Welcome to the Cardiff University Staff Counselling Wellbeing blog

Our blog is about mental wellbeing, and the things we blog about will be of interest to members of staff from across the University whatever their role or grade.

So what is wellbeing? And why do we think it’s important? Mind, the mental health charity, defines mental wellbeing below:

“Mental wellbeing describes your mental state – how you are feeling and how well you can cope with day-to-day life. Our mental wellbeing can change, from day to day, month to month or year to year.

If you have good mental wellbeing (or good mental health), you are able to:

• feel relatively confident in yourself – you value and accept yourself and judge yourself on realistic and reasonable standards.
• feel and express a range of emotions.
• feel engaged with the world around you – you can build and maintain positive relationships with other people and feel you can contribute to the community you live in.
• live and work productively.
• cope with the stresses of daily life and manage times of change and uncertainty.”

Our blog will include interesting sound bites covering all aspects of mental wellbeing, especially those concerned with ‘living and working productively’. There will also be some posts about how you might help the wellbeing of the people around you, which will be useful if you have line management responsibilities. The “live” and the “work” are very closely interlinked, with each having considerable potential to impact on the other.

There will be: posts with the latest information on wellbeing in the workplace; tools, tips and strategies that you can use to take care of yourself; highlighting of University wellbeing services that you can access while in work; news about what’s happening in the University, especially concerning initiatives like the Time to Change Organisational Pledge; highlighting of what’s going on around the rest of Wales, the UK and further afield.

You are very welcome to contribute to the blog, so do post or send us any interesting information for inclusion.

Our aim will be to include items which will help educate you about the wellbeing of you and the people you work with and/or manage, information which will hopefully enhance and sustain your personal wellbeing in the workplace and beyond.