How well you sleep at night has everything to do with what goes on during the day. Here’s why (and what you can do to improve your sleep).

Rest is a necessity - not a luxury or an optional extra for people who don’t have as much on. We deserve rest. We don’t need to earn it.

We rest first to fuel up for what we need to do. Rest comes first, not as a necessary concession because we’ve collapsed in a heap. It’s like driving.

Big resolutions feel good, like we're making some kind of stand for progress, refusing to tolerate the shortcomings of the past, and finally changing things that we couldn't overcome just a few days before. But big resolutions rarely deliver. They

We all face anxiety at times. It helps to know what’s going on and what can help.

Sometimes what makes us feel so busy at Christmas is the weight of all the unspoken feelings we’re carrying.

Just as the soil of the garden can grow good plants or weeds, so too our minds can produce helpful thoughts that support us to live well or they can just as easily (if not more easily!) grow a crop that is unhelpful.

Most of us have heard about how important gratitude is for mental health and wellbeing.

What I didn’t realise is that the odds are stacked against gratitude by a pesky thing called Scarcity Bias.

Striving Busy - that kind of busyness that comes from the idea that there is a ‘perfect’ way to do life. If we can just deliver, it will show that we measure up and will provide the best life for us and those we love.

Accepting that there won’t be time for everything, and that some things will always be more important than others, how can we be most impactful today, and let go of the things that don’t really matter?

For most of us, our lifestyle doesn't support us to really ‘show up’, and it’s a nebulous concept to begin with.

I sat down to try and describe what it means to ‘show up’ in the hope that it might be a prompt that moves us closer to fully living and enjoying our lives.

I don’t know about you, but there are a million things that come up every day to pull me out of calm and into stress and anxiety.

But I’m convinced it’s worth the effort to go against the tide and keep making shifts back towards calm.

By this time of year it can feel as though you’ve been pushed, pulled and dragged in lots of different directions. For most of us, life’s been busy, emotional, tiring and full.

Staying calm and centred though the ups and downs of the year can be a challenge and often we only have short windows of time to work with. We need to know how to build in small, achievable things that recharge us.

We’re all human and, inevitably, we all make mistakes or we wish we’d done – in our parenting, work or in any area of our lives. I’ve been reflecting how I handle mistakes, and how I can respond in a way that’s helpful.

There’s a lot going on at the moment, and I’m conscious of the need to try and stay present. I don’t want to miss any of it because I’m distracted, stressed or living in my head. 

Earlier this year we carried out a survey of over 70 women about the Top Challenges Facing Women with Regard to Busyness (a big thank you to those who were involved!)

Here’s what we learned.

Many of us know that we’re living at an unsustainable pace, and thinking there has to be a better way. But whether we are too Busy can seem like an unhelpful question when we feel like we lack control over our commitments and the pace of life. Perhaps we should just buck up, bunker down and get on with it.

It’s easy to understand why busyness is seen as a virtue. After all, it sounds like being a responsible, hard-working adult making a contribution to society and on the road to success.

Living well means living in a way that’s sustainable, intentional and that allows us to show up as our best selves.

Most of us are familiar with how time seems to speed up as we get older, but can we slow it down?