mindapples

Get inside our heads

Unravel your mind

The mindapples team would like you to tell us what you do to unwind. What advice would you give to someone who is trying to unravel their thoughts?

Continue reading

Times for your mind

Interesting piece in the Times a while back (thanks to the lovely Katherine at the RSA for sending it my way) about simple daily activities you can do for your mind. Paul Farmer of Mind is quoted but the ideas seem to come from all over the place. I’d be interested to hear what people […]

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

The art of research

A few people have asked us recently if we’re trying to produce an official “five-a-day” from the Mindapples research. There are a lot of different lists of recommended actions for our mental health, and many offer interesting talking points. We don’t want to add to that pile by producing yet another set of five things […]

Continue reading

Alastair Campbell’s five-a-day

Yesterday, Jo and I went to Stand to Reason’s ‘Celebrating Recovery’ conference at City Hall to pester politicians about Mindapples. And within five minutes of arriving, we’d already got Alastair Campbell’s five-a-day! In case you can’t read that, it says: Sleep Family / home Exercise (including playing football) Bigger cause (including Burnley FC) Laughter (see […]

Continue reading

Tal Ben Shahar

Tal Ben Shahar, Harvard positive psychology lecturer and author, has been kind enough to send through his five-a-day: Time with people I love – usually with family members. Doing something that is meaningful and pleasurable to me professionally (usually writing). Quiet listening to favorite music. Physical exercise for 30-60 minutes (running/yoga/etc). Gratitudes before going to […]

Continue reading

Mind Plan

I spent the weekend at Social Innovation Camp helping the Owngrown team do interesting things with real apples. Amongst the team was the lovely Jim Rokos, and meeting him properly reminded me to post a link to this. As Jim puts it: “The main food-groups of a balanced diet are well known. However, the essential […]

Continue reading

Calling all bloggers

Dear blogosphere, It gives me great pleasure to invite you to join the Mindapples project and tell the world, what’s your five a day? Here’s how it works: Write a post telling your readers five things you do that help keep you mentally well (and answer any of the other survey questions too if you […]

Continue reading

How mad are you?

Thanks to everyone who wrote in telling me to watch the BBC2 documentary ‘How Mad Are You?’ A really fascinating study of the fine line between ‘mad’ and ‘sane’, and quite sensitively done (if you can overlook the strange Joe Millionaire production style). The stories of those who had recovered from serious illness were incredibly […]

Continue reading

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