When I meet people I like to ask “How are you doing today?” rather than “How are you doing?” as I think it takes away the pressure for the person to find a “satisfying” answer to what can otherwise be an overwhelming question. Especially for people with anxiety like me, when someone asks how I am doing, I immediately panic and try to find a non-upsetting answer. For me this small difference in phrasing makes a huge difference for me.

In primary school I would often spend lunch time play on the bench sitting on my own -  I would get high anxiety thinking about my mum working nights, being scared of going home to my dad, not wanting to play football because I was no good at it, wanting to play hopscotch with the girls but knowing that was not really where I belonged either and the boys would frown upon that... and one game of hopscotch was not worth a week of being teasing about it. Describing how I feel today is like how I used to feel sitting on that bench. I’m watching from afar, wanting to join in, but I’m too worried, and too scared to even look up, because I may look too fem, too ugly, too awkward, too short, and too unable.

If you live in the UK, you'll most likely have noticed an HSE 'Health and Safety Law' poster on a random wall of your workplace, because companies are required to display it. However, this 'Health and Safety’ poster has zero mention of mental health.  As we all know, there is no health without mental health, so we've created the poster which contains this missing information… and you can download it for free.

'Self-love’, 'loving yourself' urgh... these expressions have always made me absolutely cringe. As a Brit, the idea of 'loving yourself’ really is at odds with everything I’ve ever been taught; swanning about having bubble baths and listing all the nice things about myself...are you joking? But, while getting better acquainted with this whole 'self-love' thing, I discovered firstly, how much I'd misunderstood it, and secondly how little I had of it.

There are a lot of skills people can learn to help cope with panic attacks, and it’s up to each person to try them out and see what methods work for them. I practice the skills when I’m not having a panic attack, in order to train myself for when an attack does happen. When I started learning these skills I tried to do them 3 or 4 times a day.