Five Suggestions To Build Mental Resilience
The Vicious Cycle: Waiting to be Fixed. Here are a few suggestions for helping to build mental resilience.
We all want better mental health. But here’s the tough question: If you want to feel different, are you willing to do different? 🤔
It’s incredibly easy to slip into the mindset that the NHS or our wider healthcare system should be the ones to “fix” us. We expect a referral to magically resolve the issues that have accumulated over months or years.
The stark reality is that services are stretched. While 91.9% of referrals for NHS Talking Therapies (IAPT) resulted in treatment starting within 6 weeks in a recent period, many individuals still face long waits for specialist care, particularly in areas such as children and young people’s services. Your urgent need is facing a system-wide backlog.
Stop Waiting. Start Doing. 🛑
While you wait for (or alongside) professional support, there is so much you can control. Your wellbeing is an active daily choice.
Here are five free suggestions to return to the basics that build mental resilience:
- Fuel and Move: Ditch the ultra-processed diet whenever possible and find ways to move your body every day. A quick walk or stretch is a biological mood booster.
- Community & Nature: Get outside. Even 15 minutes in a park helps. Call a friend. Connection and nature are two of our most powerful natural supports.
- The Magic of Breath: Learn box breathing (4 seconds in, 4 hold, 4 out, 4 hold). It’s an instant, on-demand calm switch that regulates your nervous system, anytime, anywhere.
- Embrace Play: What did you love doing as a child? Find a hobby—painting, music, gardening, sport—that lets you lose yourself in the process, not the outcome.
- Sleep is Your Superpower: Prioritise an hour of screen-free winding down before bed. Quality sleep is when your brain repairs and resets.
Your mental health journey doesn’t start when you get an appointment. It begins when you decide to take a single, different action today.
What one small change can you commit to this week? Let me know in the comments below!
The Your Choice course I did with you earlier in the year helped me get moving after feeling stuck for ages. The five things you mention are part of my daily practice. Just recently I joined an art class. It has been amazing. I hadn’t done any art since about 12years old and never showed any promise. Now I’m excited and absorbed by this new creative outlet just before my 80th birthday, which I’d been dreading.