by Dr. Sagar Jilka

About 5 years ago, I went through the most intense, stressful period of my life.

I struggled to function, think straight, and sleep.

As someone who thinks in numbers, this bothered me a lot; because I couldn’t quantify how I was feeling, why I was thinking this way, or understand what I was going through.

That’s when I really started to think more about how we can measure the mind — not the brain, or brain function — but feelings, moods, and thoughts — our mental health.

I spent a lot of time googling…

‘How to…

by Dr. Sara Simblett

Perhaps you’ve completely missed the early warning signs and now you’re feeling full-on overwhelmed, or maybe your body is reacting in weird ways — stomach pains one day, a headache the next, but your doctor is telling you you’re physically fine!

You’re listening to the same song over and over again, knowing that there’s something about those sad lyrics that resonate with how you’re feeling and you’ve stopped replying to messages from friends because it all feels too much.

These are all situations I’ve found myself in and I’ve always wondered if there might be a…

It’s a simple question, and with the millions and millions pouring into mental health globally today (£580m in 2019 alone, pre-pandemic) and the enormous cost to society of mental health problems (estimated at $16 trillion annually by 2030), surely we are directing that capital wisely to what are the most effective, evidence-based interventions to address what is a crippling crisis?

We are lucky that there is now so much support and guidance available from charities, governments and private corporations on how to best manage our mental health, from managing it on a daily basis to times of acute distress.

Interventions…

You’ve worked somewhere for 5 years, over which time you have come to be known as the person who ‘gets stuff done’, who consistently presents work of the highest quality, is organised and punctual to a fault and, when it comes to performance reviews, always receives glowing praise.

Now say, that you decide you want to leave, you’re a star performer, people will be beating down the door to hire you right? You prepare your CV and share it with the world waiting for a flood of interviews and job offers.

You wait, but they never come.

What happened? What’s…

You’ve gone through the application process, held multiple stages of interviews and completed the assessments, now, the final ‘hurdle’ — reference checking, simple right?

As they currently work though most references are generally pretty useless, for a few reasons:

• They happen at the end of the recruitment process

By this point you have spent a decent amount of time with someone, probably already set on your decision, are fatigued with the whole process and are just looking for someone else to give you the nod of approval so you don’t feel like it would entirely be your fault if they…

This is a big question as most application processes give significant weight to these 3 things so let’s take them in turn:

Qualifications

(and by that I mean the ones you usually get before you start work e.g. degrees etc)

No, probably not.

Passing a university degree (or getting the highest honours in it), does not mean someone will be your best employee.

When you think about it, most education is so alien when compared to the world of work that there are really very few parallels, so everyone pretty much starts from the same jumping-off point (hence the reason why…

Looking for a job can seem incredibly daunting, it’s a huge commitment and can feel like an incredibly complicated one at that. So much so we often subconsciously reduce the roles we look at down to simple heuristics such as “How much does it pay?”, “Have I heard of the company/are they well-known and respected?/read about them in the news?”, “What is the title I’ll be given?”, all of which are readily ascertainable and in some cases quantifiable and so we pin our search and decision-making on these criteria.

Unfortunately, these are largely superficial things that on a day-to-day basis…

The first problem you will probably encounter when trying to find your first (or next job) is a slightly existential one… what you should be doing with your life now?

It’s an incredibly daunting question to ask yourself as it will make you feel like you are making a huge commitment, but really it doesn’t have to be. It is incredibly rare that someone’s first job is the same one they’ll be doing when they retire (although it does happen).

Instead of constantly thinking about how the next role you take has to be the right one (which puts immense…