Sing your way to happiness
Singing is not only fun, it offers an antitode to stress, illness and depression. “When you sing, you breathe in a different way so you use more of your total lung volume. This means there’s a tendency to increase the airflow so your blood is more oxygenated. When that happens, you are more alert. Singing […]
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On needs
Nice post here from my friend Sophia about new approaches to the question ‘what constitutes a good life today?’ I’m linking to it here partly because I want to add support to Richard Layard‘s comment that how we relate to each other is important to our individual wellbeing. It’s what I was writing about on […]
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Video your mindapples
Look! Lauren has filmed her friends’ five-a-days and turned it into a lovely video! Please send us your videos of you and your friends talking about what you do to stay mentally in shape. We’ll compile the best footage into a short video explaining the Mindapples idea and hopefully inspiring lots more people to do […]
Continue reading Andy Gibson explains Mindapples
Craig at the O’Reilly GMT blog has very kindly posted a video interview with me explaining the Mindapples project and talking a bit about how far we’ve got. He caught me on the hop a bit: no time to do my hair, although I did manage to dress up a bit. Here’s the video from […]
Continue reading New Year’s Temptations
Hello, it’s Andy here. A very happy New Year to you, from me, and as Tessy has said already, from the Mindapples team. I’ve been taking a break from computers, ideas and work since 19th December and now feel much better thankyouverymuch. Hope you had a good restful break too. It’s that time of year […]
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Recreational mental health
I’ve had some good chats with Stian Westlake and Yvonne Roberts of the Young Foundation recently, and we were talking amongst other things about ‘prevention’ and ‘cure’ in mental and physical health. The physical health community has been directing a lot of energy towards ‘preventative’ healthcare recently, and the mental health community has naturally followed […]
Continue reading Five things happy people do
And here’s another expert list of “things we should do to be happy”, this time from neuroscientist Gabrielle LeBlanc who has “canvassed the leading experts on what happy people have in common”. Well okay, actually it’s from Oprah.com. 🙂 Here’s a quick summary… Find your own golden self Eudaimonia means striving toward excellence based on […]
Continue reading 12 steps to happiness
Here’s another take on the “things you should do to be happy” riff, this time from the Care Services Improvement Partnership. Interestingly they reference the economic crisis – which is funny because the economic crisis is also referencing us. Here’s a summary of their, erm… twelve: In situations of sustained social, economic and psychological stress, […]
Continue reading Robert Holden’s Five
Robert Holden, author, positive psychology guru and director of the Happiness Project (as seen in the BBC documentary ‘How To Be Happy’ no less), has been kind enough to send through his five-a-day. One “I love you.” One act of kindness. One “Thank you.” One act of forgiveness. One big laugh. His list so short […]
Continue reading On happiness
We’ve had a bit of a break during August while the Mindapples team did other things like write dissertations, go on holiday and launch shiny new websites. It’s been a pretty intense year so far and it’s been good to take a bit of a rest and recouperate. But now, we’re back, and I rejoined […]
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