while others struggle. She breaks this down by presenting seven key tools that can help us all learn to manage stress and anxiety in our own lives and examine the science of why they work.
Understanding and Exploring the Imposter Syndrome: If you experience imposter syndrome and want to learn some tools to support yourself, or if you just want to find out more, give this video a watch! Dr Kate Atkin gives you an understanding of the imposter syndrome, why it really is a phenomenon, and whether it might apply to you. She gives some key tips on how to spot the imposter chatter in yourselves and how to quieten that internal voice, as well as tips for supporting others.