Right now, there’s a lot going on in the world and it feels like there are fresh injustices every day. A.I. is taking jobs and ravaging our environment, our politicians and the super rich seem to get away with anything, and just recently the U.S has recklessly started another illegal war which some news sources are excitedly hyping as a precursor to a nuclear apocalypse. Not being evil and actually giving a damn about what's happening can feel pretty exhausting sometimes Just

There’s been lot of discussion in the media this week around how John Davidson, someone who has the form of Tourette Syndrome (TS) with involuntary verbal tics was heard to use offensive language towards two actors of colour at the BAFTA awards. There have been plenty of hot takes and opinion on how things should have been handled and what is more upsetting; the monstering of someone with a disability when steps were taken at the event to inform the audience and minimise disr

Money, or perhaps more accurately not having it, can be scary. Money is after all fundamentally how we look after ourselves as adults, keep a roof over our heads, stay alive. Managing our money and staying on top of things in the busy world that we live in can feel overwhelming, particularly if we’ve had challenges with money in the past, or we’re having money difficulties at the moment. It's no surprise that money issues and mental health issues are strongly interlinked. Ope

We all know we’re supposed to exercise and stay active to stay healthy, and most counsellors will encourage their clients to be more active. But sometimes exercising, whether that’s doing it in the house, doing a routine at the gym or going to an exercise class dpesn’t have the miracle impact we want it to have. We might feel embarrassed or self conscious, frustrated and wind up making ourselves feel terrible.  What is contributing to this and what can we do about it? Exhibit

I bumped into an interesting Reddit thread the other day about mental health, specifically “What’s a truth about mental health that sounds cruel but is still real?” It’s a bit of a loaded question, but naturally the people of reddit had a lot to say. This is an area where lots of people have an opinion, based on their own bad experiences, or, I suppose bluntly, from their own bad or outdated opinions. I’ve grabbed a few of the top voted suggestions below. "Your mental health

It’s finally arrived! The end of January! Over the month we’ve looked at checking in with our mood, looking after ourselves when things are more strained and the infamous (and inaccurate, but you get the idea) ‘Blue Monday’. We may have had to tighten our drawstrings and make sacrifices to get through it but here we are, we made it, for many of us it’s payday at last! So now what? While it’s tempting to just crack on with things, I want to encourage you to treat yourself! You

Earlier this week, we hit the infamous “Blue Monday,” Hit what now? Yes, Blue Monday is usually the 3rd Monday of January and supposedly the bleakest point of the year. It’s dark, it’s cold, xmas is long passed and there’s still a bit to go before we get paid, so on top of all that we’re skint. Those are some common sense observations for things that can be negatively affecting our mood at this time of year, but ultimately Blue Monday itself is a pseudoscience. Back in 2005 p

I came across a brilliant metaphor online last week and it’s stuck with me since, so I had to share! In The Lord of the Rings, Denethor, the Steward of Gondor had been using the palantir, a magical crystal ball that can show him events from afar. Despite warnings, he used it to keep up to date with what was happening in the world.   But what it showed him served the purposes of the enemy, slowly chipping away at his resolve. By the time the enemy was at the walls of Minas Tir

How are you doing? (or maybe "How you doin?" We’re a week into 2026. This can be a time of year that hits us hard. We’re dealing with the financial part of xmas and we might be facing a long month of scrimping to get through. It’s still dark in the mornings and dark by late afternoon, it’s cold with a lot of the country now freezing and getting some snow. The festivities of the xmas period are over and ordinary routine can hit us like a jumpscare. This is what we do for a li

It’s a new year and it’s that time when we look back at what we’ve achieved over the last year, how we measured up to what we had planned for ourselves and how we’re doing alongside the people that we love. If part of you is cringing in horror as you read this, you’re not alone. Understandably  this can be a really rotten time of year for some of us and as the holiday period we were maybe holding on for is receding in the rear view mirror, it can be exactly when our mental he

At some point this month, we reached a full year of weekly wee counselling blogs, so that’s nearly 60 blogs on mental health topics or related areas. Over the year counselling has become very much my focus full time in a number of roles and is an incredibly rewarding experience. I'm very grateful to all of my clients for allowing me to support them on their journey in 2025. Over the next year I’m going to be looking at some professional development and hopefully making some

What does it take to be forcibly detained under the mental health act? If you’re a fan of Tennessee Williams, getting institutionalised seems to be a pretty routine occurence for any number of mental health issues. Whether that’s the delusional Blanch Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire or the traumatised Catherine Holly in Suddenly Last Summer, there’s always an unreal almost romanticised element to it in some ways. But what is it in the real world? What circumstances would

It’s a bit of a cliche in pop culture that someone who isn’t into xmas is being a grinch and actively wants to ruin things for everyone else. Usually in tv and films, the person who wasn’t into it at the start will have a revelation (which may or may not be induced by meddling ghosts) and by the end of the story will be Xmas’s biggest fan. Hurray! Over here in the real world there are lots of different reasons why someone might not be feeling it and not want to join in. Xmas

We’re getting to the point of the year when those around us look back at what they’ve achieved, and this can be pretty tough if we’ve not had the best year ourselves and maybe we feel we’ve just not succeeded at what we wanted to get done. Life gets in the way and everyone has different things going on they need to contend with. So looking ahead to what we might want to get completed next year, how can we set ourselves off on the best foot? I’ve put together some quick tips o

This time of year, we often talk about making sure we check in on other people. That’s absolutely valid and hugely important, but I wonder how often we check in with ourselves. How long has it been since you asked yourself “How are you getting on?” “Are you feeling okay” Many of us put our own wellbeing right at the bottom of the list, especially when we’re parents or we have caring responsibilities. It’s easy in the hussle and bustle of the season to almost on autopilot do

It’s (somehow) only a few weeks to go before Christmas and before long our streets will be full of xmas lights and any shopping trip will involve taking a risk of the inevitable whammageddon. It can also be a tough time for a lot of us. Christmas is heavily promoted as a time for families and being with the people that we love, and life being what it is, sometimes we’re in circumstances that don’t support that. Maybe we don’t get on with our families.. Perhaps we’ve lost peop

I was recently asked to give a workshop on men’s mental health for HR professionals and it was a bit of an opportunity to draw attention again to the gender differences we still see in the expression and diagnosis of mental health issues and how we can better support mens mental health. Even in 2025 men are disproportionately negatively affected by poor mental health due in significant part to outdated gender norms that insist that men have to be strong, that they have to be

In an ordinary counselling relationship a client wouldn’t be contacting their counsellor in an emergency situation. At the beginning of working together, a counselling agreement sets out how the Client and counsellor will work together and typically include information on emergency services that can be contacted in a crisis or support that can be accessed outwith sessions. This can happen. Sometimes a person's mental health can worsen between sessions or something happens tha

It’s halloween, so what better time of the year to have a little look at night terrors? These are sometimes conflated in popular culture with nightmares or bad dreams (especially in horror films) but they’re a bit different. Nightmares happen during the REM part of our sleep cycle, we wake up fully and we can typically remember the dream that’s scared us, at least for a bit. In contrast night terrors happen during non-REM sleep at the start of the sleep cycle. You’re only par

An important part of traditional CBT is a formulation and clients typically encounter this early on in the counselling process, usually after the first few sessions have taken place. Having explored with the client what their situation is and what is bothering them or brought them to counselling, a formulation applies this to a cognitive model together with any modifications (which can sometimes get pretty complicated). It’s essentially my view as a counsellor of what’s going