Author: rm-wellbeing2020

14 March 2023
menopause • menopause workplace •

Supporting Menopause in the Workplace


That menopause is becoming more widely discussed in the workplace is something to be celebrated. There is much hard work, led by women, around increasing the understanding of menopause and removing stigma and shame around this normal, natural phase in women’s lives.  However, as the topic becomes more widely discussed, there is a growing trend for menopausal women to be discussed as a homogenous group, who all share the identical, challenging journey through menopause. This is not the case at all, and it is vital for workplaces to understand the distinctions and vast range of experiences of women, so that they may be supported in a way that is empowering and enables them to thrive at work.

Menopause is a complex and individual experience and encompasses distinct phases of peri-menopause, menopause and post-menopause – lasting an average of 7 years. Symptoms are different for every woman, and mental health-related symptoms in particular evolve and change through these three phases. Around 25% of menopause women experience no symptoms at all, around 50% will likely experience an average of 3 or 4 symptoms that come and go at different times and may interfere with the ability to function at work, while a further 1 in 4 experience symptoms so severe and debilitating that they can struggle to continue with their careers.

Side effects/symptoms

Hot flushes that last for several minutes and result in often unbearable levels of heat and sweat around the face and chest are the most common symptom and can cause a high degree of discomfort, and embarrassment for some, especially at work. Some women experience hot flushes occasionally, while others will have an average of 20 hot flushes per day for several years!  Night sweats and disturbed sleep are also commonplace, with menopausal women being the group most likely to experience chronic insomnia, which can result in exhaustion and concentration lapses at work.

Other common symptoms include severe joint pain, fatigue, vertigo and heart palpitations, thinning hair, dry or itchy skin and acne, and changes in weight and body shape, For many “brain fog” and memory loss are common and highly debilitating symptoms –  something that can be easily misunderstood by managers, and can be very frightening for those women affected.

Menopause, mood and mental health

The various stages of menopause impact many women’s mood and mental health. These can be linked to hormonal and biochemical changes, but mental health issues can also be triggered by thoughts and feelings around the end of fertility, changing appearance or loss of identity during this period of enormous change. It is common for menopausal women to feel grief, shame, fear and resentment.

Irritability is the most common mood complaint, experienced by 70% of menopausal women. It is especially important that organisations and leaders understand the depth of this challenging occurrence.  Strong waves of irritability, anger or rage, can last from several hours to several days, particularly in peri-menopause.

Higher levels of anxiety are reported by 51% of peri- and menopausal women – waves of anxiety can appear quite suddenly, for no apparent reason, and can be very challenging at work in particular, leading to a loss of confidence and self-assurance.

Approximately 20% of menopausal women will experience depression, particularly in the 3 to 4 years after periods stop completely (post-menopause). At its most impactful, depression can lead to suicidal thoughts and feelings, and is therefore something that must be taken extremely seriously.  The highest rate of suicide amongst women in developed countries is in the age-group 45-54 years.  

Fortunately, prescription Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) is highly effective in reducing debilitating symptoms for the vast majority of women. And workplaces should promote their mental health support services such as employee assistance providers or, better, in-house counselling services to women, to help navigate the challenges.

How to Support Menopausal Women in the Workplace

There has been an atmosphere of shame and stigma unfairly and outdatedly attached to the menopause for so long, and we need to change that narrative. Organisations and leaders are advised to encourage discussion and acceptance of menopause in the workplace, creating the space for education and conversation.

Key Tips for Workplaces

  • Have a menopause policy and factsheet – well publicised and accessible. There are many great examples of menopause policy templates online
  • Having a “Menopause Champion” in your workplace is helpful for creating an open culture around menopause, and can provide information and support to women as well as other employees
  • All line managers should be trained in menopause awareness, and should develop a willingness to discuss and support the individual needs of menopausal women in their team to help them thrive at work
  • Ensure that menopausal women in your organisation are given opportunities for career development – mature women are highly skilled at collaboration, multitasking, mentorship and bring a wealth of experience ­– and are ideally placed to manage younger generations of workers and their evolving needs
  • Show images of mature women in your marketing and communication materials – all genders and age groups should be represented for the workplace to be fair and equitable

About: Our author, Lou Campbell, is a fully qualified counselling psychotherapist, sleep therapist, Mental Health First Aid instructor and co-founder of Wellbeing Partners. Lou and her team specialise in providing confidential mental health support in workplaces, offer consultancy for HR leaders to ensure every menopausal woman is being supported based on their needs, and provides training to line managers so they are able to understand and support menopausal women in their teams.

Getting Started

24 January 2023

Rising Anxiety and the Workplace: Mental Health Awareness Week 2023

  • Mental Health Awareness Week 2023 occurs 15th – 21st May 2023
  • This year’s theme is Anxiety
  • There are many evidence-based tools & techniques that help employees manage anxiety
  • Wellbeing Partners offer anxiety management courses, group workshops and confidential one to one support for anxious employees

This year’s Mental Health Awareness week in May 2023 focuses on Anxiety, highlighting its prevalence and how it affects our personal and professional lives. This is particularly important to address in the workplace where people with anxiety disorders can feel overwhelmed and isolated.

Anxiety is an issue that requires urgent attention.  Wellbeing Partners are workplace mental health specialists, ideally placed to support your workforce.  Our team of professionals has extensive experience of addressing and treating mental health issues in the workplace.  Anxiety management is one of our specialities and we utilise therapists, counsellors and mindfulness teachers to help offer varied and empirically proven approaches for reducing anxiety.

To help you plan how to support your staff during Mental Health Awareness week in May 2023, here is information on the anxiety-specific sessions and course we offer workplaces:

From Anxious to Calm: a 60 minute workshop that helps to bust the myths and misconceptions around anxiety.  It also provides practical, solutions-focused exercises and tips to reduce anxiety and cultivate a greater sense of calm and equilibrium, even at times of stress. The skills taught are invaluable in giving people the skills they need to manage anxiety allowing improved confidence and engagement in the professional sphere.

Facing Anxiety and Flourishing: A more in-depth exploration of anxiety and how we can reduce it both in the moment it arises but also in the longer term. Utilising CBT and MBCT techniques, the course is offered either as 4 x 1 hour sessions or 2 x 2 hour sessions, the evidence-based course explores a variety of approaches for managing anxiety and developing resilience that gives people the confidence to face anxiety and know that they can flourish even in the midst of difficulty.

In-house One to One Counselling and Wellbeing Sessions: The new workplace trend in mental health for employees is tailored, individual support for those struggling with issues, including anxiety. Employee counselling is an excellent way to meet the mental health needs of your staff, giving them the space to explore issues around anxiety in a confidential, bespoke way.  Our fully qualified BAACP registered counsellors are also wellbeing coaches and have at least 10 years post qualification experience in the workplace experience, and can support all issues that arise around anxiety, offering tailored plans and treatment that support the individual.

For further information on managing anxiety in the workplace and the courses we provide, please contact [email protected] or find out more at www.wellbeing.partners

About Wellbeing Partners: One of the UK’s leading suppliers of employee mental health and wellbeing support services to workplaces. Providing a wide range of confidential one to one counselling sessions and wellbeing coaching, mental health training for managers and HR teams, the full suite of MHFA England courses, hundreds of wellbeing workshops across mental health, psychology, nutrition and physical health, plus a full range of occupational health services.

20 December 2022

In-House Counselling: The new phenomenon in workplace wellbeing

As we come towards the end of the year it is a time to reflect and we wanted to take this opportunity to wish all our clients and newsletter subscribers a Merry Christmas and thank you for the support you have shown us for the past year.  

A real positive to come from a challenging year in employee mental health, is how awareness and discussions around mental health have progressed, particularly in the professional sphere.

However, due to unprecedented demand from employees, workplace avenues of mental health support such as EAPs are struggling to keep up, and many HR and People teams are feeling overwhelmed by the support they are providing colleagues with burnout, distress and mental health issues.

The growing trend in workplace mental health is now moving towards In-House Counselling – a cost-effective mental health and wellbeing support service for employees, that is tailored to the needs of your workplace.

Please read on for more information about In-House Counselling and how it works:

In-House Counselling: The new phenomenon in workplace wellbeing

While most workplaces offer mental health support via Employee Assistance Providers (EAPs), many of these are increasingly struggling to meet the demand placed upon them, so overwhelmed that they are only able to offer limited support, or signpost onto an already overstretched NHS.

Increasingly, organisations are utilising in-house counselling services to help support their employees and this is proving popular and successful. The high-quality specialist service offers more accessible and personal support through a team of named mental health professionals who work closely with your organisations’ employees, but with confidentiality assured.

The highly experienced counsellors meet the needs of individual employees with tailored mental health support and recovery plans, helping them navigate workplace and personal life issues.

Knowing that all staff members can be guaranteed support by a named, fully qualified professional, helps to relieve exhausted HR teams and provides a guarantee of quality care to employees.

High quality specialist counselling support services ensure that all staff can be guided through all manner of workplace challenges, and properly supported with any mental health issues, by a known, trusted and experienced professional, in a guaranteed time frame.

The use of in-house counsellors has huge benefits, not only for the mental health of employees, but for the organisation as well.  The premium and cost effective service helps organisations retain staff and entice new recruits, especially in a competitive market where a culture of wellbeing support is more important than ever to potential employees.

In-house counselling is at the heart of the work of Wellbeing Partners.  Its team of highly qualified counsellors and wellbeing specialists provide over 4500 workplace counselling sessions a year, helping many organisations cope with these increased mental health demands.

If you’d like to know more about setting up our in-house counselling service for your employees, please contact [email protected] or visit https://wellbeing.partners/employee-counselling/

Getting Started

22 November 2022
men's health • men's mental health • mental health •

Dramatic Increase in Men Accessing Counselling Services: Workplace figures
particularly promising.

  • November’s awareness day place particular influence on male mental health
  • Encouraging figures see dramatic upswing in men accessing counselling services
  • Particularly important at a time when nearly 10 million people in the UK require mental health support
  • Men still more likely than women to die from suicide and resort to damaging coping mechanisms for mental health issues
  • Dedicated workplace counselling increases chances of men engaging with support offered

During November, Movember and International Men’s Day help raise awareness of the important topic of male mental health, with an emphasis on getting more men to access mental health support.

And latest figures suggest that there is reason for optimism.  Whereas the narrative around male mental health is traditionally driven by themes of avoidance and denial, we have seen a dramatic increase in the numbers of men accessing counselling, and this could not have come at a more important time.

The Quality Care Commission highlights that up to 10 million people in the UK require mental health support[i]. There are currently 1.2 million people are on waiting lists for NHS support[ii] and it is struggling to cope.  For male mental health these stats are particularly problematic.  Men still make up ¾ of suicide deaths in the UK[iii], are more likely to abuse alcohol and recreational drugs as coping mechanisms[iv] and are more likely to go missing.    

Therefore the provision of expert counselling is essential, particularly in the workplace where the demands and stresses can add to, trigger or exacerbate mental health issues.

And there is evidence that men feel more comfortable opening up in a mental health setting.  The BACP reports that the number of men accessing counselling has risen from 18% to 27% in a decade[v]. At Wellbeing Partners, we have found an even greater upswing in male counselling participation, with 45% of our workplace counselling sessions now being accessed by men.

For businesses to ensure that their male employees access the mental health support services being offered, they should ask themselves two questions.

Firstly, how easy is it for staff to access these services?  It is more likely that people will take up these provisions if it is a straightforward process, ideally a one-step procedure that makes it simple to book a session with a counsellor.

Secondly, does our process focus on encouraging employees to discuss challenge and difficulties rather than just crises?  Ideally the counselling support on offer will be focused on a wider sense of mental wellbeing, allowing for the processing of challenges and difficulties in a timely manner so they do not develop into more serious issues.

Lou Campbell, counsellor and programmes director of Wellbeing Partners explains:

“The emphasis is proactive wellness, processing difficulties before they become a crisis and normalising this as part of the workplace culture. This emphasis helps people engage earlier and helps remove the perceived stigma amongst some men about accessing mental health support”.

Managers too have an important role to play in ensuring this support is seen as part of a healthy working culture and taken up by employees.  Encouragement is invaluable for staff who might be unsure around asking for mental health support.

Campbell adds:

“An essential component of mental health training in the workplace is focusing on training managers to be able to notice signs of employees needing support and having the skills necessary to signpost them onward to that support”.

Our actions, as managers, HR staff and colleagues, can help sustain this impressive upturn in men accessing mental health support.  If you would like more information on male mental health and how counselling can support your employees, please contact

[i] https://www.cqc.org.uk/publications/major-reports/soc202021_01d_mh-care-demand

[ii] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/nhs-mental-health-waiting-list-b2145432.html#

 

[iii]https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2021registrations

[iv] https://alcoholchange.org.uk/alcohol-facts/fact-sheets/alcohol-statistics

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7626/CBP-7626.pdf

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/substance-misuse-treatment-for-adults-statistics-2020-to-2021/adult-substance-misuse-treatment-statistics-2020-to-2021-report

[v] https://www.bacp.co.uk/news/news-from-bacp/2022/16-june-mens-changing-attitude-to-mental-health-and-therapy/#:~:text=Men%20are%20also%20more%20likely,compared%20to%2027%25%20in%202022

1 November 2022
autumn • mental health •

November Newsletter

November is here already – it seems to have snuck up on us!  As evenings draw in and temperatures drop, we can be forgiven for lamenting the loss of the sunny days and long evenings of summer. Indeed, many people experience a downturn in mood as the seasons change, with people feeling increasingly isolated, fed up, lethargic and as many as 2 million experiencing seasonal affective disorder (SAD).

Perhaps reflecting this, November is replete with mental and physical health awareness days and there is a particular slant towards raising awareness of male mental health issues as we head into winter.

At Wellbeing Partners, we are committed to offering solutions to these issues, through workshops, courses, counselling and expert advice and we are excited about the opportunities to do this throughout November.

MOVEMBER 1st – 30th November: Using humour to confront serious issues is a brilliant way to engage people whilst raising awareness. Movemeber creates a humorous shared experience whilst bringing male mental health into daily conversation.  Globally, 60 men take their own lives every hour and 1 in 8 men have a mental health issue, but men are still statistically unlikely to seek help. Wellbeing Partners offers a broad range of sessions to support men’s health including ‘Men’s Health’, ‘Men’s Mental Health’, ‘Mindfulness for Men’ as well as expert counselling and one-to-one sessions.

International Stress Awareness Week 7th – 11th November: If left unchecked, heightened stress can trigger serious health issues, both mentally and physically, as well as affecting our performance and attendance in the workplace. International Stress Awareness week is an opportunity to reflect on stress levels and cultivate strategies to help us reduce them.  Stress management is a speciality of Wellbeing Partners and we have a variety of options available.  As well as our expert-led counselling sessions, we offer interactive workshops including ‘Managing Stress and Enhancing Resilience’, ‘Recover from Burnout’, ‘From Anxious to Calm’, ‘Facing Anxiety and Flourishing’, ‘Wellbeing in Hybrid Working, and ‘Back on Track: Cultivating a Positive Mindset’.

World Kindness Day 13th November: This annual awareness day is an opportunity for individuals, groups and organisations to consider our sense of shared humanity and to promote courses, workshops, behaviours and initiatives that spread kindness and connectivity. After two gruelling years of a pandemic and continued financial and global uncertainty, this is a perfect time to engage in behaviours that enhance kindness, boost mood and reduce stress.  Wellbeing Partners present such opportunities through the sessions ‘Kindness and Compassion’ and ‘Improving Connection and Belonging’.

World Diabetes Day 14th November: November is not just about mental health, but also raising awareness of physical health issues like diabetes. Globally, someone is diagnosed with type-2 diabetes every two-minutes and awareness of diet and lifestyle choices that affect the illness can help us avoid serious health issues later in life. Our expert nutritionists deliver engaging sessions that can help with this including ‘Reducing Sugar in your Diet’, ‘Ten Tips for Healthy Eating’ and ‘The Ultimate Detox’.

International Men’s Day 19th November: This annual awareness day is an opportunity to reflect on positive male role models and achievement whilst also addressing serious issues around male mental health. The year’s theme is ‘Better Relations between Men and Women’ and addressing mental health issues is an essential part of this as it gives men the skills required for emotional honesty and emotional intelligence, the bedrock of healthy relationships. We can help men explore their mental health issues through expert counselling and curated sessions on ‘Men’s Health’, ‘Men’s Mental Health’ as well as ‘Mindfulness for Men’.

If you would like more information on any of these sessions, please get in touch or enter your details below.

Getting Started

Enter your details below or call us on 020 3951 7685 to get started

21 September 2022
#anxiety • #anxietydisorders • #cbt • #cognitivebehaviouraltherapy • #employeementalhealth • #mentalwellbeing • #mindfulness • #overcominganxiety • #unhelpfulthoughts •

FACING ANXIETY AND FLOURISHING

Is anxiety causing you distress and holding you back in your career or personal life? Do you know that your anxiety is most likely being triggered by your own thoughts and thinking patterns?  

Here’s some examples of thoughts and thinking patterns that often lead to anxiety:

“Catastrophising” thoughts, where we imagine things going wrong, such as:

  • This will be a complete disaster
  • Things always go wrong for me
  • I’m going to fail / I’m going to get sick
  • If I don’t take on this extra work, I will lose my job
  • Soon everyone will find out that I don’t belong here

Or “abusive self-talk”, where we say mean things to ourselves, such as:

  • I’m not good enough
  • It’s all my fault
  • I’m a terrible friend/partner/parent
  • My life is a complete mess
  • Everyone else is going ok, it’s just me who’s not coping
  • I always say stupid things in front of others

These types of thoughts can make us feel frustration, fear, shame, guilt, anger, confusion, sadness, isolation, envy, rejection, abandonment. These are the stress-related emotions, which power up our nervous system and lead to the symptoms of anxiety and circular thoughts of self-doubt.

What can we do to reduce these unhelpful thoughts and calm our anxiety?

The good news is that there are a range of evidence-based techniques and skills that we can learn and practice in order to overcome our negative thinking patterns, calm our anxieties and live in a more content and less fearful way.

Wellbeing Partners teaches these techniques and skills through a four part course called Facing Anxiety and Flourishing which is run over four weeks – one hour per week. New courses start each month and both daytime and evening courses are available.

The Facing Anxiety and Flourishing course is led by a fully qualified and highly experienced cognitive behavioural science instructor who specialises in anxiety issues. The course will provide you with the advice, skills and exercises to manage your unhelpful thinking patterns, reduce your anxiety, balance your mood, build perspective and help you gain resilience.

The course utilises a blend of practices from CBT, psychology, resilience training, stress reduction, self-compassion, mindfulness, and emotional intelligence to give you a distinctive set of tools to respond to anxiety skilfully and with confidence.

The Facing Anxiety and Flourishing course runs monthly throughout the year and costs £180 per person for the four parts, materials and lifetime access to the Mindfulness UK app.

6 September 2022

Letting Go

At some point in our life someone will have said to us “you’ve got to let it go”.  Well-meaning as the advice may be, the idea of “letting go” can seem challenging, even unrealistic, but letting go is an attitude that can be cultivated by all and doing so can be liberating.

The pandemic saw the removal of the certainties of life, leaving us with an experience akin to having the rug pulled from beneath our feet.  Everything was thrown up in the air and we had no idea how bumpy the eventual landing would be.  Every aspect of life – health, family, profession, finances and human interaction – was impacted.  Anxiety rose as we tried to navigate experiences that were troubling and beyond our control.

As the pandemic recedes we find ourselves facing many new uncertainties. Adapting to the new normal of hybrid working, the cost of living crisis and political unease are part of our landscape, a reality we naturally try to push back against.  But rather than helping, resisting our reality feeds an endless cycle of stress, rumination and even despair.

Recent experiences have magnified the inherent uncertainty of the human condition but amongst all the difficulty, they opened a door to a more progressive way of approaching these challenges. Perhaps it is time to “let go” of that which is beyond our control and get back on track.

When facing things beyond our control we can endlessly ruminate. This serves to increase stress without resolving anything. A more compassionate response is to train our minds to accept our reality and let go – to respond with choice and self-care.

It is important to clarify that “acceptance” and “letting go” are not passivity.  It is not a mental shrugging of the shoulders, but instead a more nuanced response to meeting difficulties.

When we face a challenge, we begin the process of acceptance and letting go by asking ourselves a simple question:

“Do I have any control over this situation?”

If the answer is “yes”, then you can decide how you want to respond, giving you a sense of engagement.

If the answer is “no”, then you can decide how you support yourself – to let go of that beyond our control. In doing so we do not give up on ambition, progress or affecting change, but we let go of those behaviours that compound stress and rumination, instead increasing our sense of equilibrium. 

“Letting Go” is an attitude that is cultivated.  Mindfulness, anxiety management and consciously shifting our mindset are all effective ways of practicing acceptance and letting go.  They allow us to observe rather than avoid our difficult experiences.  We nurture a stance that allows the difficult to arise without it triggering behaviours that sustain stress and unease. 

This is the bedrock of an approach to life that ultimately gives us more choice over how we meet demands and challenges.  Each time we encounter experience with this attitude, we create new habits, behaviourally and neurologically, that become second nature over time. In doing so we expand our comfort zones and increase our resilience to difficulty. Letting go means growth, not retreat and the implications are massive.

Wellbeing Partners are committed to helping people develop the techniques needed to cultivate “letting go” and offer a variety of workshops and courses that introduce and deepen these skills in a range of contexts.

Back on Track, Wellbeing in Hybrid Working and Recovery from Burnout look at developing resilience, choice and adapting in the professional context, whilst Mindfulness Sessions, Facing Anxiety and Flourishing and Managing Change look at the wider context of letting go and the emotional intelligence needed to find the strength to face uncertainty with courage and confidence.

If you would like more information on any of these sessions, please get in touch or enter your details below.

Getting Started

Enter your details below or call us on 020 3951 7685 to get started

23 August 2022

MBCT – for depression and anxiety

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) isnow a recommended treatment for relieving mental health issues, based on guidelines by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)

  • Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy is a clinical form of mindfulness, similar to cognitive behavioural therapy but not the same
  • The rollout of MBCT on a societal scale has the potential to revolutionise how we view and manage mental health issues
  • MBCT is a non-drug treatment from the field of psychology, which helps to combat the unhelpful thinking patterns that feed many people’s mental health issues

Recently published NICE guidelines have placed Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) at the forefront of improving mental health in society, with NHS GP’s set to recommend MBCT more widely as a front-line treatment for mental health issues. Though this will likely take several years to fully implement, MBCT has already been successfully used as a mental health treatment for several decades. Our fully qualified MBCT teachers at Wellbeing Partners explain:

MBCT, if you do not know of it already, is an acronym you will be hearing regularly in the very near future as the treatment is more widely rolled out across society, and as we embrace this novel and extraordinary approach to how we relate to our thoughts and feelings.

Most people know mindfulness as a relaxation tool but MBCT is something different. MBCT is a fusion of mindfulness and cognitive therapy developed to combat recurring depression and it has been shown to also have a positive impact on a variety of mental health issues, including anxiety. The treatment gives us a greater understanding of our own unhelpful thinking patterns and how it is these thoughts can make us feel stressed, anxious, alarmed, frightened, ashamed, guilty, paranoid, and can eventually lead to mental health issues.

Here are some of the main tools and techniques we can learn from Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy:

MBCT teaches us to relate to our thoughts differently: “Thoughts are not facts”

The greatest gift that MBCT gives people is the ability to relate to thoughts differently.

Many of us can get into the habit of “overthinking” a lot of the time – perhaps anxiously fantasising about how our work or personal life might go wrong, criticising ourselves or others for not being good enough, or feeling like things in our life will never improve. And because our thoughts are our inner voice which speaks to us, these thoughts can seem like the truth. We may spend time and energy battling these thoughts, or giving into them, increasing our unhappiness and anxiety as we try.

MBCT teaches us to recognise that our thoughts are our opinions, and we can choose how to respond to these opinions, or perhaps let them go. This technique is both a mindset shift and a skill that is learned over a number of sessions with a qualified and experienced MBCT teacher.

Emotional Intelligence: “How am I feeling?”

Emotional intelligence is a coveted but elusive skill, one that is important for our professional and personal lives. MBCT is a doorway into better understanding of how we are feeling and gives us the tools to use our emotions intelligently. Unless prompted, we are rarely conscious of how we are feeling and how our emotions are shaping our behaviour, and this can sometimes have unfortunate consequences. 

Emotions like fear, anger, frustration, shame, guilt, resentment can build up over hours, days, weeks, months even years. These emotions are often wrongly-labelled as “bad” feelings, or negative emotions that should be avoided or swallowed. But emotions are neither good nor bad, just a bunch of signals in the amygdala part of the brain that are designed to help us navigate life.

Taking actions purely based on these emotions can sometimes have a bad outcome, but emotions themselves can be looked at differently, reframed, as important information for us to pay attention to. By focusing our attention on our current emotional experience, MBCT allows a greater knowledge of how we are feeling in real time, which regulates our emotional energy if we are stressed and gives us a chance to choose how to respond to situations, experiences and people in a more informed way.  Again, this is a skill that is learned as a part of a MBCT course over a number of sessions with a qualified teacher. The outcome of a greater understanding of our emotional state is a more robust sense of calm and equilibrium, one that MBCT teaches us to cultivate and to be able to call upon when required.

Recognising the Good

Much of the conversation around MBCT concerns mental health issues. However, there is another side to MBCT which is equally important and that is how it connects us to the good in life.

Humans evolved to have a “negativity bias”, meaning we find it easier to focus on that which we find threatening or difficult.  MBCT helps create balance by teaching us to pay attention to the good, the richness and variety of life, those little moments of joy that might otherwise be missed when we are caught up in ruminative thinking patterns.  The sound of a loved one’s voice, the exquisite tase of our favourite food, the beautiful skyline or anything else that comes through the senses.

Being in the present moment helps us experience these small moments of joy as they are happening, enjoying the emotions that these moments create.  And these small moments add up.  Psychologist Rick Hanson calls this “hardwiring happiness”, the process of training ourselves to focus on what makes us calm and content, what brings us happiness, especially the smaller moments that we might not usually notice or value.

A multi-faceted approach

MBCT provides a subtle but multi-faceted approach to understanding how our mind works, and how we can accept and manage our thoughts, and the energy from our emotions, in a healthier and more positive way.

For more information, or to book an MBCT session or group course for your organisation, please contact us at Wellbeing Partners – [email protected]

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