As a life coach, I often have women coming for coaching sessions to feel happier or improve their lives in ways that will make them happy. In essence, looking for the rules to be happy in life.

The rules of a happy life often centre around a few key principles: practising gratitude, nurturing relationships, and setting realistic goals.

Embracing gratitude encourages a positive mindset, allowing individuals to focus on the good in their lives, even amid challenges.

Building and maintaining meaningful connections fosters a sense of belonging and support, vital for overall well-being.

Additionally, setting achievable goals provides direction and a sense of accomplishment, helping to cultivate motivation and purpose.

Finally, prioritizing self-care and balance in various aspects of life contributes to sustained happiness and fulfilment.

Many people will find themselves in the stressful situation of looking after elderly parents.

Taking care of elderly parents can be incredibly stressful due to a combination of emotional, physical, and financial challenges.

The emotional weight can stem from the deep love and concern for your parent’s well-being, coupled with the fear of losing them or witnessing their decline.

Physically, looking after elderly parents often requires significant time and energy, impacting personal responsibilities and daily routines.

Additionally, navigating medical decisions, managing medications, and coordinating healthcare services can be overwhelming, especially if you are not familiar with the complexities of elderly care.

Financially, the burden of expenses related to healthcare and potential long-term care solutions can strain resources, leading to anxiety and uncertainty about the future.

This mix of responsibilities and emotions can create a high level of stress, making it essential to seek support and develop coping strategies.

Almost everyone will feel stuck at some time or other in their life. This is a natural state to be in and signifies that change is needed in your life. Most people will experience the same feelings emotionally and physically.

We all experience many emotions during the day. But what happens if one recurring feeling keeps coming through? Especially if it is a negative one.

If you are someone who is feeling lost, sad or hopeless, you may find your whole life is being affected and you are struggling to cope.

Feeling sad and lost can stem from a variety of reasons. It could be due to undergoing a significant loss, facing major life changes, experiencing a lack of purpose or direction, feeling overwhelmed by responsibilities, or struggling with unmet expectations.

What does the term ageing well mean to you? Is it looking good, feeling great, having plenty of energy or still being driven and focused into your twilight years?

Society often drives home the message that ageing well is all about looking young. They feed the belief that ageing well is a purely aesthetic quality, having wrinkle-free skin and looking like you are in your 20s.

The fact is, ageing well is more, much more than this. It is a whole holistic package. It is of course how you look to some extent but also how you feel, behave and what you believe.

Someone can be 25 going on 85 if they have the wrong mental attitude, no matter how young they look. Whereas, someone in their 80s can have the mental attitude of a 30-year-old and can still come across as young and vibrant.

There are many reasons for feeling lost in life. Life changes can bring with it many conflicting feelings and as you move through your life, one of the biggest feelings which often comes up is feeling lost in your career path.

There are many reasons for this. Today, more than ever, there are so many outside influences affecting your life.

The concept of well-being is a complex combination of factors which isn’t just about physical health. If someone were to ask you how you are, you would undoubtedly answer them whilst thinking about your physical body. You would probably not go into a detailed discussion about your emotional well-being as this would seem almost a taboo subject.

Well-being though is a complete mix of physical and emotional facets within us and one so often affects the other that to separate the two areas is difficult.

As a coach, when discussing well-being with my clients, I would spend time and look at their emotional, physical, mental and social well-being when devising a wellness programme for them.

Menopause can be a highly stressful time for many women. It is a stage in life that brings much transition and there are many symptoms women will need to confront, emotional as well as physical.

During this period in a woman's life, which can be anywhere from their mid-forties to mid-fifties, they need to pay attention to what is happening in their mind and body. Many of the symptoms of peri menopause and menopause can mimic other conditions so it is important to understand your body and the symptoms you are presenting with.

If you are looking for ways to calm your mind then look no further than the practice of using powerful morning affirmations for mindfulness.

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Affirmations are short sayings repeated over and over until they become part of your belief system. Most affirmations will be in connection to yourself, short sayings you will repeat in a positive manner in order to affirm a belief you want to uphold.

The way you speak to yourself matters greatly. Have you ever found yourself saying derogatory things such as, “I’m useless” for example?

A simple saying like this doesn’t seem too bad as an isolated case but the problem with this sort of negative thinking is the thoughts will start to grow and more and more negative thinking will appear until you have no good thoughts about yourself, only negative ones. This is where the damage starts to your sense of well-being.

Feeling overwhelmed can strike at any time. Let’s face it, the world we all live in today can be very overwhelming for most people at some time or another.

Fast-paced jobs, deadlines, pressures at work, family concerns, making enough money, saving enough money, getting on the property ladder and staying on it, keeping up with technology, keeping up with everyone in your circle, the list can go on and on leading to more and more feelings of overwhelm.

When you feel this level of overwhelm and stress, you may find it hard to focus on what you are doing and need to do.

Your thoughts can begin to drift off into areas you don’t want them to go to, and you can feel as if you are trapped.

Even if you are aware that your thoughts are irrational, unhelpful or maybe unfounded, it can be difficult to stop them from popping up in your head, causing more and more complications and distractions and overwhelm.

Watching parents age and decline can be a traumatising, emotional and stressful time for many people, especially if they are caregivers.

Finding ways to cope with ageing parents can often seem exhausting and you can feel as if your life is no longer yours.

It can also be made more difficult if you are offering advice they won’t take, they are refusing to relinquish control when they need to, or they are no longer capable of making their own decisions but refuse to see.

When you are placed in situations such as the ones mentioned above, you need practical tips and advice to hand so you have coping strategies in place when you need them.

There are many unpleasant, uncomfortable and depressing symptoms of menopause and for many women weight gain, especially around the tummy is one of the most unwelcome. If you are looking for ways on how to stop menopause weight gain then you are in the right place.

If you suffer from food obsession, you could find that it is starting to rule your life. You might constantly question how to stop obsessively thinking about food, or be constantly on the lookout for the best diets or ways in which to change your life so you are no longer ruled by food.

An unhealthy preoccupation with food can start to have consequences in all areas of your life, from your job, and health to your relationships. You can find yourself thinking about meals that you are going to be eating instead of concentrating on work, spending too much time planning meals instead of being with family and you can discover that it takes up too much space in your mind, leaving you with little room to think about anything else.

There is, of course, the major issue of health. An unhealthy obsession with food can leave you either overweight with health issues or underweight with health issues, which in both instances can be mental problems as well as physical problems.

I bet you have had many conversations along the lines of “ know let’s it here I prefer it,” or “no if you got his way it will save so much more time than the way you are suggesting.” These simple sentences may seem innocuous enough but if you hear them enough, they may highlight a more insidious problem, that you have a controlling person in your life.

Once you realise this is the case, you may start asking how you live with controlling people. It could be that the p controlling person is someone that you can’t just drop from your life, so you are going to have to learn some empowering ways to deal with them.

There are many people who can be controlling, a partner, friends, work colleagues, your boss, parents, family members and neighbours.

Imagine if we treated everybody in our world the same as we treat ourselves at times. Have you ever noticed that voice inside your head telling yourself all of the things that you do wrong and thinking “How do I stop being so hard on myself?” This constant habit we have of knocking ourselves down, criticizing ourselves and causing pain is something that needs to stop but how do you go about it?

Most of us want to take care of our physical and mental health and one of the simplest ways of doing so is to recharge our batteries as much as possible. This means taking some well-earned rest and time for ourselves, stepping away from life’s pressures and doing something that we love and having a mental and physical rest.

Recharging your batteries is an essential way to eliminate stress and overwhelm from your life, and to remove the build-up of pressure that modern living brings.

Newly divorced, separated or bereaved and starting your life again on your own can be overwhelming. All of the couples things that you used to take for granted, dining out, holidays, always having a plus one may now have ended but that doesn’t mean that your life has. Navigating through can certainly have its hard moments but there are ways that you can get through and come out much stronger.

One thing that we all need to be aware of in life, is that there are going to be times when it really sucks, times when we seem to just keep getting knocked down and don’t seem to be able to get up. These feelings are going to happen to everyone at some time in life, no one will escape them. Life is all about positive and negative experiences. What we need to know is how to deal with them when it happens, how to face up to living when it feels like you are falling apart.