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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...

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...

Have you ever wondered what people think about you? In particular, what’s their first impression of you? The warm up exercise for Laughology’s Unconscious Bias session, asks the audience to answer some questions about the trainer, based purely on what the person delivering looks like and the few words that they have, thus far, uttered. When running a course last week,...

There were many enduring photos of the spectacle that was the Royal Wedding over the weekend. One memorable image was the miserable trout pout worn by Victoria Beckham who clearly missed the memo that explained it was not a funeral, but a day of celebration, happiness and joy. Mrs Beckham wandered around with a face devoid of any jubilation and looked...

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...

‘Mini-beasts’ is a popular summer term topic in infant classes around the country. Young children will be learning about these amazingly resilient creatures and the fantastic things that they achieve. Mini-beasts show tremendous backbone, despite not having an actual backbone, being incredibly small and easily squishable. Currently, there are a lot of news headlines about the pressures on teachers and the...

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...

Have you ever imagined you were in charge, you know, of everything? If I were Prime Minister, I would bring in a law against ugg boots, a total ban on Mondays, and ensure that everyone had access to decent mental health services AND that EVERYONE used them. So basically, we would be living in a mentally healthy dictatorship. All hail me!...