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How do you asses your own mental health? I mean, we can see if we have got a cold, have the flu, broken an arm etc. When something affects our physical health we know what to do and what we need. So how can we give ourselves a bit of a mental health MOT and why should we? We are getting...
Why does my daughter tell me off once every couple of weeks, providing me with a list of my misdemeanours, whereas my wife happily tells me off as soon as I make a mistake? A key reason is personality differences. Understanding this improves communication and boosts mental health. We are social creatures and misunderstanding each other can cause all sorts of...
Promoting mental health awareness is a good starting point, but workplaces need to go much further in order to prevent stress and mental illness. The positive shift we have seen in the past five years in how workplaces think about mental health and wellbeing is encouraging. Increased dialogue about the issue ‘normalises’ the experience of mental illness, and removed the stigma, which...
For many, many months I have been advising my other half (which is completely different to nagging) to cut down on his screen time. As we embarked on our family holiday last month I suspected that I should do the same. Why? Because I am concerned about the damage our screens have on our wellbeing.

A close friend of mine suggested a while ago that we did something a bit different. “How do you fancy climbing Mount Snowden in the middle of the night to watch the sun rise from the summit on the summer solstice?” she asked. It seemed a good idea in the middle of winter when we booked it. Last weekend, me and...

Whilst eating dinner with family and friends recently we happened upon the subject of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (not unsurprisingly as it’s my husband’s favourite topic) whereupon I started to feel a little anxious. You see my ‘internal’ fight or flight, reptilian brain, response to ‘AI’ is: ‘It’s scary, it’s going to take all our jobs before taking over the entire world and...
When I was 28 I met my guardian angel! ...well, at the very least he was an incredibly kind man... My acting career (which of course had been non-stop) was dwindling, I was about to become homeless and my love life was well, pretty similar to my acting career - non-existent. I faced the prospect of moving out of London and...

Someone once famously said to Bill Shankly: 'To you, football is a matter of life or death!' To which he replied: 'Listen, it's more important than that.’ As we enter the business end of the World Cup, we have already seen a wide range of life-or-death emotions, both on and off the pitch. These have been from players, managers, supporters and...