Talking Mental Health at Flackstock Festival

Conversations were inspiring, mental health was spoken about openly and the music was incredible.

Highlights of the day (in our very unbiased opinion)...

Our amazing speakers Lisa and Haleem sharing mental health tips in the Mindfulness Tent. Enlightening takeaways included: the importance of getting to the root cause of your issue rather than just 'patching it up', being honest with yourself about what you need to change, and that it can help to rely holistically on not just medication and therapy, but also support networks and yourself

The incredible atmosphere, electric with the positivity of hope for a world in which tragedies related to mental health like suicides do not exist.

Ronan. Keating. Enough said!

Read on for some more interesting thoughts from Lisa and Haleem's talk...

• We all have ups and downs in our mental health regardless of whether we have a diagnosed mental health issue.

• We need to take action to improve our wellbeing and to support resilience. Like our physical health, we need to work and put energy into this.

• There are many evidence-informed tools to support our wellbeing – explore lots of ideas and find out what works for you!

• The Five Ways to Wellbeing theory has a robust evidence base, offering guidance about what we all could easily do every day to improve wellbeing. Read more here or download our free Five Ways to Wellbeing poster.

• There is a difference between healthy and unhealthy tools. Imagine if you broke your leg. You can use a crutch, but ultimately, if you rely on the crutch, your leg will grow wrong. You need an operation to get to the root of the issue.  

• For our speaker Haleem, the key to getting better was total honesty with himself. He asks himself, "what needs to change?" and tries to answer truthfully. 

• Once we identify what needs to change, we can use tools to actually do it. Although medication, therapy, psychiatrists etc can be great tools, we are still somewhat reliant on something or someone else. 

• What are some tools we can use in the meantime? Breathwork and meditation are pretty much the oldest tools known to humankind, to improve wellbeing-even before creating basic language, we would have used the breath. 

• There are certain types of breathwork that have been proven to release serotonin and dopamine (the same as anti-depressants), regulate emotions by relaxing or activating the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, flooding the body with oxygen and providing us with cardiovascular exercise. Read more on this here. 

Some more memories from the day!