If your Tipping Point is crying into a jar of Nutella, then so be it

WE can all agree that this year didn’t work out as well as we wanted it to. Well, not unless you hastily set up a PPE company in March and ripped off the dozy UK Government for millions of pounds.

It’s been harder for some than others but as someone wiser than me said: “We’re all in the same storm, just on different ships”.

Some days are going to be hard, no matter what your situation.

I’m a huge advocate of all the work people are doing towards mental health awareness and combating one of the UK’S biggest killers – depression.

But I also think that i t ’s O K , and actually h e a l t h y, to some days just be sad. I don’t think sadness and feeling down are necessarily a bad thing to

feel occasionally. It doesn’t always mean y o u’r e depressed and need help.

Some days you feel sad because you are sad and we just need to get through those days the best we c can, even if it means crying cry into a jar of Nutella while w watching Tipping Point. Po

Some m moments are like that and that’s fine.

Other days are absolutely wonderful and you don’t want them to end. But if every day was like that, it wouldn’t make them special days now, would it?

Bad days are bad days, but if we didn’t have them you wouldn’t notice the great d days. If I was American I’d say something someth about “rainstorms” and “rai “rainbows” here, but I’m not so I w won’t.

Io I often think that a lot of our mental health problems com come from “the gap”. The gap is w what I call the bit in our minds that separates a) the person we are, from b) the person we think we should be.

So the way to fix this gap, is the way we fix any gap: we fill it. Fill it with things that are going to make us happy.

You might like to go for walks and listen to nature – birds tweeting, breeze in the trees, or the gentle sound of running water, as someone holds up their child to wee against a dry stone wall. Peaceful.

G a r d e n i n g . T h e r e’s nothing better for the soul than a day spent digging your flowerbeds. It almost make s the days you spend in crippling agony afterwards seem totally worth it.

Exercise, fishing, writing, learn a language or an instrument. Or, and this is as equally important a s d o i n g s o met h i n g , d o absolutely nowt. Nada. Sod all.

There’s no shame in giving yourself some time to not be stressed, not get anxious and not worry about what might or might not happen.

Ye s, y our friend s may have decorated their houses, done an online photography course and lost a stone, but you’ve completed Netflix and worked your way through all the different flavours of Magnums, so who’s the real winner?

If you didn’t have bad days you wouldn’t notice the good days

SLOB Doing nowt is good for the soul