Today the 10th of October is World Mental Health Day. LivingCare Group are wishing to raise awareness of the effects of mental health, its prevalence and provide some advice for individuals.
According to www.mind.org.uk 1 in 4 people will be affected by mental health problems at least once a year. In England 1 in 6 people report experiencing a common mental health problem (such as anxiety and depression) in any given week.Studies show that one great way to cope with stress and anxiety is mindfulness. LivingCare wish to share the following techniques from the www.mind.org.uk website.
What is mindfulness?
In day to day life we tend to lose touch with our body and our minds take flight and we forget about our thoughts and feelings in that moment. This is when your body ‘ceases to be mindful’.
Mindfulness is a mental state achieved by focusing your awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting your feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, usually used as a therapeutic technique.
How can mindfulness help my mental wellbeing?
Mindfulness helps your mental wellbeing by becoming more aware of the present moment, the surroundings around us and understand ourselves better. When you become more aware of the present moment rather than rushing off worrying about the future we start to appreciate things that we usually take for granted.
Mindfulness lets us stand back from our thoughts and feelings and see how we can become tangled in these thoughts in ways that are not good or us.
The first step to becoming more mindful:
The first step is a simple but very effective step – Breathing. Focus on your breath-in breath-out technique. Focus your mind on that breath-in, breath-out. When you do this your mind has time to stop worrying, overthinking and the mental discourse just stops. You don’t think of the past. You don’t think of the future. You don’t think about your everyday tress. You don’t think about your projects at work. You just focus your attention, your mindfulness, on your breath.
The breath-in can also be a celebration, people that are dead cant breath-in but you can, you’re alive and you’re breathing.
he practice is simple recognition of the in-breath and the out-breath.
The second step to becoming more mindful:
The second step to becoming more mindful is concentration.
When you breath-in follow that breath-in all the way through, when you breath-out follow that breath-out all the way out. From the beginning of that breath-in to the end of the breath-in your mind has to be always with it this way the mindfulness becomes uninterrupted and the quality of your concentration is improved
The third and final step to becoming more mindful:
The third and final step to becoming more mindful is being aware of your body.
In the first step you became aware of your breathing. Because you have now generated the energy of mindfulness through mindful breathing, you can use that energy to recognise your body. This brings the mind wholly back to the body. Your mind and body are then completely relaxed. This exercise is so simple but yet so effective. In our daily lives our body is there but our mind is elsewhere. Our mind gets caught up in past and future events, worries, stress, sorrow and regrets so our mind is never truly there in the present.
Mindfulness helps to bring your mind back to the present and even for a second forget about your worries and just focus on you and your life right in that very moment not the past not the future but the present.
When your mind is there with your body, you are established in the present moment. Then you can recognize the many conditions of happiness that are in you and around you, and happiness just comes naturally.
For more information and techniques visit:www.mind.org.uk/information-support/drugs-and-treatments/mindfulness/#.W7cUZXtKiUk
LivingCare Group provide a Private GP service where individuals can speak to a doctor.The doctor may arrange for you to seek counselling or provide further advice and referral.For more information regarding our Private GP service: www.livingcare.co.uk/private-gp-servic