Mental Health Awareness Week 2024 - Daily Blog

Here at the PPN NW we are embracing Mental Health Awareness Week 2024 and reflecting on this year’s theme: Movement – moving more for our mental health. This theme aligns powerfully for me in considering the impact on my mental health of walking. In the past, my go-to strategy in the face of severe mental health challenge was to shut down, barring the doors on life (both literally and metaphorically), incapacitated, making movement impossible for me in the face of my distress.

In becoming involved with mental health services, I developed other coping strategies supported by psychological professionals. Over time I have been able with their help to shift my pattern of responses and, key to that, is putting on a pair of trainers, however difficult that may be, and propel myself out of that ‘barred’ door to start walking and move.

Walking in nature, whatever the weather, brings me respite. Those tiny moments of being mindful, observing the first celandines with their enamelled petals of gold, to hear the song of a skylark or catch the scent of newly cut grass on the breeze and then to feel, when the sun appears from between the clouds, a lift in my mood. It’s the being, the movement, the feel of pavement, grass or sand beneath my feet. Though distress may still be present it is joined with a sense of awe in nature, the seasons, the landscape and this allows me to reach the next post, the next wall or hedge.

My distress, tension and anxiety are eased by the physical effort of movement in walking and through close observation of my surroundings allowing me to reach a more manageable place in how I feel and soothe myself, with the knowledge I have agency to put on my trainers to find solace in walking in nature whenever I choose.