Wellness Wednesdays

Burnout   Last week I listened to a really insightful podcast – Brene Brown interviewing twins Emily and Amelia Nagoski about their bestselling book  'Burnout: The Secret to Solving the Stress Cycle' . So what is burnout? Google tells me that it is a state of emotional, physical and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when we feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained and unable to meet constant demands. If you have experienced this, you will know that it is debilitating and can impact on your ability to function at your normal level. Energy levels drop and even the simplest of tasks can be overwhelming and exhausting.      Emily & Amelia believe that burnout occurs when we do not complete ‘stress cycles’. When we experience a stressor in life, dealing with that stressor (completing the task/eliminating the cause of stress) does not eliminate the impact of the stress within our body. To complete the cycle, the stress needs to be released through

You may be feeling a bit flat this week with the announcement of the new COVID lockdown restrictions. I must admit I was feeling a bit uninspired to write this today, but my Social Policy colleague Eileen Cunningham inspired me this morning with starting up her daily gratitude posts on Facebook. This is something that she did during lockdown earlier in the year; she shared daily thoughts of gratitude about aspects of her life, often simple things like a walk or a meal or a positive experience in work. This really helped her to feel positive during a testing time. The power of gratitude is well documented and research evidence suggests that it has a positive impact on mental health.      So what is gratitude? It can be lots of things – an emotion, an attitude, a moral virtue, a habit, a personality trait or a coping response. From a psychological perspective, gratitude involves having a distinctive view of the world; i t’s about focusing on and appreciating what we have rather than what

This week I am sharing a brilliant book called  The Compassionate Mind Workbook . A step-by-step guide to developing your compassionate self.  This is book is written by our very own Dr Elaine Beaumont, a Lecturer in Counselling and Psychotherapy at Salford.        The workbook is a step-by-step guide to Compassion Focused Therapy, in which the chapters build your understanding of yourself, the skills that give rise to a compassionate mind, and ways to work with whatever difficulties you're struggling with in life. The exercises (e.g. using imagery to cultivate compassion, creating a calm and peaceful place in the mind, compassionate letter writing, compassionate thinking, mindfulness, creating a compassionate team that can help the individual face fears and distress), prompts, audios and case stories in this book provide an understandable and practical way to develop compassion. This is potentially important because there is increasing evidence that suggests that cultivating compa