Mental Health Awareness Week at the AA

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week this week, and while we know that everyone’s mental health should be looked after all year round, we think that this week brings a great opportunity to highlight the importance of mental wellbeing in the very place where it can be easy for other to-dos to come first – the workplace.

As such, we’ve got lots of mental health-focused activities planned for this week here at the AA offices. To kick things off we had a ‘juice power’ session this morning, where we tasted lots of different blends of healthy and nutrient-filled juices, from spinach and banana to pineapple and carrot, before we were lucky enough to do a relaxing yoga class at lunchtime.

On Tuesday we are spending the afternoon in Mental Health Awareness training with Michelle Morgan who is a Mental Health First Aid instructor. This session will be a condensed version of the two-day first aid course that she usually teaches, which covers topics such as depression, anxiety, suicide and eating disorders.

Then, on Thursday, we have Luke Prebble from Karmarama coming in to do a mindfulness session for the team, where he will talk us through the basic theory and also show us some practical techniques that we can all use in day-to-day life. Luke is a qualified mindfulness coach and he also set up Karmarama’s in house mindfulness offering – ‘Calmarama’.

As we know it’s also important to take some time out to enjoy ourselves, we will round off the week with a picnic in the park on Friday afternoon. In addition to this, our weekly newsletter Advertising Matters will be a mental health special this week, and we have also implemented a stairs challenge, where the person who walks up the stairs the most in a month (we’re on the seventh floor!) will win a prize.

We hope everyone is getting involved and using this week to raise awareness of mental health, whether that be at work or in personal life. Our industry is lucky enough to have NABS – the support organisation for the advertising and media industry. They know that although we work in an incredibly exciting profession, it can also be an extremely challenging one, and so they offer expert, impartial and friendly advice. You can find out more about NABS here.

For updates and pictures of our activities this week keep an eye on our social channels!