This week, my mind has felt lost in the chaos. Exploding thoughts, distractions, and endless interruptions. It’s been hard to focus or prioritise what matters most. Every time I try to concentrate, I'm yanked in a different direction. A WhatsApp message about my kid’s sport, an email, a reminder for a party, a news notification. Doing a job, cooking, my kids asking me a question. It’s felt like I’m not fully present anywhere.

I remember my very first moment of anxiety. I must have been about six, on my first school camp. Everything felt foreign, my body tense, my mind full and busy. I just wanted to get out of there! I desperately wanted a sense of comfort and to get rid of uncertainty - I wanted to go home.

Japan, certainly has a rich history of traditions and customs and proved to be the ideal classroom for some lessons! Here are my top three insights into how the Japanese look after both themselves and their community, gleaned from our trip:

In a world where connection seems to be just a click away, why do so many of us feel isolated and alone? It's a question that has been on my mind lately, especially after stumbling upon an interesting fact: Young Australians aged between 15-24 are experiencing higher levels of psychological distress and loneliness compared to any other age group (HILDA Report, 2024). This shift in loneliness demographics, once dominated by the elderly, now places the younger generation at the forefront of this epidemic.

Life is a crazy ride of ups and downs, and we need a game plan to prioritise mental well-being and keep sanity intact. Let's break it down into three modes: reactive, proactive, and reflective – your Mental Health Game Plan for the rollercoaster ride we call life.

It’s easy to become trapped in thought patterns which work against, especially in adulthood, where those neural pathways become increasingly hardwired. We become consumed in how our experience of the here and now, forgetting there is another way. To get a little nerdy on you, the psychological term for this is cognitive fusion, where you think your thoughts are an immovable reality (Exploring Your Mind, 2023). In other words, you become your thoughts.

I don’t like telling people how to suck eggs. It’s a complex world, so too is stress and anxiety. I’m also acutely aware of the fact that when it comes to mental health, there are mainstream challenges and clinical issues - the latter well out of my zone. I also don’t think there’s one size fits all when it comes to helping kids - like us adults, they can be complex little things. But through reading, listening, parenting, teaching and my own trial and error, there are a bunch of practical things I’ve found super helpful in supporting children who are dealing with big emotions and scary sensations. There’s a good explanation as to what’s going on in their minds and bodies which you can learn about here, but to keep things practical here, I’ll dive straight in to my go to list…

It’s all too easy to try and reason with a child or teen grappling with stress and anxiety, it can be like banging your head against a brick wall - it doesn’t get through. What if we based our response off the state they were in - survival mode, emotional overwhelm or reflection?

His fists were tight, his face red, adrenalin pumping through his little body. He was about to pick up the chair and piff it at me. I anxiously stood my ground.

I was sitting in one of those classic French steel beach chairs when I noticed it - a spec in the Mediterranean Sea, slowly making its way across the French Riviera. It somehow looked relaxing and challenging in one. I mean, this swimmer was way out. It must have been challenging, but they must have been capable. They were on a mission, but also seemingly lost in the moment.

Like the Eiffel Tower from afar, a sense of perfection is so often portrayed in our culture; however, hidden inside our concealed minds we can so easily find mental mayhem.

Being stuck in mental mess is no fun, I know, I’ve been there. And by stuck, I don’t mean bedridden, although I definitely feel for such people. I mean the same old-same old, day-after-day, over it feeling. Everything feels hard and hope feels depleted. You can face another day, but it’s painful. You know something needs changing, but you can’t see how.

As we’ve based ourselves in Southern France for a couple of months, the other day I thought I’d take the opportunity to head on down with our family to the local pool and smash out some laps. To say the experience was different from my small local community pool on the Sunny Coast is an understatement.

A few weeks ago our family set off on an opportunity of a life time and landed in Europe, where we will be based for the next few months… tough times I know :) I always find it so interesting seeing how other cultures live, and with mental wellbeing being something I love to blog about, I’ve been interested to notice how Europeans go about life on this front. There have been a few things that have stood out which I think we can learn from.

I’m not sure about you, but do you ever feel like you’re in this never-ending pursuit of happiness? I do - I think if we’re honest, we probably all are to a point. Although happiness can be this fleeting emotion, I think there are certain things we can do to create an all-round happier lifestyle - simple things we can put in place that make life that bit lighter and more enjoyable.

Performance. Ahh, how we value it in western culture. We let it become part of our identity and self-worth. If we measure up to expectation, we feel worthy. If we don’t, we’re left with this feeling of inadequacy and not enoughness. If we measure up, we might get a boost of ego from others’ reactions, feeding our belief that strong performance = worthiness.

Have you ever been stuck in your thoughts? I have, and it’s brutal. A few years ago life’s situations and events got the better of me, overwhelming me to the point where I could see no way out - I felt paralysed…

I was packing myself, nervous to the core… butterflies, fidgety, all those symptoms you feel when something really matters, which you kind of believe defines you. I’m a perfectionist by nature, and I was about to butcher a race and totally embarrass myself. I envisaged the race before me, nothing less than perfection would avoid disappointment.

I remember the feelings of chronic anxiety - vividly. Tension. Unease. Apprehension, creeping into more and more areas of my life. Slowly, normal things became different from what they ought to be… used to be. They were bigger, more overwhelming… the world just seemed a scarier place.

Life had given me lemons, plenty of big yellow sour ones. I was in constant physical pain, my mind was all over the shop and I could see no end in sight. I’d been to appointment after appointment to try and resolve what was the deep-rooted issue. It was a simple procedure, elective surgery, how could things have gone so wrong? I’d been blindsided and I was now facing two battles, a physical and mental one. Life had well and truly got the better of me. I was not in a good space at all.