Now in it’s 15th year, the Mental Health Awareness Week organised by the Mental Health Foundation, seeks to raise awareness of mental health and wellbeing issues, and this year the focus is on mindfulness.

Being aware of our mental health is becoming  increasingly more relevant as our lives become busier  and demands on our work and personal life take over. When this happens we can be more prone to moments of depression, anxiety, stress, worry and so it is important to take measures to help prevent these symptoms developing into serious mental health problems.

Along with looking after our physical health and getting enough sleep, another way we can look after our mental wellbeing is to practise mindfulness.

Mindfulness has wrongly been associated with simply emptying your mind and zoning out, and unlike meditation it does not involve focusing concentration on a particular word or sound. At first it might seem difficult to understand, but in fact mindfulness simply requires paying attention to the present moment and concentrating on non-judgemental awareness of your thoughts, feeling and senses, in order to avoid being overwhelmed by them.

You can practise mindfulness anywhere at any time, and training yourself regularly will not only give you more insight into your emotions in order to manage them better, it will also help with concentration and greatly improve your mental wellbeing long-term.

Mark Williams, professor of clinical psychology at the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, says "Most of us have issues that we find hard to let go and mindfulness can help us deal with them more productively. We can ask: 'Is trying to solve this by brooding about it helpful, or am I just getting caught up in my thoughts?' Awareness of this kind also helps us notice signs of stress or anxiety earlier and helps us deal with them better."

The Mental Health Foundation has lots of information on the subject of mindfulness and you can also download the app by Headspace which endorses mindfulness and contains hours of content on stress and happiness.

The Be Mindful website has an online course which covers the core elements of  Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)  and a research study by Oxford University showed considerably effective outcomes for participants of the course in reducing anxiety, depression, and stress.

Read our blog about mental health to learn more about the subject and other ways besides mindfulness to improve your mental wellbeing, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and on Facebook to join in the discussion and for more tips on health and wellbeing.