Tips for wellness from our Mental Health In Schools Team
Mind And Body
“Your mind is like a garden. With care, it will bloom beautifully” – Unknown
Just as we look after our physical health, it’s important to look after our mental health. In fact, the two are closely connected!
Most of us will know what it’s like to feel worried, stressed or low from time to time. We might be affected by our relationships with friends and classmates or things we see on the news, and we might feel worried about school or our home lives (this is understandable!) Recognising how our mind health and physical health work together can keep us mentally healthy.
Our Tips for looking after your Mind and Body:
To ensure a healthy mind and body, why not try some of the activities below? Can you choose one from each category?
Physical– healthy eating with plenty of water, time away from technology and get fresh air where you can, regular exercise every day (e.g., walk to school or get off the bus a stop earlier, dance, or stretch), a consistent sleep schedule (children aged 6-12 years should aim for 9-12 hours sleep per night, adolescents should aim for 8-10 hours).
Social– spend quality time with friends and family, connect with others in person (as well as online), join a club or community group, reach out to others and don’t be afraid to ask for help or offer support.
Practical– keep a daily routine to create structure and stability, use checklists to act as reminders and to hold yourself accountable, get ready for the day each morning, set yourself small and achievable goals to stay motivated.
Emotional– develop supportive friendships, write down three good things from your day, take time to do something relaxing every day, practise self-kindness (e.g., treat yourself how you would treat a friend!)
The Anna Freud Centre has some fabulous resources to help you and your child develop a self-care plan, that you can download here.
Please contact [email protected] for information and advice about mental health and well-being for your child and your family.
Tips for wellness from our Mental Health In Schools Team
“Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” -Winston Churchill
Being Brave
We can show bravery in lots of different ways, such as recognising that we feel a certain way (e.g., sad, anxious), asking someone for help when we need it and trying new things, even if we feel scared!
Feeling scared is often a sign that we are doing something challenging and it is completely normal to feel this way. Even though it can feel uncomfortable, being brave and facing these difficulties can also help us to learn and grow (both physically and emotionally). This can mean we need to step outside our comfort zone at times to be able to overcome challenges, but it is important to remember that being brave does not mean we have to cope alone.
Our Tips for Being Brave:
Set yourself a goal to try something new. Create a plan to break your goal down into smaller, more achievable steps! This can help your goal to feel less overwhelming.
Take chances and make mistakes! Sometimes it is helpful to fail, so you can practise being brave. Try something you have been wanting to try and take that chance to move out of your comfort zone. You might even find that it wasn’t as bad as you thought it would be.
Practise positive self-talk to help develop your bravery. Repeat these sentences to yourself or out loud – ‘I can do hard things’; ‘ I try my best’; ‘I can enjoy challenge’. You might want to write positive statements on post-it notes and stick them around your mirror so you can remind yourself of them every day!
Ask for help when you need it from someone you trust. Taking the step to talk to someone is one of the bravest things you can do!
Strike a power pose! Standing up tall with your feet apart, your head held high and with your hands on your hips can help make you feel more confident and ready to take on a challenge. What pose makes you feel more confident?
Please contact [email protected] for information and advice about mental health and well-being for your child and your family.
Tips for wellness from our Mental Health In Schools Team
“Your future depends on your dreams, so go to sleep.” — Mesut Barazany
Rest
It is important to work hard, stay motivated and set goals to achieve in life. It is also important to not overwork yourself and get enough rest to help manage your stress and unwind so you can stay motivated and prevent burnout in the long run.
Rest is vital for your mental health as it can improve your concentration, memory, critical thinking, and thinking, planning for the future, problem-solving, mood, immune system, reduce stress, and helps your body’s metabolism and physical recovery.
Rest can be difficult to define because it can look different for everyone. It can be anything physical or mentally stimulating that improves wellbeing such as going for a walk, singing, drawing, cycling, playing games, watching TV/streaming, exercising, playing sports, reading, dancing, listening or creating music, writing, crafting, relaxing or anything else you enjoy!
Our Top Tips For Rest
After you have done something important like studying, chores or homework, reward yourself by doing something enjoyable that helps you recharge.
Set aside enough time each day for hygiene. This can be showering, brushing teeth, washing hair. These regular activities can help you to relax.
Create a healthy sleep routine by avoiding caffeine or sugary drinks near bedtime, ensure you are warm and comfortable in bed and limit screentime.
Engage in some mindfulness or restful activity, such as meditation, reading, listening to calming music, podcasts or bedtime stories. The Calm App has lots of meditations, soundscapes and stories.
Please contact [email protected] for information and advice about mental health and well-being for your child and your family.
Tips for wellness from our Mental Health In Schools Team
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” Albert Einstein
Change
Changes are a normal part of our lives and they affect us all in different ways. Some changes may feel small to you, but big to another person, and the opposite for a different change. For example, moving to a new class or school, moving homes, or starting a new club. They can feel exciting, but they can also feel overwhelming and stressful, especially when they are unexpected. Below are some tips to help you cope with changes that may feel hard for you.
Our tips for coping with change:
1 – Keep doing things you enjoy! When we feel stressed or worried, it can be easy for us to focus on the worries all the time and forget to do the things that make us happy. Make sure to plan in time at the weekends and evenings to do things you enjoy to help you relax and boost your mood!
2 – Think about what you can control. When a change is unexpected or overwhelming, we can feel a bit like we have no control over the situation or how it is making us feel. It can be helpful to think about what you do have control over in this situation. For example, we can’t control how the change makes us feel but we can control how we react to the situation and what we do following the change. Such as, staying connected with our friends and family, keeping to our daily routines, and planning ahead where we can.
3 – Look for the positives. While change can feel hard, there’s often something good that comes from it, even if it is not immediately obvious. Such as, new opportunities, new people or learning experiences. You might even surprise yourself and enjoy the change!
Please contact [email protected] for information and advice about mental health and well-being for your child and your family.
Tips for wellness from our Mental Health In Schools Team
“The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside.” – Anne Frank
Get Outdoors
Spending time outdoors is great for your body and mind! It can improve your mood, reduce feelings of stress, improve your confidence, helps you to be more active and can reduce loneliness.
How to get outside more:
Take a Nature Walk Find a park, trail, or even your garden and take a walk. Look around for birds, trees, and flowers that you can spot. You could try taking photographs and share them with a friend.
Play a Sport or Game Whether it’s football, netball or running, outdoor sports are a great way to get moving. They also help us develop our communication skills when we play as part of a team!
Do a Scavenger Hunt Make a list of things to find outside—like a particular leaf or a butterfly—and go on a hunt to find them!
Bring Your Hobby Outside Do you like drawing, reading, or listening to music? Try doing it outside! Find a comfy spot on the grass and enjoy your favourite activities in the fresh air.
Have a snack outside Try taking a snack outside and eating it while focusing on the food and what is going on around you.
Watch the Stars On a clear night, lie on a blanket and look up at the stars. You might even see a shooting star or spot constellations.
Meet up with a friend outside
It can be helpful to get outdoors every day, even if only for a short time. You could try walking to a friend’s house or to the shop instead of travelling by car or getting public transport. You could try to make getting outside part of your daily routine, whether it is riding a bike or sitting in a garden or park while you listen to music.
Please contact [email protected] for information and advice about mental health and well-being for your child and your family.
Tips for wellness from our Mental Health In Schools Team
“It’s good to talk.” Bob Hoskins
Talking
We can’t always see when people are struggling, and people may not be able to see when we are struggling. We need to ask people how they are feeling, and we need to let them know how we are feeling so we can help each other.
There are people we can talk to if we are struggling; whether that be someone in our life already, such as a family member, a friend, or staff in school or college, or someone such as a mental health professional. Always try and speak to someone who you trust and someone who you feel will be able to help you.
There is no shame in wanting to speak with someone about your feelings, we all need to do it sometimes, it is an action of bravery!
Our Top Tips For Talking
If you want to speak to someone but are struggling to, try writing your thoughts and feelings down or drawing a picture to show how you are feeling and giving this to someone you trust instead.
You can also agree to have a ‘safe word’ to use with someone too, which signals that you have something you would like to talk about. For example, you may agree with a family member or teacher that you will say ‘bananas!’ when you need a private chat. Make sure you say it so that they hear and notice it.
Draw your handprint and on each finger, write someone’s name who you could speak to if you needed to talk about something.
Try and write down a list of ways you could support someone if they were talking to you about worries or sad feelings they were having.
Remember, you are never a burden for asking for support…there is always someone who will want to help.
Follow this link for information on who you can talk to: Young Minds
Please contact [email protected] for information and advice about mental health and well-being for your child and your family.
Tips for wellness from our Mental Health In Schools Team
Listening
“He understands badly who listens badly.” Welsh proverb
Listening is an important skill that helps us to feel connected to others and the world around us. When we listen, we can learn new things, solve problems and interact with people around us. This is great for our mental health as we are using our minds and connecting with people.
Try out these games to test your listening skills:
1 – Sound hunt! Close your eyes and listen carefully to the sounds around you. See how many sounds you can identify in a minute. This type of listening activity helps us to connect with the world around us, which can help us to feel calm.
2 – Weekend catch up In pairs, partners should take it in turns to talk for 1 minute about their weekend. The children should then ask each other questions about their weekend, to see if the listener could remember what they did. Each partner can score points for each question they answered correctly.
3 – I went to the supermarket, and I bought a… As a group, sit in a circle. The first person says, “I went to the supermarket, and I bought a…” and they choose an item, for example an apple. The next person has to repeat that sentence and choose their own item to add. For example, “I went to the supermarket, and I bought an apple and a book”. Keep going around the circle adding items. If someone forgets an item, you move onto the next player. It gets harder as you go!
These last two games encourage ‘active listening’, where you are taking in the information you are hearing. This is a useful skill to practice. You can also practice this at home, trying to remember what you have heard on a programme or video!
Please contact [email protected] for information and advice about mental health and well-being for your child and your family.
Tips for wellness from our Mental Health In Schools Team
Caring
Caring is about looking after the needs of yourself and others. There are lots of ways you can show others that you care, showing kindness, compassion, love, support and being thoughtful.
It is equally important to take time to care for ourselves, sometimes termed ‘self-care’. This can help us to increase our resilience and sense of self-worth. Allowing yourself time to engage in activities you enjoy and make you feel good, along with recognising unkind thoughts and trying to replace these with kinder thoughts can be part of caring for yourself.
Caring for others can help us feel connected, purposeful, and close to those we care for. These things are positive for our mental wellbeing. Can you think of a way you’ve shown care for someone this week?
Everyday millions of people in the UK give additional care to people they know through helping with everyday living tasks. Young Carers may also be responsible for looking after younger brothers and sisters and doing household chores. If you are, or you support a Young Carer, you can find local carers support by following these links:
Caring Chain – write down an act of caring they can do for another person or for themselves on a strip of paper. Create a paper chain with each of these strips, by folding and linking them together. This can then be displayed and children can be encouraged to give a new act of caring a go each week.
Try to identify 3 ways you have been caring towards yourself and 3 ways you have been caring towards others. Then, set a goal for another caring act you can carry out over the following week.
As this week has been Mental Health Week, I have chosen some fabulous books that help us understand what emotions we are feeling and why.
Why Do I Feel Like This? Shinsuke Yoshitake is a warm, witty, and wise picture book that’s as entertaining as it is enlightening.
Everyone knows the struggle of navigating big emotions — especially when they don’t quite have the words to explain how they’re feeling. Why Do I Feel Like This? is a brilliant, funny, and thoughtful exploration of just that.
Told through the eyes of a young girl on her way home in a thoroughly bad mood, the story dives straight into the unpredictable world of childhood feelings. As she trudges along, annoyed and unsure why, her imagination takes over. Could her bad mood be something she caught? Did it come from something she ate? What if she could store her feelings in jars and sort through them later — or even send them off in a rocket?
This clever mix of humour and introspection is where the book really shines. Rather than offering neat solutions or moral lessons, Shinsuke allows his young protagonist to explore every odd and silly idea that pops into her head. It’s a wonderfully relatable portrayal of how children (and adults!) can spiral through emotions without always knowing why.
The illustrations are bold, quirky, and full of character. Every page is packed with visual humour and fantastical scenes that bring the girl’s musings vividly to life. From an emotion menu to a whimsical contraption for filtering out bad moods, the book invites children to laugh while also considering their own emotional experiences.
Offering gentle encouragement for self-reflection, it opens the door for children to think critically and creatively about their emotions. It reassures them that it’s okay to feel angry or sad sometimes, and that those feelings aren’t permanent. By the end of the book, the girl hasn’t magically solved all her problems, but she has learned a little more about herself. In a world that often expects children to be cheerful and resilient without giving them the space to explore what they feel, Why Do I Feel Like This? is a refreshing and necessary read. It invites children to wonder, imagine, and, most importantly, to understand that emotions are just part of being human.
I’ve chosen a graphic novel for our older children, Small Things by Mel Tregonning, a hauntingly beautiful and deeply moving wordless graphic picture book that explores childhood anxiety with rare sensitivity and emotional depth that offers an honest portrayal of the internal struggles many children face, often in silence.
The story follows a young boy who appears to be slowly unravelling under the weight of his worries. He’s having trouble fitting in at school, his academic performance is slipping, and he finds himself becoming short-tempered, even towards the people who care about him. He feels completely alone. But what makes this book so affecting is that not a single word is used to tell his story. Instead, it is told through evocative, monochrome illustrations.
The boy’s anxiety is represented by shadowy, imp-like creatures that follow him everywhere. They cling to his back, crowd around his thoughts, and, most disturbingly, begin to nibble away at pieces of his body – a striking visual metaphor for how anxiety can feel like it’s eating away at one’s sense of self. It’s this imagery that captures the intense, often invisible toll mental health struggles can have on children, and it does so with startling clarity.
As the story progresses, the reader sees the boy slowly reach a breaking point — but then something shifts. Through a quiet act of kindness and connection, he begins to see that he’s not the only one surrounded by these worrying “creatures”. He notices that others, too, carry their own small demons, no matter how confident or put-together they may seem on the outside. This moment of realisation is gentle but transformative. It’s a reminder that we are never truly alone in our struggles, and that opening up can lead to healing.
Small Things offers a unique opportunity to start meaningful conversations about emotional wellbeing. It can be particularly valuable for children who find it difficult to express their feelings verbally. Reading this book together can open the door to discussing what anxiety feels like, how it might show up, and how we can support one another through it.
And finally, I’ve picked Charlie Changes Into A Chicken by Sam Copeland, a laugh-out-loud adventure with a surprising emotional core.
The story centres on Charlie McGuffin, a seemingly ordinary boy with a very extraordinary problem – he changes into animals when he gets anxious. One moment he’s himself, the next he’s a flea, a pigeon, or even a rhino. And the worst part? He has no control over it. His transformations happen at the most inconvenient times, like in the middle of a school play or when he’s trying to avoid the class bully.
While the story is absolutely hilarious (and children will delight in the unexpected animal moments), the book also explores serious issues with sensitivity. Charlie’s life is full of real worries; his older brother is seriously ill in hospital, and his parents are understandably stressed. Charlie tries to stay strong for everyone, bottling up his fears, which leads to the wild animal transformations. It’s a clever metaphor for how emotions can feel overwhelming when children don’t have the words or space to express them.
Despite the fantastical elements, the characters are grounded and relatable. Charlie is supported by a trio of loyal friends, the science-loving Flora, the practical Mohsen, and the hilariously blunt Wogan. Their friendship is a highlight of the book, demonstrating how empathy, humour, and teamwork can make all the difference in difficult times.
In addition to being fun and entertaining, Charlie Changes Into A Chicken subtly encourages children to talk about anxiety and feelings. It normalises the idea that it’s okay to worry, and more importantly, that it’s okay to ask for help. The book’s final message is one of hope, resilience, and the strength of both family and friendship.
Illustrated throughout with lively drawings by Sarah Horne, the book is visually appealing and accessible, even for reluctant readers. A wonderfully funny, thoughtful read that combines magical mayhem with emotional insight.
Tips for wellness from our Mental Health In Schools Team
“Empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with their heart, seeing with their eyes.” Daniel H Pink
Empathy
Empathy means feeling with someone, not just feeling sorry for them. It is one of the best ways to be a kind friend and a good person. Empathy is not just noticing that someone is happy, sad, or hurt—you’re trying to understand their feelings from their point of view and responding with kindness.
Examples of when you could be empathetic:
Our tips for empathy:
Pay attention to how people look and sound – are they happy, sad, or upset? Look for clues in their body language to find out how they might be feeling.
Read a book or watch a TV show – pick a character in the book or show and imagine how that character might feel. Do you think all the characters feel the same? Put yourself in their shoes! Check out EmpathyLab’s #ReadForEmpathy book collection for ideas of what to read to build empathy.
Empathy drawing – if you like to get creative, you could try drawing a picture of how someone else might feel in a certain situation (e.g., “a child who has lost their favourite toy”, “a child who is starting a new school”).
Be kind with actions – even little things help – like sharing, listening, or giving a hug.
Include everyone – invite others to play, join in, or sit with you. Notice if someone is standing alone, sitting on a bench, or watching others play.
Kindness cards – consider making cards or notes for family, friends or classmates who might need a boost!
Please contact [email protected] for information and advice about mental health and well-being for your child and your family.
