Mental Health Awareness Week: How And Where To Find Support...

To mark Mental Health Awareness week on 9-15 May May, Headspace Mindfulness Meditation Teacher, Dora Kamau is on hand to help the nation achieve good mental health and notice when loved ones are struggling.

Dora has shared top tips on how to manage your mental health each day and develop a new practise to channel stress:

Mental health is complex and isn’t one size fits all, so being as open and compassionate as possible is really important. If we can educate ourselves around the symptoms and behaviours that can manifest in the mind and body, this can help us to learn how to identify someone who is struggling.

If someone is struggling with their mental health, be curious, cultivate safe spaces and relationships with individuals and offer open-ended, neutral questions and language to help them feel included in the conversation.

If you can only do one day to take care of your mental well-being, I would encourage you to take 2-3 minutes each day to ground yourself. Take a few deep breaths, feeling your feet on the floor or connecting to your senses. Grounding is a great way to check in with the mind and body and create a moment to pause and gather yourself before continuing on with the rest of your day.

Approach stresses with a sense of mindfulness, instead of meeting it with reactivity, we’re able to connect to a greater sense of balance which can help us to stay focused. Dora suggest Headspace’s A 10-minute meditation for stress to help slow down and be present when getting things done and reaching our goals.

Headspace, the UK’s leading mindfulness and mental health app offers tools to better your mental health through various mindfulness and meditation tracks.