Mental Health Awareness Week Shouldn’t Last a Week
Every year, Mental Health Awareness Week comes around and suddenly our feeds are filled with reminders to “check in”, “be kind” and “talk more”. And whilst I understand the intention behind it, I often find myself thinking the same thing:
Why does awareness only seem to become visible for one week or when something bad happens to someone in the public eye?
Mental health doesn’t disappear when the campaign banners come down!
It exists in our homes, workplaces, relationships and communities every single day. It shows up in the employee who is functioning outwardly whilst quietly overwhelmed internally. The business owner carrying pressure they don’t know how to release. The parent trying to hold everything together whilst running on empty. The person who smiles professionally but spends their evenings emotionally exhausted.
For me, mental health awareness has never been theoretical.
My interest in emotional intelligence, communication and human behaviour didn’t come from a textbook or a corporate trend. It came from lived experience.
I grew up with parents who were essentially kids raising kids, using the only tools and relationship patterns they had learned themselves. Like many people, I entered adulthood carrying emotional patterns I didn’t fully understand at the time. Fear of rejection, fear of conflict, people-pleasing, emotional overwhelm and a nervous system that was permanently stuck in fight-or-flight.
For years, I struggled with communication, relationships and self-worth without truly understanding why. I spent a long time disconnected from myself and from any real sense of emotional safety.
Eventually, everything caught up with me. In 2017, I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia after years of chronic stress, emotional suppression and physical strain. But truthfully, the emotional exhaustion had been there long before the diagnosis arrived.
There was a point where I genuinely didn’t know how to keep living the way I was living.
What changed my life wasn’t a motivational quote or a single breakthrough moment. It was understanding myself properly for the first time, and recognising that I had responsibilities, relationships and animals depending on me that I refused to abandon. No matter how low I felt, I couldn’t walk away knowing the impact and emotional upheaval it would leave behind.
What followed was a deep journey into emotional intelligence, communication and human behaviour. I began learning about nervous systems, behavioural patterns, emotional regulation and psychological safety. For the first time, I started to understand why I thought the way I thought, reacted the way I reacted and struggled in the ways I struggled.
Most importantly, I learned that survival mode is not the same as living.
Over the years, through therapy, personal development and deep work in emotional intelligence and behavioural understanding, I slowly rebuilt the way I communicate, work, lead and relate to others. And that journey completely changed my life. It’s also the reason I care so deeply about the work I do today, because behind so many business issues, relationship breakdowns, leadership struggles and workplace tensions, there are humans who are overwhelmed, dysregulated, unsupported or silently struggling.
We cannot continue treating mental health as a yearly campaign whilst ignoring the environments, communication styles and cultures that contribute to poor wellbeing in the first place.
Mental health awareness should not last a week.
- It should exist in the way we lead people.
- The way we communicate.
- The way we handle conflict.
- The way we support children.
- The way we build workplaces.
- The way we respond to emotions.
- The way we create psychological safety for ourselves and others.
I’m not sharing this because I have life perfectly figured out, I absolutely do not. I’m sharing it because I know what it feels like to believe things cannot get better, and I also know they can.
Sometimes healing starts with understanding yourself differently.
Sometimes it starts with one safe conversation.
Sometimes it starts with finally realising you are not broken, you’re operating from patterns, experiences and survival responses that once protected you.
Awareness matters.
But real change happens in what we consistently choose to do afterwards.
What will you choose? The same ol’ repeating patterns or something different that gets you to where you want to be?
When you’re ready, when you’ve realised the way things are going aren’t serving you, reach out and let’s have a conversation about getting you to that destination you long for.
I’m here for it!
