Take Notice… Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savour the moment, whether you are on a train, eating lunch or talking to friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you appreciate what matters to you.

Modern life is very busy and very hectic, sometimes we do not give ourselves enough time to stop, look, relax and reflect. We all should pause and appreciate our surroundings and our place in them.

One way for you to do this may be going for a walk in the countryside, you can see some suggestions of some great walks available in Kent or Medway by clicking here, or just sitting and watching the sunset, but if you find yourself still tense there may be other ways for you to learn to relax.

• Mindfulness
• Relaxation

Mindfulness for Mental Wellbeing

It can be easy to rush through life without stopping to notice much. Paying more attention to the present moment – to your own thoughts and feelings, and to the world around you – can improve your mental wellbeing. Some people call this awareness ‘mindfulness’, and you can take steps to develop it in your own life.

Mindfulness is a form of meditation that uses breath as form of concentration. By focusing on breathing practicing mindfulness helps bring the individual back to focus on the present moment and enables people to focus on all of the experiences it contains.

Have you ever started eating a snack bar and before you realise it the whole thing has gone, or driven somewhere with no recollection of your journey – these are just a couple of common examples of ‘mindlessness’ when we go on automatic pilot. It’s very easy to do in our modern hectic lives. We are constantly multi-tasking as well as dealing with many distractions and this means that sometimes we fail to notice the good things in our lives and around us.

Mindfulness is a way of becoming more aware of our thoughts and feelings, this may not sound like an obviously helpful thing to do, however learning to do this in a way that suspends judgement and self-criticism can have an incredibly positive impact on our lives. Mindfulness helps us to do this. Mindfulness cannot eliminate life’s pressures but it can affect how we respond to these pressures by enabling us to be calmer – this benefits the brain and the body. Practicing Mindfulness can help us to be fully present in our life and work and can help improve both.

“Mindfulness is the art of staying in the moment and accepting what is. Because it is already here.”

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Myth Busters

• Meditation is not a religion. Mindfulness is simply a method of mental training.
• You don’t have to sit cross-legged on the floor (like the pictures you may have seen in magazines or on TV), but you can if you want to. You can meditate more or less anywhere.
• Mindfulness practice does not take a lot of time, although some patience is required.
• Mindfulness is not complicated and it is not about ‘success’ or ‘failure’. Even if mindfulness feels difficult, you will have learned something valuable about the workings of the mind and would have benefited.
• Mindfulness can help you see the world clearer so that you can take more considered actions to change those things in your life which need to be changed.

Free Guided Mindfulness Exercises

FreeMindfulness have a series of mindfulness exercises focus on bringing awareness to the process of breathing. The free downloads include:

• Mindfulness of breath
• Brief mindfulness practices
• Body scan
• Sitting Meditations
• Mindful movement
• Brief mindfulness practices
• Body scan
• Sitting Meditations
• Mindful movement

These Mindufllness exercises are distributed under the (CC) creative commons copyright and available at http://www.freemindfulness.org/download

For more information on Mindfulness on the NHS website follow the link.

Relaxation

Learning to relax properly can help you de-stress. Although the reason for you being stressed may not have changed, you can control your reaction to it and learn to release tension. It may take you time to learn to relax - it is, though, a great skill that you can learn.

More information on relaxing, including relaxed breathing and deep muscle relaxation techniques, can be found on the NHS choices website which you can explore by clicking here.

Mind also have a comprehensive guide to relaxing which you can look at by clicking here.

The Mental Health Foundation have a great range of podcasts which you can download and listen to which can help you relax and improve your sense of wellbeing. Listen to them either on your computer or on your personal MP3 player. Some are designed to be quick fixes and some are more in-depth, so to explore more and download the ones which fit into your lifestyle click here.

If you have a suggestion as to how to take notice, or want to share a story about how learning to relax has helped you get in touch with us by clicking here.

The Wheel of Wellbeing logos are © of SLaM. The Wheel To Wellbeing is owned by South London and Maudsley NHS Trust (SLaM) and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share-Alike 4.0 International License.

Information on this Licence is available atwww.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

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