Happy New Year!

This is the year for MOODMAPPING™ – this year is the best year yet! Book 2 is underway; there is a regular timetable of workshops which includes a midweek session for those who find the weekend difficult.

My goal is to build the MOODMAPPING™ community so that we can start spreading the word about MOODMAPPING™ throughout this country and indeed world. This week I received a copy of the contract to translate MOODMAPPING™ into basic Chinese and last week I received my first email from a someone who bought MOODMAPPING™ in Dutch.

This year I will produce regular newsletters describing more about MOODMAPPING™ set up a forum for MOODMAPPING™ and finish book II -

Just as a taster – this is the result of contributions from several people who regularly use MOODMAPPING™ – we came up with this. Green – safe stable moods; Yellow – more alert and some care maybe needed; Red – life has become more turbulent and it may be time to seek help and take greater care of  yourself

This shows small, medium and large moods - learning to manage large moods helps you get more out of life

This year I want to meet more people interested in MOODMAPPING™, to learn more about how moods affect people and have fun!

What are your goals? Post them below or email me and I hope very much to see you at a workshop in the near future

Employers have a duty of care towards their employers, to make sure that their work does not make them ill, and to behave reasonably should their employees become ill.

1 in a 100 people have bipolar disorder and it is becoming more common. This may be because Stephen Fry, following his documentary The Secret Life of a Manic-Depressive has made fashionable or may reflect our increasingly chaotic and unhealthy lifestyles.

Last year GPs wrote 391 million prescriptions for antidepressants. This has doubled in the last 10 years and suggests that at any one time over 4 million people are being treated for depression.

Dr Liz Miller has studied mood, mood disorders, bipolar disorder and depression for the last 15 years. She has developed the Miller moodmap. This plots mood on two axes, how much energy person has and how good or bad they feel. The Miller Mood Map shows the four basic moods, Stress and Anxiety; Exhaustion and Depression; Action; and Calm. She now works in Occupational Health advising employers how best to help their employees be productive and effective and how to help them back into the workplace should they become ill.

Dr Liz Miller’s model of mood interprets bipolar disorder as meaning extreme, unstable and difficult to manage moods, while depression represents extreme exhaustion. In other words, if pushed too far, we are all a little bit bipolar. Everyone has a mood, all of the time. Most of the time we manage it without outside help. Nonetheless, there are times when through a combination of circumstances and relationships, it may not be so easy to manage moods. At this point we need to start looking at how we can consciously manage moods more effectively. And this is where Moodmapping becomes important. Moodmapping provides a tool that enables people to map their moods, look at the causes of why they feel the way they do and look at strategies that will help them feel better. This not only improve their mental health and well-being but also improves people’s ability to work effectively and efficiently.

A good manager and employer knows almost intuitively how their workforce feels. However few of us have enough time to spend with employees to get to know them as well as one would like. Moodmapping is a way enables employers to understand how people are feeling quickly and easily. Changes in mood come before changes in behaviour. We start feeling bad before our productivity drops off. By being more aware of their employees moods, it is possible to act before a drama becomes a crisis.

If you have an employee with bipolar disorder or depression, 99% of the time he or she will work effectively, creatively and efficiently for you. However as an employer, you need to be aware of what look for and what do should someone’s mood change dramatically. By planning for this in advance, and agreeing a course of action with your employee you can head off most disasters before they happen.

By understanding mood better, and how different people respond to their circumstances, it becomes easier to have a happy and productive workforce, than if you leave it until somebody has become seriously ill.

Above all you need to be aware of what happens when someone’s mood changes. You see his or her behaviour change. Someone who is normally calm and happy may become quiet and withdrawn. Equally they may become overexcited, they may be staying late or leaving early. These changes in behaviour are the result of changes in mood.

The key is talking to your employee sooner rather than later, asking them what is happening in their life both work and at home and how they are feeling. Once you start communicating you can start managing what is happening.

As an employer you have a duty of care to make sure the work you expect employees to do does not make them ill. The most important step you can take is to be more aware of how they feel. Moodmapping is a quick and easy way to understand mood.

People very often ask me exactly what I eat! this is especially true if they have just watched the documentary, the secret life of the manic-depressive,  where Stephen Fry and I are seen shopping together in Borough market.

Diet is a very important aspect of bipolar disorder,as is avoiding alcohol and other non-prescription drugs. It is also equally important and strategies to manage difficult situations of life. It is also important to have a work, social and family life where you can be yourself. it also helps if you can live somewhere that suits you.  diet on its own is not enough! It is a good start and an essential part of a healthy life however “man shall live by bread alone” and neither can women. We need to have a well rounded healthy lifestyle.

Moodmapping helps because it makes people more aware of how they feel.  How we feel is essentially our mood. There is always a reason for a mood, even though you may not be aware of what is making you feel the way you do. With practice and regularly mapping your mood you can begin to understand better the reasons why you feel the way you do and also start to manage your moods so that you can feel the way you want and get on and solve the problems that life keeps throwing at you.

As far as diet is concerned, I have a simple rule Eat nothing with a barcode!

This means avoid processed food, it was not something similar around 5000 or 10,000 years ago and then you probably should not eat it or drink it. I’ve yet to find physically coming out of anything other than a bottle or a can and I have never seen a Kit Kat Tree! these are not natural substances.

More and more people seem to be getting a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. More people are therefore experiencing unstable, extreme and uncontrollable moods. To a certain extent this doesn’t reflect our deteriorating diets. Equally, we need to become more aware of how we feel in order to better manage our moods. The next Mood Mapping workshop in London is July 3 and I would love it if you could come.

May is an amazing month for the huge variety of spring food which is available locally.

I have a huge amount of respect for Jamie Oliver and his tireless campaigning to educate us to eat better quality food which we can grow ourselves or source locally. Globalisation has moved our inherent UK culture away from the nation of gardeners who dug for victory to a nation of fatties who can’t tell the difference between a carrot and a potato. I know I am making a massive generalisation with my last point however  some folk really don’t know the difference. The women of the UK used to have hour glass figures. Now apple shape seems to be far more common. Is that evidence of the change in our eating habits from healthy to unhealthy?

Our local economies have been decimated by the impact of globalisation. Low cost food produced in far flung parts of the world masquerades as good value for money food in our supermarkets. What nonsense! The nutritional value of this type of food is highly questionable and the impact it has on our local economies and communities carry an enormous cost.

Against this rather dire backdrop I was delighted to read the following article on the BBC web site – Hospital food cooked with fresh local ingredients could put hundreds of millions of pounds back into the NHS, one hospital trust has said. What a joy and delight to see the return of common sense. Not only will patients consume food high in nutrients which will aid their recovery.  It is also a lower cost option, which fuels the local economy and is estimated to save as much as £400m if rolled out across the NHS in England.

In the current climate of necessary cuts in public spending surely other NHS Trusts will follow Nottingham City Hospitals lead? This could potentially save hundreds of nursing jobs if the financial savings were properly realised and managed.

I was also delighted to get introduced to the Fife Diet. This is a great initiative by a local group in Scotland. I hope they are successful in winning contracts to supply local product to local business including schools, hospitals, police etc. The initiative is funded by the Scottish Government Climate Challenge Fund, and it would be ideal if it could become self-funding through long term local supply contracts.

Poor health and work absenteeism has long been recognised as a problem for UK employers.  Employee health and well-being are closely linked to organisational performance.

The Confederation of British Industry has reported that in 2009 employee absenteeism cost the UK economy £13.2 billion and according to a recent review by Dame Carol Black (the National Director for Health and Work at the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement), the total cost of sickness and absenteeism to the UK economy is over £60 billion.

Professor Louis Appleby, the government’s mental health tsar, said:

“At any one time one in six people are struggling with depression, but only a quarter of those people are in treatment. We need to be better at preventing depression, better at treating it and better at reducing the impact of depression.”

Professor Cary Cooper, an occupational health psychologist at the University of Lancaster, said:

“The UK has gone from being a manufacturing economy to a service-based economy in the past 30 years so the problems that are most likely to rise in the workplace are people problems rather than physical problems. Employee audits should be conducted regularly to understand what is causing problems in the workplace.”

Mood Mapping tools can help employers conduct employee well-being audits. The tools can provide close to real-time data that will give visibility to the actual mood of the organisation. We can then make suggestions on to improve the mood state of employees and then assess how the mood state has improved.

Mood Mapping does not involve answering lots of questions or filling out lots of forms. It is a simple easy to use graphical tool, supported by practical strategies.

For more information about employee well-being audits, please contact Caroline Finlay.

We had a very successful first Mood Mapping Trainers workshop last weekend (24th and 25th April). That was made possible by the enthusiasm and efforts of the delegates who were from many different professions including local goverment, the legal sector, corporate HR, mental health, retail and teaching.

This contributed to a lively and enlightening ideas session, where we all learnt about the different ways in which Mood Mapping can be usefully applied. The group dynamic was happy and positive, and we were blessed with sunny weather which we took advantage of with lunch in the park on Saturday (as you can see below!).

Thank you to everyone for attending and happy Mood Mapping!

I am so pleased that the Mood Mapping workshops are going well!

I learn something new every time I deliver one. It is amazing how scalable the tools are at a macro and micro level, providing an intuitive graphical way to view issues. It is a neat trick to be able to get the contents of your head on to a page in front of you, allowing you to stand back and be completely objective. Then make evidence based decisions.

I am a person who loves to work with images and pictures rather than read line after line of text. After all a picture paints a thousand words.

Using the Mood Mapping tools I have experienced aha moments more than once myself and it is a joy when delegates do the same. The aha moments typically result in lots of smiles and extra attention for the rest of the workshop as the voyage of personal discovery unfolds.

It is after all human nature to wish to know everything about ourselves and where possible to know how others see us too or in the words of my national bard Robert Burns in his poem To a Louse (On seeing one on a Lady’s bonnet at church)

The full two lines go:
“O wid some poo’er the giftie gie us tae see oorsels as ithers see us.”

The English equivalent of the original text would be along the lines of:
“If only it were possible for some great power to give us the gift of seeing ourselves as others see us.”

Fifteen years ago, I preferred to starve than eat in front of people I didn’t know. I could not even say my name to a group. Now I volunteer to talk to audiences of 10s and 100s if not 1,000s. Over the last ten to fifteen years, I learnt the social skills I should have learnt as a child.

I worked hard to change because “Someone needed to do it”. When Soames Michelson became too ill to facilitate the Doctors Support Network groups, I had no choice but to step up to the plate.

A self help group believes that together you can help each other more than each of you can do as individuals on your own. In a group, you “Gain by Giving”.You too can start a self-help group and here are few tips.

A group needs to be as open and as inclusive as possible. It is like a family. Once you are committed to someone, they are part of your team. Not everyone will not be helped by your group – for example, addicts may be better with Alcoholics Anonymous and you would be wise to point them in that direction.

As long as this is done with good intention, and openly and calmly communicated, the group survives.  For the most part, you want to include everyone who wants to come along. Some people learn quicker than others and everyone can help the slow learners. The fastest people are at their best when balanced by slower more thoughtful people!

Keep it Simple! Keep coming back to the reason you are together.

Know what you want to do. Have your first meeting – at your house or in a coffee bar. Email people you know with your idea, start a blog, email people you know. If your idea is good, it will catch and you will soon have people coming to you, and it will spread by word of mouth.

Meet at least every month. In my experience every two weeks is best. Weekly meetings can be too intense unless you have plenty of experienced group members.

Stay calm! You cannot argue with distress.

Groups create an energy. You need at least two people in the room who can direct that energy, maturely, intelligently with compassion and reason.This allows one person to help another group member individually when necessary.

Develop “group rituals” – set activities you do each time you meet. Go round the group and let everyone introduce themselves and describe briefly how they are and what has happened to them.

Read out loud a chapter from Mood Mapping or other books.

Have plenty of refreshments.

Be nice to each other!

Communicate, communicate, communicate!

Communicate regularly - keep everyone up to date- monthly newsletters are hard work but help bring people together – just a quick hello and an anonymised summary of recent meetings
Just do what feels right, keep doing it, keep talking, be creative and keep the energy flowing!

We have to learn to fit in within a family, group and community. Some families function better than others, some groups work better than others. If humanity is to solve its problems we need to learn to work together. If we can’t communicate we can’t learn. Humans are a social species and we do our best work when we work together. Even Einstein needed feeding!

Groups are a great place to learn to connect and communicate with people at any age. Most people learn to communicate as children, but not everyone! I can testify it is never too late to learn; it is just easier before you have too many ingrained bad habits!

A Q&A with Dr Liz Miller, author of Mood Mapping

What is Mood Mapping?

Rather than using words, Mood Mapping is a way to represent your mood visually. You mark your mood on a map or chart, in a way that describes how you feel, without using words. You can compare your mood at different times of the day and between one day and the next.

It is new, and it is revolutionary. People who use it, start to see their moods differently. They realize that they are more than their mood, and their mood describes how they feel. Once you understand how your mood works, you never go back!

We have a mood, all the time, every day. Most of the time, we are not aware of how we feel because we feel all right. We notice our mood, when, for example we are in “the wrong mood” to do something. We might need to concentrate to finish a report and we are waiting to find out whether we have a job offer following an interview. Waiting for the news may make us either too anxious or too excited to work.

Mood Mapping helps you understand how you feel and work out what you need to do, to calm down and get in the right mood to work. Moods have an enormous influence on how we think, how we feel and how we behave. Nonetheless, a mood is just a mood, and with the right strategies, it is almost always possible to improve your mood.

In this book, I am interested in helping people understand their moods better and to manage them more easily.

Why did you write Mood Mapping?

As a doctor, 40% of consultations are to a greater or lesser extent based around mental health and psychological problems. These problems are just as severe as physical health problems, and they rarely need medication or drug treatment. Mood Mapping helps people understand why they feel the way they do, and gives people strategies to manage their feelings and moods.

All too easily doctors resort to prescribing antidepressants or drugs for anxiety when people can, with the right approach and encouragement, deal with their problems without medication. Like physical health, mental health depends on living in safe and healthy surroundings, on a healthy diet and exercise, on good supportive relationships, on having the right strategies to cope with difficulties and having the chance to “be yourself!”

I wrote Mood Mapping to summarise the advice I give my patients and to show them the simple technique of Mood Mapping that helps people work out how they feel, and record it from day-to-day. If people feel happy and healthy, they rarely need to see the doctor!

In what way will Mood Mapping help someone?

The most important part of dealing with a problem, any problem, is accepting and understanding the problem. In my own case, with my own history of bipolar disorder, it took me almost ten years to accept that I had a problem. I thought it was normal to be depressed. I thought everyone was depressed! It is easy to think with mental health problems, that you are the only one, or that everyone thinks the way you do. We need some an objective measure that explains what it is reasonable to expect and what you can do about it. There is no right or wrong way to live, but some ways are healthier and more enjoyable than others.

This is not a typical self-help book that points to the six or seven keys to self-improvement. Instead it is a book that helps you see where you are in the world, and gives you some suggestions to help you feel better. Everyone’s Mood Map is individual to them, just as the solutions you find to your problems are individual to you. One size does not fit all!

How does this book compare to other books about Mood?

Mood Mapping is the first book to concentrate on Mood as the basis of “how you feel”. Almost all other books about Mood describe mood largely as the result of how you think. Mood Mapping sees mood as the underlying trait and “how you think” depends on your mood. If you are anxious, your thinking will be more negative than if you are feeling calm and peaceful.

Undoubtedly, you can change your mood by changing the way you think but your mood comes first. There are five main keys to your mood, which is the most important for you depends on you. Some people put relationships first other people put the need to be creative and to express themselves.

Mood Mapping describes the five main areas that affect mood, Surroundings; Physical Health; Relationships; What you know and how you think; and Nature and self-expression; yet each one of us individually, would put them in a different order!

Mood Mapping looks at where our moods come from, and what we can do about them and how we can improve our own mental health and the mental health of the people around us.

You have a chapter on Personality. How does Personality fit in with Mood?

The commonest mistake we make in psychological terms is to confuse mood and personality. What people see of a person, their Persona, is a combination of their mood and their personality type, but mood is not personality.

Personality describes the approach you take, to other people, to yourself, how you see the world and how you tackle problems. Mood describes how you feel.

All too often personality questionnaires contain “mood questions” such as “Are you normally a happy person?” This is the same question as “Are you normally in a good mood?” This relates to your mood and attitude, rather than your personality.

Your personality describes your approach. Do you internalize problems, or like to talk about them? Do you get on with doing something about what is happening or do you like to know what it happening before you step in?

It helps first to understand your moods and then you can see what is mood and what personality is. Your “Persona” is that individual combination of mood and personality that other people notice about you, and determines how you see the world.

What do you want people to take away from Mood Mapping?

Mood Mapping is the first book to look at how you can manage your moods, as opposed to managing your thinking. Moods affect thinking, and thinking affects mood, yet moods also depend on your surroundings – it is difficult, but not impossible to be miserable on a yacht in the Caribbean.

Your physical health affects how you feel, a bout of flu takes the edge of your performance. The strategies we use to tackle problems, and this is the area where other books and psychologists concentrate and finally we have to have the freedom to be ourselves.

The message is Mood Mapping helps manage the way you feel. You affect the way you feel, by how you think about problems, through your surroundings, your physical health, your relationships and making sure you express the real the you, not the person that other people would like you to be.

Mood Mapping brings together those five major keys to mood. Mood depends on many areas, and it is rarely a single problem. You have to do what you can, where you can, to help yourself in your personal circumstances! Mood Mapping helps you become more aware and more in control of the different areas of your life.