Boosting Your Mental Wellbeing

This book describes key skills that allow us to thrive both at work and in our personal lives. Making time to boost our wellbeing is realistic and achievable, and making small changes in key life areas can have a surprisingly significant impact on mood. Working in primary care can be stressful and exhausting and our connection is easily broken with the aspects that made it rewarding and worthwhile. Once broken, it is all too easy to slip into a negative spiral of over-working, failing to switch off, and not spending enough time on rest and recuperation. The book introduces six GROWTH steps, all possible in 10 minutes. These are based on techniques such as CBT, mindfulness and behavioural activation, that help lead to positive mental health and significantly improved wellbeing.

The first half of the book includes exercises and activities to help you practise and learn more about each of the GROWTH steps. The second half then focuses on applying the steps to some of the common difficulties that we all experience in primary care, such as: overcoming low mood, low motivation and burnout coping with anxiety, uncertainty and worry, especially if you are training, taking exams or simply feeling overwhelmed managing change and loss The book can help you avoid imposter syndrome, strengthen important relationships, navigate tricky encounters, and cope better with trauma and complaints. The book cannot remove all the stress that comes from working on the front-line, but it does offer you simple practical help to manage stress much better by boosting your resilience and improving your coping strategies. And it only needs to take 10 minutes a day!