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!...
We know that, if adults in homes and schools are happy, then the children around them are more likely to be happy too. Similarly, when children are happy, it rubs off on us grown-ups. Well, it does usually. I am writing this at 7am on Sunday morning, having come away for a leisurely weekend to a beautiful village in deepest, darkest...
You might think it's a bit odd that a happiness expert is writing about being unhappy? However the obsession the media and government seem to have with happiness has lead me to want to set the record straight. It’s OK to be unhappy - even on International Day of Happiness. Let me start by saying I am a firm believer in...
At ten years old and in Year 6, my youngest of three is perched on the edge of childhood. Any parent with a child of the same age will recognise the time, where you start see the first indications of a transition. It is an inevitable rite of passage when a little girl or boy begins to leave a few of...
