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Wellbeing & Headstart Resilience Tips

Wellbeing and Your Caring Role

Juggling your caring role with other aspects of your life can be challenging. It may be that you are not always looking after yourself as you are busy helping others. Looking after your own wellbeing and mental health is vital, without this you could burn out. It is as important to take a step back and focus on you! On this page we will provide you with some top tips as to how you can look after your own wellbeing and support services you can access. We will explore the importance of movement, mindfulness, and meditation. Have a go at some of the resources, helpful YouTube videos and apps. Here are a few quick and easy tips that may help when you are feeling low:

  • Go for a walk
  • Spend some time in nature
  • Listen to music
  • Watch your favourite programme
  • Listen to a podcast
  • Spend time with a pet
  • Have a relaxing bath
  • Write in a journal
  • Talk to someone you trust
  • Limit screen time
  • Reduce alcohol intake
  • See your friends
  • Learn a new hobby
  • Dance
  • Sing
  • Draw or colour
  • Cook or bake
Helpful YouTube channels

We are lucky to be able to access free support through YouTube channels. These can provide information, guidance and activities that can really help improve one’s wellbeing. Here are a few that you might find helpful:

Mindfulness and Meditation

Mindfulness is all about being in the present moment, not thinking about what has happened or what could happen, but being in the here and now. Mindfulness is in all of us and gets easier with practice! You can practice mindfulness in many ways, including going for a mindful walk; when walking focus on your senses, what do you see, hear, smell, feel; focus on what is happening in that present moment. Below is a link to some YouTube channels that can help with practicing mindfulness and meditation.

  • HeadSpace: https://www.youtube.com/user/Getsomeheadspace 
    Provides guided meditation for people at all levels. Relax with guided meditation sessions that will help you rest and reset after a long day, let go of worried thoughts with our Stress pack, or create the ideal conditions for healthy, restful sleep with our sleep meditations and sleep sounds
  • Calm: https://www.youtube.com/c/calm 
    This channel provides short mindful meditation videos. There is also a calm app which provides meditation exercises, sleep stories to aid sleep, and relaxing music. Some sleep stories are even narrated by celebrities, including Harry Styles (please note there may be a cost to the Calm App)
Movement

It will come as no surprise that movement and exercise can really help our mental health and wellbeing. This does not need to be running a marathon or doing an iron man challenge, but rather sitting down less and moving round more! Anything from gardening, all the way to going to the gym, can improve our mental health and wellbeing. Start small, the small changes can make a big difference!

Don’t forget everybody is different and you must go at your own pace. Below are a couple of videos that may inspire you to begin your journey into moving more

Creative Expression

This can be a fantastic way to distract from worries of day-to-day life and can help you to immerse yourself into something creative and positive. For some using a creative outlet can help to express their emotions in ways that they could not ordinarily, for others it can be a great distraction and calming experience.

Resilience

Life can throw us lots of challenges that we need to overcome, this can be particularly true for you as a young adult carer. You have likely faced lots of obstacles throughout your journey, resilience is all about overcoming these challenges and thriving; it is the ability to bounce back from adversity.

Headstart and Blackpool’s young people are leading the Resilience Revolution, which aims to make Blackpool a more resilient town, you may have seen some of the resilient steps on the pavement around Blackpool town centre!

If you would like to get involved in the Resilience Revolution visit the Headstart website: https://sites.google.com/seaside.blackpool.org.uk/mock/get-involved/young-people 

Helpful Apps

There are lots of fantastic apps out there that can provide tools to help improve our mental health and wellbeing.

  • Catch it, Check it, Change it:
    an app to help challenge “unhelpful thoughts”, includes keeping a mood journal to help better understand thoughts and reframe these.
  • Calm Harm:
    an award-winning app which uses the basic principles of an evidence-based therapy called Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT). Calm Harm provides tasks to help you resist or manage the urge to self-harm.
  • Move Mood:
    a free app to help young people manage the behaviours associated with low mood or depression. It uses the evidence-based treatment Behavioural Activation Therapy to help you improve your mood by encouraging you to increase your motivation to carry out a variety of tasks in order to help you to move forward, take control and feel positive.
Local Services
Helpful mental health support services