Positive Wellbeing Resources
Looking after mental health is just as important as your physical health. This page is designed to help you stay positive and look after your emotional wellbeing during these unique times. We have compiled a helpful resource that includes accessible apps for your phone, helpful websites, interesting podcasts, and inspirational books to get you started!
Positive Apps
Created for everyone, including veterans and servicemen, to support self-care and overall mental health during COVID-19. It can be used as a stand-alone self-care tool or alongside professional mental health care. You can mark favourite coping tools, set reminders to visit the app daily, work towards goals as well as track mental health over time.
Keep track of how you’re feeling and get recommendations for things you can do to help yourself cope, feel better and stay safe in a crisis. The app aims to provide a means of accessing support for people who may struggle to use Samaritans’ listening service, or who may find it difficult to express how they are feeling when talking to someone.
Offering Support on Meditation and Relaxation
Offers a range of resources within an online hub, including meditations for stress, sleep and relaxation as well as meditations suitable for children. A 7 day initial free trial is available and there is even resources specifically for coping with anxiety during COVID-19.
A popular meditation app which introduces the basics of mindfulness and mediation. There is an initial ‘Take 10 Free Trial’ (a guided course featuring 10 sessions of 10 minute each with accompanying video infographics to illustrate concepts) with subscription offers thereafter. They have recently released free content specifically geared towards health care workers/providers during COVID-19.
A suit of mental health apps, developed to help veterans, servicemen and others learn how to practice mindfulness. The apps provide information, tools, support resources and assessments as part of the gradual, self-guided training programs designed to help you understand and adopt a simple mindfulness practice. They are also designed to help families manage stress, anxiety and sleep troubles.
A free emotional wellness app teaching the skills of mindfulness and mediation to the under 25’s. They aim to help children, teens and young adults build the emotional strength to tackle life’s ups and downs.
Offers guided meditations and practical teachings you can access anywhere. Expert teacher’s help you through the basics and how to mediate successfully. With an initial free trail is available with paid options thereafter. Health care providers can use redemption code HEALTHCARE to unlock all content during COVID-19.
Offering support with stress, low mood and anxiety
A fun app designed to keep you engaged whilst also boosting your mood through playing science-based activity games to reduce stress, build resilience and overcome negative thoughts. Developed by Psychology experts familiar with cognitive behavioural therapy interventions, there is a free version available allowing access to some of the information as well as a paid version allowing full access to all materials.
A free, evidence based mental health relief app, using scientifically proven cognitive behavioural therapy strategies to help you learn to relax, be mindful, take charge of worries and anxiety as well as develop more effective ways of thinking.
Offers a range of clinically validated techniques, coping tools and peer support and to help reduce stress, anxiety and depression. The app gives suggested activities based on your mood and is therefore very helpful during self-isolation. Currently offering free premium access during the COVID-19.
Helpful Websites
A clinically validated digital Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) course. Be Mindful is NHS-Approved and evidence-based, with numerous rigorous published research studies showing the significant mental health benefits the course achieves. Many thousands have completed the course, reporting life-changing results, including reduced stress, anxiety and depression. Take part at your own pace, at a time that suits you, simply online via a web browser on your phone, tablet, or PC. Register for a free introduction to the course to see if it’s for you, before paying a one-off fee of £30 for lifetime access to the full course, including a library of mindfulness tools and exercises to keep.
Coping in a Crisis Coronavirus Survival Guide
Informed by crisis theory and clinical practice, Men’s Minds Matter’s guide focuses on the importance of how to protect our mental health during COVID-19 by managing our psychological response to it.
An E-health platform for healthcare organisations which uses digital technologies to empower patients to master their own wellbeing online. It is secure, flexible and user-friendly and provides an extensive catalogue of online modules, diaries and questionnaires designed to help people experiencing physical, emotional or psychological difficulties change the way they think and act to regain control of their lives. In order to access this service, the Minddistrict platform needs to be available in your area and an account created by your local healthcare provider. Please check with your GP or NHS IAPT service (to find if this is available in your area.
An online NHS platform offering practical advice, interactive tools, videos and audio guides to help people feel mentally and emotionally better. Whatever you need to know about coping with stress, anxiety or depression, or just the normal emotional ups and downs of life, the NHS Choices Moodzone is here to help.
An online course to help people manage stress, anxiety and depression. Working through a series of topics selected by a therapist to address specific needs, the eight week course is designed to be completed in your own time and at your own pace.
Wellbeing Podcasts
NHS: Mental Wellbeing Audio Guides
Mental Health Foundation: Podcasts for Your Wellbeing
Read Yourself Well
Practical Advice / Self-help
Little Book of Mindfulness, by Patrizia Collard
Mindfulness is the easy way to gently let go of stress, be in the moment and find more peace in your life. It has quickly become the slow way to manage the modern world and will help set you and your family on the road of mindfulness so you can lead a more mindful, peaceful and relaxed life.
Offers a series of simple practices that you can incorporate into your daily life to relieve chronic pain and stress of illness. Clinical trials show that mindfulness meditation can be as effective as prescription painkillers and also enhances the body’s natural healing systems. Mindfulness can also reduce the anxiety, depression, irritability, exhaustion and insomnia that can arise from chronic pain and illness.
Practical, supportive and uplifting, this is a journal for anyone who experiences anxiety, whether in the form of phobias, social anxiety, generalized anxiety (GAD) or day-to-day worrying. It encourages readers to use CBT techniques and mindfulness exercises to help themselves feel better, understand their anxiety and help them to achieve peace and calm in everyday life.
The Anxiety Solution: A quieter mind, a calmer you, by Chloe Brotheridge
Therapist Chloe Brotheridge uses the latest scientific research as well as her own personal experience to create a programme to help others overcome anxiety difficulties. This book provides readers with simple, yet powerful practical tools to help manage symptoms and to start feeling better day by day. Read your way to a calmer, happier more confident you.
The Upside of Stress: Why stress is good for you and how to get good at it by Kelly McGonigal
What if changing how we think about stress could make us happier, healthier, and better able to reach our goals? Kelly McGonigal offers a surprising new view of stress, one that reveals it’s upside and shows us exactly how to capitalize on its benefits. Practical and life-changing, The Upside of Stress is not a guide to getting rid of stress, but a toolkit for understanding, accepting and getting better at it.
Inspirational Stories – Arthritis Action’s book recommendations
A Street Cat Named Bob, by James Bowen
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12394068-a-street-cat-named-bob
Eat, Drink, Run, by Bryony Gordon
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/38457889-eat-drink-run
I Found my Tribe, by Ruth Fitzmaurice
Misfit, by Charlie Howard
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/36048239-misfit
The Stranger on the Bridge, by Jonny Benjamin
Reasons to Stay Alive, by Matt Haig
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25733573-reasons-to-stay-alive