The people we support and colleagues at Mansard House in Preston celebrated Mental Health Awareness Week 2023 by taking part in a range of wellbeing activities to reduce anxiety.
There were lots of activities on offer during the week which the Mansard team explain below:
Self Soothe Box
“We talked about self soothe boxes, the benefits and how the box can help you when you are feeling low, anxious or need a distraction. To create your own box – put items that stimulate your 5 senses (touch, smell, sight, taste and hear) into a box that you can access when you need them, you can also put sentimental items in. At the session we promoted ideas of what items could go into the box and how they could help someone who is going through a tough time and may need their spirts lifting.”
Mindfulness activity
“We completed a mindfulness activity. We took a piece of chocolate, and asked ourselves questions: ‘how did it felt in our hand’, ‘what did it smelt like’. We took our time tasting and then eating the chocolate, seeing how it stimulated our taste buds.”
Wellbeing Gift Bags
The people we support and colleagues were given a wellbeing gift bag including the following:
- Bubbles, to blow all your worries away
- Love Heart Sweets, to Love yourself (read each one)
- Play Dough, to help relieve any stress (use like a stress ball) or use as a distraction
- Face Mask, use to chill out, pamper yourself and revitalise yourself
- 3 in 1 Coffee sachet, to take time out, sit down and relax, take 10 minutes just for YOU
“To promote the idea that ‘to look after yourself physically, will help you mentally’, we ran a session about the phrase PLEASE, being a good way to remember to look after yourself:
- PL – Physical Illness, these can impact on your mental health, by taking care of your body, you take care of your mind
- E – Eat, eat a healthy well-balanced diet
- A – Avoid Mind-Altering Substances – avoid Nicotine, Caffeine, Alchhol, Illegal Drugs, Medication prescribed to other people
- S – Sleep, get a good night’s sleep
- E – Exercise, do regular exercise
We talked about each letter of PLEASE and provided suggestions and advice about how best to achieve each one.”
Mindfulness WalkÂ
“We went out for a mindfulness walk, enjoying nature and the sights and sounds around us. We felt the warm breeze on our face and felt the hot sun on our bodies as we walked around a nearby park. This helped us to’ be in the moment’, leaving all our worries and anxieties behind us. We also enjoyed a delicious ice cream to cool us down. Whilst we were out there was Carabbian Band on with dancers, which we enjoyed watching.”
iCOPE Dairy Sheet
“We did an activity to assist us when we are feeling anxious. Filling out a Diary Sheet, can help us process how we feel when something happens that really bothers us. Maybe something has made you feel sadness, fear, anxiety, anger, shame, guilt, jealousy or envy. The idea is to write down what happened, rate the emotion, notice what you feel in your body, what your thoughts are, what you feel like doing (Urge) and what you are going to do.
The people we support find that by talking through the diary sheet with staff – talking about their emotions, how their body feels and their urges and what they actually do at the time – can really help to process and better understand what has happened and how well they reacted. If they reacted negatively, they can learn from this and look for ideas to act in a more positive way next time.”
Some fantastic ideas to share with your services
