Simon Blake – Mental Health Questions and Answers | Expert Interview

Mental Health Expert Interview with Simon Blake CEO of Mental Health England by Darren A. Smith MBM

Today’s podcast features mental health questions and answers by our expert Simon Blake. Here’s a quick overview of the questions:

What is the definition of mental health?
How has Covid-19 affected mental health?
How accurately is mental health reported in the media?
How does mental health affect physical health?
How does mental health affect your life?
Why is mental health important? – Why is mental health training important?
Why is mental health on the rise?
Please tell us about mental health month/week.
When is mental health too much?
What does mental health mean to you?
Where can someone get a mental health diagnosis?

You Can Read the Full Transcript on Mental Health Questions and Answers Below:

Darren Smith:

Welcome to Sticky Interviews. My name is Darren Smith, and I’m the Chief Executive Officer of MBM Making Business Matter, the Home of Sticky Learning. We are the soft skills training provider to retailers and manufacturers around the globe. The idea of these interviews is to bring to you the expert’s inside knowledge of how you can be the very best version of you. Welcome to the show. Welcome Simon Blake. We are here at Sticky Learning, MBM, and we have the great honour of talking to you. Now, I know that you are the CEO of Mental Health England. I know that you ride horses and you’ve got a competition tomorrow. But what I’d like to do is, for the guys that are watching is say, why should we talk to you about mental health?

Simon Blake:

Simon Blake, on Mental Health Questions and Answers

So, I mean, the first thing, of course is that everybody should be talking about mental health and talking about mental health properly and seriously. So great to be here talking with you. But I am Chief Executive of Mental Health First Aid England, which is an organisation that wants to train one in 10 of the adult population in mental health first aid England skills and knowledge because we think that will create a cultural tipping point in which enough people have the skills and understanding around mental health to make a real difference.

Simon Blake:

I also, of course, have lived experience in terms of live with a partner who has their own mental health conditions, friends, family, my own ups and downs in all sorts of things. So, yeah, I have some professional expertise and then some personal expertise. But just go right back to the first bit. We all need to be talking about it, and that’s why you should talk to me because hopefully, I encourage some people too [inaudible1:47].

Darren Smith:

Fabulous. Alright, we’ve got about 12 questions. Most of them are those that either come from people on LinkedIn or they are searching for them on Google. So we saw these questions and we thought, who better to ask than you? So we are going to go through these questions, ask you, we might go off a tangent, we might ask you to share a few stories. But for the viewers at home or at work, what we are really trying to do is get all those goodies that are inside your head around mental health out so we can help each other.

Simon Blake:

Cool.

Darren Smith:

So our first question is, what is the definition of mental health?

Simon Blake:

Sure. I mean, the World Health Organisation, I know Donald Trump’s not their biggest fan. But the World Health Organisation defines mental health as a state of well-being in which individuals realise their own potential can cope with the normal stresses of everyday life, can work productively and fruitfully, which is obviously a good term for those working in supermarkets and be able to contribute to their own community. So that’s the World Health Organisation definition. I guess the key bit in that is this is about well-being.

Simon Blake:

We often talk about mental health when we mean mental ill health, and it’s really important to recognise. We talk about one in four people experiencing poor mental health each year. What we talk less about is that four in four of us have mental health and that we rely on that to help us get through every single day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Darren Smith:

Right. Because you’re right, I talked to my mum and dad, obviously, they’re a generation of about 70, 80 years. And they talk about people, oh, he’s got mental health. So they use it almost in that negative, which is wrong. And I guess they, and even I haven’t wrapped my head around mental health actually. We’re talking about either illness or well-being. Right.

Simon Blake:

Yes. And of course, it’s a continuum, isn’t it? That some of us will have a clinically diagnosed condition. Some of us might have highs and lows. We will have bad moments and experience bereavement or divorce or separation or whatever it is. So our mental health is a bit like our physical health. We don’t either have pure physical health or an illness. We are all different parts and there is a similar sort of thing with our mental health. But we may not have a clinically diagnosed illness, but we may be operating 80% for a few weeks for whatever reasons, whether that’s external or internal.

Darren Smith:

And that perfectly brings us onto our next question, which is what we’re all going through right now. For some people, hell on earth, for others, even worse. So how has, I think I know the answer, but interesting for you to elaborate. How has covid affected people’s mental health?

Simon Blake:

So, I think it’s fair to say it have affected people in numerate different ways. And I just want to start by saying, of course, that there are some people who have been locked down, who have not been locked down in safe houses, in safe experiences. So maybe in violent relationships. Some people have experienced homophobia or transphobia or whatever it is within their home life. So I think there are some, some key things which we just have to acknowledge. Because I think sometimes people forget that we don’t all have the luxury of a safe home. But also once you sort of acknowledge that, that even though lots of people have had awful experiences which may have include being bereaved and not being able to go to the funeral and grieve properly.

Simon Blake:

So some really bad things, most people have adapted incredibly well. That moment with an hour a day, whatever it is, notice that it’s going to be different tomorrow. Whether it’s going to be different tomorrow and you are going to still come to workplace, or it’s going to be different tomorrow, you’re going to stop coming to the workplace. Yeah, there’s lots of things where we’ve adapted incredibly well. What we also know is that a much higher level of people have experienced anxiety during lockdown since Covid began. And whilst we don’t have all of the information now, of course, as the restrictions, ease there is much, much more room for people to get anxious about all sorts of different things. About am I going to be forced back into the workplace? Am I going to have to get public transport and is that going to be safe?

Simon Blake:

What’s happening with our borders? Am I able to do X, Y, and Z? The reality is that most of us are a little bit confused and, of course, being confused because the rules are not being as communicated as clearly as they could be, in my opinion. And the variation across the four countries, it doesn’t help that. But what that means, of course, is that when we are not sure it can exacerbate worry and concern and anxiety. And for some people it is also important to say no commute, more time at home, an opportunity to slow down, an opportunity to not travel internationally as part of their job has brought some real positive benefits as well. So I think it is really important that we acknowledge the adaptability that as human beings, we’ve done incredibly well. However hard it’s been, we’ve done incredibly well.

Darren Smith:

Yeah.

Simon Blake:

And that it has been difficult for some people and will continue to be, and that there have been some positives for some people, and that most people, of course, have gone back and forth. If you asked me last week how it was a very different answer than how it is today.

Darren Smith:

Very true. You’re right, it’s a very changing picture. I mean, we as a family, we went out on Saturday and the whole mask thing, it’s just, I don’t know. We wanted to go out and sadly, we went into a weather spring for lunch. There was no mask in there. Or we went into a clothes shop and it said, you must wear a mask, sanitise your hands. Absolutely. We went in, there were six assistants without masks and you’re thinking this is all a bit confusing.

Simon Blake:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Darren Smith:

Well, we got it.

Simon Blake:

Yeah. And I think that that is, yeah, I’ve used public transport probably three times since March. On Sunday I got on [inaudible 8:49] railway, and there were probably similar six or seven people without their masks on and I was furious. I’m not a person who gets furious about much. And then I was like, just breathe. By the time I got home, I was like why were there so many people? Why weren’t the people on the train saying to them that they should be doing it? Of course, yeah, actually I had my mask on. I was far enough away. But there’s something about our interactions with each other, what’s happened in this period and our own. Clearly, it triggered something in me.

Simon Blake:

I don’t normally go from not 60 in quite the speed that I did in that moment, which suggests that it worried me rather than it made me angry, even though I felt fury. Then of course, I’m 45. No, I’m not 46-year-old Blake. So always sort of equipped like many of us with the nuance of emotion. So it took me a while to just step back and go, okay, what’s happening? And that’s what I think all of us are going to have to do a bit more of.

Darren Smith:

That’s very true. The other thing I found that was a bit odd was that I was in a shop, I had a mask on, and I’m smiling. I’m thinking, that’s doing absolutely nothing. I’m smiling at people, the shop assistant, but it’s doing nothing very often, very often.

Simon Blake:

Well, your eyes may have been dancing, Darren, you never know. Your eyes may have been dancing as you smiled.

Darren Smith:

I’ve got to do more of that. I certainly have. And I’m glad you mentioned your age. I had to ask the kids the other day, am I 49 or 48? Let’s come back to our topic. We talked about the changing picture, and the media can be very responsible for that. How do you think the media are doing reporting on mental health? And I don’t mean our criticism of them doing it right or wrong, but how we take what they say. What do you think about that?

Simon Blake:

Again, when we talk about the media, there’s such a wide spectrum, isn’t it? We have seen, I think over the last decade, some really good documentaries, some really good news reporting, some really good pieces. But still, you get the headlines which are stigmatising. Still you get things which may be absurd. They may be ridiculous, they may be outrageous, but they are not crazy, mad or insane. So you get all sorts of language and use of words, and then descriptions of when anything bad happens, the way that then it’s attributed to mental health or not. So I don’t think as a whole, the mainstream media is on the sort of the positive end of the spectrum.

Simon Blake:

However, there is some really, really good reporting. When people report on suicide, we see some of them taking the advice divert by Samaritans and others and using that. And other times you just see such sensationalist and poor reporting, you wonder whether yeah, we are right back in the seventies again. Yeah. But YouTube, Instagram, Twitter again, some really appalling stuff, but some absolutely brilliant material and blogs. And of course, what we have now is a much greater opportunity to curate our own newsfeed rather than BBC One Channel. Well, three wasn’t it initially and then Channel Four turns off at 10 o’clock or the radio. So I think the media still could do much more to de-stigmatise.

Simon Blake:

So be an active non-stigmatising, or if you think about they’re similar to there’s a difference between being non-racist and being anti-racist. The media could be much more proactive in trying to de-stigmatise mental health rather than just not stigmatised because we’ve got a long way to go before it reports accurately. If you think about what we talked about at the beginning when it talks about reporting of mental health, often it is talk of reporting on mental illness rather than on the positive and on the state of well-being.

Darren Smith:

I think that’s the biggest part I’ve taken so far, is that difference, which I don’t think I had in my head either. So maybe it helps others. Okay. And just as a part of that, I’m thinking about the next generation. So my son is 17 next week. Gabby, my daughter is 20. Do you think their generation will do it better? It’s a bit of a leading question, I guess. I think they will. Do you?

Simon Blake:

Absolutely. 100%. So I spent my whole career until October 2018 working with young people. So I worked at the Family Planning Association, running a sex education project. They were better at talking about sex and sex and relationships than our generation. I worked at National Children’s Bureau where we talked about drugs and about volatile substance abuse and about bereavement and about mental health. They were better at talking about all of those things than our generation. And just before I came here, I was at Brook Young People’s Sexual Health charity, and then the National Union of Students. There is a language, there is an understanding, there is a much better awareness of the issues here. There’s greater connectivity and closeness.

Simon Blake:

However, that doesn’t mean that they’re sorted. I think that is the risk that we have, which is, oh, young people are better at talking about it, therefore they’re sorted. And I think that there is a huge amount that we need to do to just really get alongside children, young people, and understand what it’s like growing up now to help them to navigate. As usual, we do the same. We demonise young people and this time around, it’s social media, it was acid parties and illegal raves, and before that, it was sex before marriage. There’s been a theme each time. So that’s our job is to get alongside children, and young people work with their emotional literacy, their emotional intelligence, their acute feeling and connectivity to mental health. And then help them navigate their lives.

Darren Smith:

Well said. Just so I can think that they’re not doing everything perfectly. I just need to get my two off their phones.

Simon Blake:

Yeah. Well, what my mom and dad has said, he just needs to make sure that he comes home on time. So there will always be different things. And that’s part of the where children are lucky to have parents and carers who are able to have that sort of bungee line, which is, go, come on, stretch. But we’re always here, we’re always holding on. Yeah. That’s where the children are lucky. Not everyone is lucky to have that, but that’s the job, isn’t it? Holding just at the edge of their comfort zone, holding onto your nerve whilst they’re at the edge, and helping them all the way through.

Darren Smith:

Well, that’s certainly true. Because I’m teaching Jack how to drive at the moment.

Simon Blake:

Good luck.

Darren Smith:

When say holding on, I literally am to the hand brake. But enough about that. Fingers crossed. Okay, let’s talk about mental health affecting physical health. So as a layman, I can see that one affects the other. Would you be able to take us a bit deeper into what does it really mean, the connection between the two?

Simon Blake:

Yeah. So I did a podcast with Ruby Wax about a year or so ago. And she described it probably the best that I’ve heard described, which is this thing is a onesie. Yeah, we may talk about it in mental health and physical health, but it’s one thing. How we are mentally affects how we are physically and how we are physically affects how we are mentally. We know that physical exercise, whatever we’re able to do, whether that’s a walk or whether that’s sprinting or horse riding, whatever it is that is good for our mind. Being in nature is good for our well-being. That connectivity is there. But we also know that if people are experiencing poor mental health, that’s often the time when you lose motivation, when you stop caring for yourself, when you stop being able to feel the spikes of joy.

Simon Blake:

So the two are interlinked. If you think physical health, physical activity, physical health is important for well-being. But at the same time, how we are mentally may also affect how we feel about activity, but also how we feel physically at the same time. I’m not a clinician, so yeah, I don’t want to overstep my mark on this. But we know about how we get aches, but that’s headaches owned to stress. We know that shoulder pain. My brother died a few years ago and I had the worst back pain for about three months. There was nothing that was physical. It was pain and it was coming through that. So yeah, that interrelationship is there. So Chinese medicine, acupuncture, all of those traditional medicines are about body and mind. Chakras, I don’t know anything more than that.

Darren Smith:

I worked in the corporate world for about 14 years. Very stressful job. A lot of responsibility. And every time I went on holiday, I got cold. Because I was just coming out of that. And the family would say, you’re horrible for the first three days because I was just a dribbling mess.

Simon Blake:

Yeah.

Darren Smith:

Okay. Alright. That makes sense. And mental health affecting. So the physical we’ve talked about and they’re connected. Absolutely. Get that. What about affecting all your life? So how does mental health affect the whole thing?

Simon Blake:

Yeah. Well, I guess, it’s the same thing, isn’t it? If you think about our mind as a muscle, we can train ourselves to look for and experience joy. So that bit of noticing, looking around you and being grateful for the things that you can appreciate and it’s not saying everything has to be brilliant, but are there three things that I can be grateful for at the moment. Journaling so that we are writing down our feelings. You talked about your children and phones and actually close to 50 and spend too much of my time walking along, looking down at my phone. Have to make a deliberate effort to go actually look up, look at the world around you and then do that later.

Simon Blake:

So similarly, our motivation. What we are willing to try and not try, whether we’re willing to take risks or not. It’s all part of that same bit. Our mental health is at the heart of who we are. It is our humanity. So the mantra of there is no health without mental health. There is only us and our bodies and our minds. It’s how we’re recognising the massive privileges and joy. For those of us who looked at our body this morning and thought, oh, remembering it gets us around every day. It’s actually what enables us to do the shopping, whatever it is. Whatever our limitations and our horizons, all of it is really about our lives.

Darren Smith:

Yes. Absolutely. You just reminded me. There was a guy on LinkedIn who talked a while ago. I think he did a one-minute video where he said he was he told this story about standing in the queue at post office and he said he made the decision not to look at his phone. And this thing went wild. Really? All you did was stop looking at your phone in the post office queue. But it was brilliant. Me included. I stopped and thought I might just do that a couple of times.

Simon Blake:

Yeah.

Darren Smith:

Stop looking.

Simon Blake:

I deliberately don’t take my phone out with me. We used to often go out for Sunday lunch and I wouldn’t take my phone because I know I’d be tempted. Now if I do meet people, I turn my phone off so that the second they go to the toilet, I don’t immediately look. Work emails on our personal emails on our bank account on so my phone tells me when I spent money. You can’t even spend money without the pain of it being told on your phone. So yeah, I would absolutely. I practice not having my phone with me a lot.

Darren Smith:

I like that. I think it was Bear Grills who said, let’s disconnect from the cyber hive. Took me a while to figure out what he meant, but when I got it, yeah, I get it. I get it. Ok. Alright. I’m just conscious of time. We’ve only got a finite amount of time with you. So I want to ask you the things that people are asking me. Why is mental health training important? I think I know the answer and I think you’ve touched on it, but let’s just make sure.

Simon Blake:

So yeah, mental health, I think the most important thing is that we all need to learn and understand mental health a bit better. We all need to learn and understand a bit about signs and symptoms so that we can understand when we are noticing in ourselves and when we are seeing in other people. We need to understand its relationship to the rest of our body and the rest of our lives, which we talked about. And we’ve got to stop being frightened of it because let’s face it, people are frightened of mental health a lot of the time as well, because they don’t understand it. So we need to shift the culture. We need to have enough confidence to have conversations and enough confidence to develop skills. Training is the main way that we understand to make that happen.

Simon Blake:

Now, we can read, we can watch TED Talks, people can listen to YouTube. There are things that we can do but actually there is also the skills practicing. How do you have conversations? How do you spot changes? What might you have to do the difficult conversation around things? And how do we just build our confidence? So if you think about physical health, you see someone, you talked about your dribbling nose and made me conscious and wonder whether I had a dribbling nose at the time. But you talked about your dribbling nose. We can see when people are physically ill. We can train ourselves to better understand when people may not be at the time, then we can have the conversation. But we’re much less likely to be confident to have the conversation because of the stigma that’s associated with mental health.

Simon Blake:

And whilst stigma exists, whether it’s about as I said before, I spent a lot of time working in sexual health. Stigma exists around HIV, around sex, around abortion, around same sex relationships, around mental health around poverty. Wherever there is stigma, there is shame and there is difficulty. Actually, these things are difficult enough to experience with support often. We shouldn’t be making it more difficult with stigma. So the training is really smashing the stigma for one of a better way of saying, but also doing that through better understanding, better knowledge, which will help us help ourselves and also help us have the skills to recognise and have conversations with each other. I guess just the one other bit around training. I didn’t come into this job with any expertise.

Simon Blake:

I still wouldn’t call myself an expert, but I’ve got some expertise now. But what it has made me realise is that actually we can do a lot to look after our brains that enables the brain to look after us. And I was actually quite lucky in that I have a very, very well formed hobby which does lots of that. Yeah. So you can’t horse riding. You can’t have a phone when you’re going around cross country. You can’t have a phone in your hand when you’re trying to plot the horse up or to drive somewhere. So I already had that sort of self-care sort of inherently built into my life.

Simon Blake:

But had I not got that kind of things to do in the evenings and weekends and all those sorts of things, then what I would’ve learned through this job and through training was we have to take measures to slow down. We have to actively build that muscle, which looks after ourself. We have to really try and I think that did that’s wherever we sit on the mental health continuum at any point in time. There are things we can do to look after ourselves and that’s a really important part of learning and training at the same time.

Darren Smith:

I like it. Two thoughts came into my mind. One, you mentioned Ruby Wax. I watched a TED Talk where she talked about her mental illness. Was that right? She’s been through some stuff, hasn’t she? It’s pretty tough.

Simon Blake:

She has, yeah. I would recommend. So the podcast that I do with her is called Just About Coping which is then Simon Blake with Ruby Wax. But yeah, Ruby’s done a lot of TED Talks. She has established the Frazzled Cafe, which is a cafe to support people as a place to go and they’re online now. So literally frazzled basically like frazzles in the way of Frazzles and Frazzled Cafe, support groups to help people who are feeling stressed and want help. But yeah, Ruby’s had her own experiences and written books. She’s got a new book out at the moment. All of it worth a read, really, really. She has a masters in cognitive behavioral therapy and has really gone into understanding neuroscience, et cetera.

Darren Smith:

Alright, we’ll add those links to the bottom of here so people can see them. We’ll add those in afterwards. And the other thought I had was, we mentioned the dribbling nose and someone says, oh, you’ve got a cold, you’ve got a dribbling nose. What would be the equivalent? Is there one for mental health where we might see something and think, okay, you’ve got a mental health cold.

Simon Blake:

Well, I guess it depends how well we know people, doesn’t it? Now I’m conscious thinking, have I got dribbling nose. It’s amazing what happens. So the key thing is noticing change. So if somebody’s always on time and suddenly late, always sociable, doesn’t want to go out, always well kept, looks messy, always messy, suddenly well kept. Always performs, suddenly isn’t performing, never gets angry or is often short-tempered, but suddenly is very patient and detached. So just thinking about am I noticing changes? And the really important bit in that is it’s okay to ask the question because so often we can be worried about asking the question, but it is really important to check. I’ve noticed that always, your work context, you are always on time.

Simon Blake:

But for the last three weeks, actually you’ve been late and I wanted to find out whether there’s anything right in order to help you, not to punish. Is having the right sort of care and conversation, but being specific. I mean, I guess that’s the key. That’s the key bit. There is lots around low mood, irritability, all sorts of things which you can see, but ultimately, it’s are there changes?

Darren Smith:

Changes. Okay. Alright. Perfect. Got that. Mental health, it’s on the rise now. Is it on the rise because it’s on the rise, or is it on the rise because we’re more aware of it? I don’t know if you can answer that but.

Simon Blake:

So let’s just make sure that we unpick this, given what we said. So mental health will be on the rise as populations rising, it will be decreased because every single person has mental health. What you really mean is diagnosed conditions on the rise. I think what we know is that we have a better understanding about mental health and mental illness than we did previously. We know that we have got better medical care and support around mental health. So talking to somebody the other day about their experience of postnatal depression as opposed to their mother’s experience are being very unwell after the child. So there’s all sorts of cultural changes between the understanding of mental health and mental illness is changing, and that includes our medical understanding.

Simon Blake:

Remember it wasn’t that long ago gay man, it wasn’t that long ago that I was illegal and mentally unwell according to diagnostics. Everything changes. The important bit is that we are working in the right direction, and that more people are getting help. The bad bit of that is that their waiting list is still too long. Some people are not getting non-judgmental help and advice. Some people don’t feel able to ask for help and support. Then when you put things like Covid on top of that, we know that we are already in a system and the culture that perhaps isn’t as open and honest and then isn’t able to deliver. And those things will be exacerbated as a result of this.

Darren Smith:

Ok. Yeah. Get it. What would you advise people to do? So we’re talking about mental illness being on the rise. We’re also more aware of mental health, which must be a good thing. We can talk about it a bit more than we used to. If someone’s feeling as though they’re not happy, they’re not okay, what should they go and do?

Simon Blake:

So the key bit in all of this, of course, is that finding somebody you trust and having a conversation. And that person that you trust might be the person that you are working the till with or doing the shelves with, or it might be your sibling, or it might be a parent, or it might be a doctor, or it might be the employee assistance program or Samaritans. Actually, it doesn’t have to be any one person. There can be anybody that you trust. And it also doesn’t have to be easy. It may feel difficult, but it will feel better once it’s out because of those old sorts of sayings, what’s it? Problem shared is a problem halved. And all those sorts of things. We know ourselves. The things at four o’clock in the morning are really, really, really big.

Simon Blake:

Actually, at eight in the morning, once you’ve had the chance to have a conversation, may not be. And of course, there might be clinical issues as well. So I guess the key bit is never be afraid to ask for support. We have a culture which doesn’t always reward getting help. Important to acknowledge we all need help at some point. We all need help for our physical bodies. We need help for our mental health as well. I think that has to be the key bit. The challenge, of course, is that when you are feeling low, rubbish, not good, whatever language you want to have, actually asking for help can exacerbate feelings. So that is why it’s a two-way job.

Simon Blake:

What I hope is that if I am down about my brother dying, after about six months, friends are like, okay, Simon, this is enough now. We need to sit down and have a conversation with you. You are not moving through. And it wasn’t a case of yeah, we want you to feel differently. It was, we can see that something isn’t right. How can we help you? Of course, as is often the case, you say I didn’t need the help. I don’t want the help, but they’re absolutely right. And that’s why I wasn’t going to go to them and ask for help because I didn’t feel like I needed it because that was where my brain was at that moment in time. But they could see something and gently, kindly came. And that’s why it is really a two-way. It’s got to be a two-way thing.

Darren Smith:

I had a snoop around the website earlier, and I may catch you on the hop, but it’s not my intention. I saw a tool called Address the Stress.

Simon Blake:

Yeah.

Darren Smith:

Which was about a funnel. What I understood was things were in it, all those worries and 4:00 AM things. And then after they got released by talking to people, or it got stopped further by alcohol. That’s what I took from it. But I only looked at it for a few minutes. Would you mind just sharing a bit more and explain it better than me?

Simon Blake:

Yeah, sure. No, that’s not a bad explanation in 20 seconds for a quick look around the website. So think about a stress container. If you think about that World Health Organisation’s definition that we manage the normal stresses of everyday life. So if a container’s that big and that big might be, can you see that? There comes a point. Actually, let’s just think about it differently. There comes a point at which your bath water can no longer stay in if you get in it as well. It is going to splash out the sides and go over and you’ve got to find a way to let the water out. You’re either through the overflow or through the tap.

Simon Blake:

So if I have a busy week at work and I’m feeling a little bit like that. The best thing that can happen to me is that I will get the chance to ride the horse. Right. Kick off the weekend. Yeah. That’s the tap. That’s why I pull the plug, turn the tap on whatever it is. It might be running, it might be a conversation, it might be sewing. And of course, it might also be a glass of red wine or a glass of white wine or a beer. The challenge is if it’s six beers every day, because we are not finding other roots through. That’s the sort of bit of it that we all have different-sized containers. We all have different moments in our lives and we’ve got to find ways to switch off.

Simon Blake:

So when I talk about self-care, which is what I think is really one of the ways of turning the tap and letting some of the stress out, it’s giving ourselves a rest. It’s finding ways to enable our brain to feel like it doesn’t have to be on high alert. And that may be a three-hour conversation with a friend talking things through. It may be a ride through the woods or whatever or it might be a run. The bit about it is it’s always pizza and always lots of beer and at the end of it, there isn’t actually any resolution. I like a bit of pizza and I like a bit of beer, but it’s all of it, isn’t it? It’s in moderation. If it’s destructive, that’s the challenge. Yeah.

Darren Smith:

That makes sense. So balance, yeah, moderation. We’ve all been there with maybe too much of those. I’m just conscious of your time. So I’m going to ask you one more question and then we’ll just move into a summary. What does mental health mean to you? And I’m going to add a rider on that. What would you like these people out there to know and you think, if only we knew that it’ll be much, much easier for everyone?

Simon Blake:

I guess, what does mental health mean to me? It is very much that continuum. It is a recognition that our body and mind go together in the same way that sometimes I have a sore knee and I don’t think I’ve knocked it. Sometimes I have a sore head and I don’t think I’ve knocked it. And other times I know that I fell off the horse and it’s hurt the knee. And sometimes I’ll know that there are external circumstances, or I can feel that something’s happening, which means that my brain is hurting.

Simon Blake:

So that continuum, yeah, we move back and forward and sometimes it will include clinical diagnoses and sometimes it doesn’t. But our mental health is something that we should all be acutely aware of. So if I had something which I would encourage people to do it would be the weekly well-being check, which we have on the website, which you could put in the links.

Darren Smith:

Yep. Will do.

Simon Blake:

The questions which are, how do you feel right now? How did you sleep? How are you feeling about work? Just a series of different questions and the bid really is just taking that time to notice. I guess I’m a big advocate of no matter what the state of our mental health. There are always some things which we could try to do. So helping ourselves to get good sleep by not having our phones in our bedrooms. Helping our mind to get the best out of what we eat by trying to eat good balanced diet as much as we possibly can.

Simon Blake:

Not drinking too much coffee, tea and alcohol and drinking loads of water, getting some exercise. They’re not always easy to do. It sounds so simple when I just say it, but it isn’t always easy. But being conscious about the fact that we often go back to the pizza and beer. I can glog a whole pizza at the best of times and I’ll feel full. What I rarely do is think actually what is that doing between stomach and mind. Whereas when I eat a really nice salad and whatever you eat is good, kind of go, yeah. I notice now that the lightness that also comes with my mind. If I don’t drink over a weekend, I’m getting to that stage where not very much booze makes me feel a bit groggy.

Simon Blake:

If I don’t drink for a long time, I actually notice I’m feeling quite a lot better. So then you’re going, actually, what’s the payoff here and how do I want to feel tomorrow rather than how do I want to feel tonight? So I guess it’s just that bit of what I would say to people is in the same way that we feel our back, our hips, our knees, our legs, our arms and try to fill the brain, try to understand what’s going on, try to really connect in with it and do our best to help it look after us. I think that’s the core of this for me. Really.

Darren Smith:

Yeah. That makes perfect sense. Without knowing it, I’ve just made a link. Gal and I, my wife, some friends asked us to go out and we knew it would be a boozy night. It’s in about three weeks. Then we said, but hold on, we’re going to wake up a bit later, feeling a bit rough on Jack’s birthday. So we’ve just moved it. So we’ve done a small amount of this already, which is good.

Simon Blake:

Yeah. Alright.

Darren Smith:

Makes perfect sense. Simon, that has been fantastic. I’ve just written down here a few notes of things that I particularly took away. We talked about mental illness and trying to understand that better when we sometimes and I was using mental health and I was meaning mental illness. So that’s a good point. You talked about mental and physical being one. Back to what Ruby Wax and the Frazzle Cafe say, so perfect. And I like your piece that you said spikes of joy. I haven’t heard that before. I think we should all do with a few more spikes of joy.

Simon Blake:

Well, and to notice them and to know what gives you it. That’s the bit and to notice when you are not feeling them and to try and understand why. I do practice gratitude. So the first thing I do when I wake up is think about three things that I’m grateful for, and sometimes the big things, and sometimes it’s peanut butter. To tell you when you start actually thinking, I’m grateful for peanut butter, how much butter your peanut butter on toast taste.

Simon Blake:

But these don’t have to be big things. The joy of a hug at the moment because we are not getting very many of them. And noticing that and then remembering those things and trying to be grateful for it, I think is really key to helping us to have a better grasp of what gives us joy and then how we can get it and recognising that sometimes things aren’t joyful. But there’s often joy to be found even when it’s not the most joy of time.

Darren Smith:

Very true. I haven’t seen my parents for a long time. They’re old. They’re 80 years old or so, and I haven’t hugged them for four months and that just feels odd.

Simon Blake:

Yeah. They wouldn’t like you calling them old. They wouldn’t like you calling them old. That’s all I’m going to say.

Darren Smith:

Well thankfully this is on YouTube so there’s no chance of them seeing it. I’m kidding. Alright, I’m aware we’ve used a lot of your time and I’m really, really thankful. I think we’ve got a lot of goodies out of your head, and we’ve answered a lot of the questions that people are asking, so thank you so much. And the last thing I’m going to say is, best of luck for tomorrow. You’ve got a competition. I think you’ve got a horse called Boris and you’re doing a dressage, is that right?