Hello! Thank you for clicking on Castle Surgery’s wellbeing page.

In this area, we’ve listed a few resources that you might find useful for improving your wellbeing and mental health. Self-care can improve our lives in different ways.

This includes developing new helpful behaviours that produce positive outcomes as well as strategies to help tackle challenging situations. Just as certain activities can help our physical health, there are things we can do to help our mental health.

It’s good to think about how closely the two are linked and how each can affect the other, as such there might be activities such as exercise that people find makes them physically fitter but feel better in themselves too.

Wellbeingthroughwork.org.uk

• If you’re in employment (even if you’re off sick) you can contact this team to get different types of support
• You can download the WellbeingThroughWork leaflets here:
  • English
  • Welsh

lltf.com– Living Life to the Full

• Free online courses covering low mood, stress and resiliency.
• Work out why you feel as you do, how to tackle problems, build confidence, get going again, feel happier, stay calm, tackle upsetting thinking and more.

mind.org.uk

• provides advice and support to empower anyone experiencing a mental health problem.

moodgym.com.au/

• moodgym is like an interactive self-help book which helps you to learn and practise skills which can help to prevent and manage symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Gov.Wales – Looking after My Mental Health and Wellbeing

• Life can be hard enough without COVID-19. It’s made a huge impact in your life. Work worries, Family worries, Financial Worries on top of not being able to see your usual company for support.  Gov.Wales  have shared their own recommended list of resources to look after your mental health and wellbeing.

bemindfulonline.com/ – Be Mindful Online

• Be Mindful is the only digital Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) course.
• NHS-approved Pathway has helped thousands of people to reduce their levels of stress, anxiety and depression and improve their mental wellbeing.

silvercloudhealth.com/uk

• online course to help you manage stress, anxiety and depression.
• You work through a series of topics selected by a therapist to address specific needs. The eight-week course is designed to be completed in your own time and at your own pace.

NHS – WellBeing Whilst staying at home

• Tips for things to do whilst in isolation

my.livewellwithpain.co.uk – Live Well with Pain

• Are you living with long term pain? Developed by clinicians for both clinicans and those living with pain, this is a really useful resource to help you live well despite the pain.

Swansea Bay Wellbeing Resources

Downloadable PDF Leaflet

We’ve all experienced a bad night’s sleep. Some have it more frequently than others.

Poor sleep affects you during the day as you may feel more tired, less alert and long term could impact on your physical health too. Before jumping onto medications to help with sleep (which all come with their own risks) it’s worth seeing if you have tried some simple measures first.

SLEEP HYGEINE

This is just a term that describes simple practices and habits that together could help improve your night’s sleep. This includes simple actions like:

Try not having a TV in your room and keeping your bedroom as a bedroom to allow your mind to associate this room as a place of rest and feel relaxed when you’re going to bed.

Some people like to read in bed. Many people love gandering at their smartphones in bed. That activity might actually keep you up, in addition to studies showing the effects on blue light emission from displays may also affect your sleep patterns. Try to wind away from these activities a couple of hours before you go to bed.

Avoid those caffeinated drinks late afternoon and early evening!

Avoid taking naps during the day. You might have caught only a few hours during the night, making you tired during the day so you nap. But then that’ll make your sleep pattern even more erratic.

DEVICES FOR SLEEP

White Noise

• sometimes some people find white noise calming. Playing some sort of background sound might be useful, it could be nature sounds, sound of rain, some people even use audio books.
• Again, different things work for different people so you can try to see what works.
• You can play this directly from your phone or if you have a smart device like an Alexa or Google Home, you can play from there.

Light therapy :

• Mainly for during winter months where we have shorter days and longer nights.
• This affects some people, perhaps as the circadian rhythm (your biological or body clock) is affected. Some studies show that our bodies may naturally prefer to wake up to the gradual light from sunrise, and thus wakes us up during the lighter phases of sleep where we may feel fresher, rather than an alarm that course force us to wake during episodes of deeper sleeps where you might even feel a bit disortiented.
• You can either get devices that are timed to gradually increase brightness in your room in the morning to wake you up gently
  o If you’re a bit more techy and have smart bulbs, you can programme these to gradually increase in brightness each morning, say, with an Alexa app.

Aroma therapy and diffusers:

• Some people find certain scents calming. Clean crisp cotton sheets? Warm magnolia? A gentle jasmine or a soothing lavender?
• Although there are studies that have shown aromatherapy can help with anxiety/stress/sleep this must also come with a warning.
• Please check Allergens list and any manufacturer warnings on the oils/scents devices you decide to try. Do not ingest it.

Here are a collection of links from reputable resources regarding the topic of sleep hygiene:

• NHS Sleep Well 
• Guys and St Thomas Hospital – Sleep Hygeine
• MoodJuice 
• Sleep Hygeine in Children

Are there symptoms or something in particular that’s affecting your sleep?

Sometimes it might be certain symptoms, like having to wake up at night more often to pee that disrupts your sleep. Sometimes pain might be waking you up. It might be restless legs. It could be breathlessness that might wake you up. Some medicines might also affect sleep (please check your medicine’s leaflet side effects information).

If you’re finding that there’s something specific that keeps waking you up, give the surgery a call and we can go through looking into what we can do together to manage those symptoms.

A mixture of free and paid resources. Some of the websites above have their own apps too.

Most of these should be accessible both on Android and iOS (Apple iPhone) devices.

NHS has their own library list of apps you might find useful here.

Please look for these apps in your Google Play Store or Apple App Store, depending on your device.

•  bemindfulonline
• Headspace
• Moodgym
•  Sleep
• Calms App
• Music – Max Richter
•  Via Spotify – Sleep Music Playlists/Nature Sounds

Other:

• CalmHarm

Calm Harm is an app designed to help people resist or manage the urge to self-harm. It’s private and password protected.

Your ContBooks. Whether you like flipping through paper pages, swiping through digital text or listening over audio books. There are various ways to access several useful self-help books.

The Chimp Paradox – Prof Steve Peters

• Highly recommended book. Discusses a concept of how our mind reacts to things in life in a simplistic analogy of primal instinctive chimp, logical human and storage computer. It looks at how these experiences forms habits and how to then change the way we react in future to a more controlled and positive way
• Feel the Fear and Do it anyway – Susan Jeffers
• Mindfulness – finding Peace in a frantic world
• The 4 Pillar Plan – Mark Williams, Danny pENMAN
• Becoming – by Michelle Obama
• How Full Is Your Bucket – Don Cliffton
• Gratitude Journalent Goes Here

• Wellbeing Through Work
• Samaritans
• Cruse Bereavement
• Community Advice and listening line.org.uk