Strictly Come Dancing’s Dianne Buswell joins Happiful’s podcast to share her love of dance, the importance of rest and the joy she feels as the author of her new book Move Yourself Happy

Diane Buswell brings joy to millions of people as a professional dancer on Strictly Come Dancing, and that joy is repaid tenfold, as she explains on Happiful’s podcast.

“I still pinch myself daily that I’m doing a job that is literally a dream,” she says, beaming.

Read the full interview with Dianne in issue 74 of Happiful Magazine.

Dianne has dedicated her life to date to dancing, having started when she was just four years old. “I remember so clearly just absolutely loving going to dance class,” she explains. “It was never a chore. I always wanted to be dancing.”

Move Yourself Happy

Fast forward to 2020, just two years after she met her partner Joe Sugg on Strictly, and dancing as she knew it temporarily came to a halt, as the first Covid lockdown was announced.

However, Dianne’s determination to move and support others kicked in and she started to provide free classes on YouTube and Instagram. The feedback was gratifying and spurred her on.

“I had people messaging me daily,” Dianne shares. “They were saying that it was the first time they’d moved their body in weeks and it felt good, had given them a purpose and helped with their mental health. It was just such a nice thing to hear from all these people and know that I’d actually helped them to have a bit of happiness in their day, in a time that was stressful for so many people.”

This was also the catalyst for Dianne’s beautiful new book Move Yourself Happy: 21 days to make joyful movement a habit. Her book focuses on four key pillars; movement, nutrition, rest and positivity. It provides a three-week plan for movement as well as personal insights from Dianne and reminders to honour and respect your body and what works for you.

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Psychotherapist John-Paul Davies explains what depression is, how it can feel, the self-help steps that help and why working with a therapist could open up a much-needed conversation

Every person reading this article will have some sort of relationship to the concept of depression. Whether that’s through lived experience, witnessing the depression of a friend or loved one or questioning if the tough time they are currently going through themselves, is in fact depression.

As Psychotherapist John-Paul Davies explains on Happiful’s podcast, while the initial route for diagnosing depression should be through a visit to your GP or a Psychiatrist, depression is a condition he encounters regularly in his practice. He’s eager to share how common it is and to underline the constant possibility for change and a different way of being.

“Depression is very understandable based on our physiology, our environments, the media and the type of world we live in. It’s a very human response to somebody’s early life, to current circumstances and grief,” John-Paul notes.

“There are most definitely ways we can move through it, albeit it's a gradual process, but never think that because of what’s happened in the past that you can’t change in the present. There’s always hope and things that we can do to help ourselves.”

So what is depression?

“I would say that as human beings, we're at our happiest when we're in the middle band of feelings, which you might describe as ‘calm and alive’,” John-Paul explains. “However, it’s not always possible for human beings to be in that place. If we go above that ‘calm and alive’ band we might be overly aroused, fearful or angry. If we fall below, then we can feel hopeless, helpless, apathetic and in despair. There can be a lack of physical movement that goes with that feeling too. And I think for me, depression is a situation where somebody has a tendency to fall below ‘calm and alive’.”

The impact of depression, he notes, can be far-reaching too. “Depression can have a profound adverse impact, unfortunately on all areas of life for people,” John-Paul shares. “But there can be a range of depressive experiences, some people experience it mildly while, for other people, it's something that's been around clinically quite severely for months or even years in their lives.”

What can you do to help yourself?

As well as seeking support from your GP, John

Self-love writer and co-founder of The Rising Circle, Vex King, joins Happiful’s podcast to talk about the experiences that shaped him and the impact of practising self-love

Vex King is a Sunday Times bestseller and internationally renowned for his beautiful work on self-love and compassion, and as he shares on Happiful’s podcast, the drive to learn and share supportive words with others is the result of tough childhood experiences that shaped his desire to change his mindset and circumstances.

“I like to call myself the guy that tries to make the world a better place. Ultimately, I’m spreading a message of self-love,” he says introducing himself. “I’ve come from a place where I’ve endured a lot of suffering. To give a bit of background, my Dad died when I was six-months old and my family and I were homeless for roughly three years of my childhood. Then when we finally found a home, unfortunately we weren’t really welcome in that area and neighbourhood for at least two decades. I suffered a lot of poverty, I’d say severe poverty, racism and abuse. There were a lot of times where I suppose I nearly gave up on my life.”

Read the full interview with Vex King in issue 73 of Happiful Magazine

The transition from such trauma to the life Vex leads today might seem like a mighty mountain to have climbed, and he is clear that it was neither linear nor easy. As a younger man, Vex explains, he encountered periods of extreme anger and despair. He also had a strong vision of the life he wanted to lead and an internal drive to alleviate other people’s pain and suffering.

Vex found hope in books, foreshadowing the work he is now so passionate about. “I just wanted a way out. I turned to books and books really helped me. They really built in hope that there was something better out there for me, that I could change my mindset and that I didn’t have to be a victim of my circumstances.”

“I wouldn’t want anyone to go through what I did, especially as a child,” he reflects. “At the time it was traumatic and I didn’t realise it. It was painful, it was heartbreaking and it was uncomfortable. But at the same time, I look back on it now and say to myself ‘Would I be here if I hadn’t gone through those particular things, would I have a story to tell? Would I have gone out of my way to find these tools, these ideas, these perspectives that have altered my life and that I’m now sharing with the world so that people can change their own lives?’”

Vex is visibly passionate and clearly dedicated to supporting and championing others. He co-founded The Rising Circle with his beloved wife Kaushal, to share free meditations, manifestation tracks, gratitude sessions and yoga and to ensure that everyone can access this support. He also continues to write, and his most recent book Closer to Love<

Kate Baily, co-founder of Love Sober joins Happiful's podcast to discuss the journey to alcohol-free living and the benefits it brings

“For me, drinking was very much tied in with the cultural narrative of my twenties and my own narrative about feminism and being empowered,” Kate Baily shares on Happiful’s podcast. “Then I had my children and a massive identity shift. I had lots of hormones and my mental health wasn’t great. So wine became more and more part of my life. When I first heard the phrase ‘wine o’clock’, I laughed my head off. I thought, thank god it’s not just me!”

Kate soon realised that she was not alone in feeling this way about alcohol and there were many other women for whom alcohol played a major role in their daily lives. However, Kate notes, she was in the ‘grey area’ of drinking, not alcohol dependent but not experiencing a healthy relationship with it either, and she wanted that to change.

Fast forward to today and Kate is now the co-founder of Love Sober, co-host of the Love Sober podcast and has written two books with LS partner Mandy Manners, most recently the beautiful Love Your Sober Year: A Seasonal Guide to Alcohol-Free Living.

Kate’s also a sobriety & life coach specialising in holistic well-being for women in midlife, perimenopause transition, sobriety, and stress management. Her first-hand experience makes her extremely relatable, her honesty is refreshing and she’s ultimately very realistic about the role alcohol plays for so many of us, in what we perceive to be ‘stress relief’.

“I managed my stress with lots of different things,” she says, reflecting back. “I had my hobbies, I had this kind of toolkit. Drinking was part of it but there was this disconnect between how I was feeling, what my new role is (as a parent) and how it was all fitting, that became impossible to ignore. This created quite a lot of shame, which can lead to a downward spiral.”

Kate came across Soberistas while searching for questionnaires about alcoholism in the early hours of one morning. She began to get curious about living an alcohol free life, after finding support on the site’s forum. Although not easy, and she chose to drink again after a year before stopping for good, this experience inspired Kate to learn more about positive psychology, the role of the vagus nerve and the unmet needs we can often ‘treat’ by drinking.

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Integrative Therapist Billie Dunlevy discusses low self-esteem and shares how you can start to improve yours, today

‘Self-esteem’ is a phrase we hear and use often but what is the definition of self-esteem, and more importantly perhaps, low self esteem? Billie Dunlevy, a Counselling Directory Member and Integrative Therapist has the answer and shares some realistic ways we can start to improve our own self-esteem.

“Self-esteem is a measure of how we value and perceive ourselves,” Billie explains on Happiful's podcast. “It’s fundamentally about our attitude and how much we like ourselves. It’s different from self-confidence which is based more on an external measure of success, such as our ability to solve problems, land a promotion or give a dazzling presentation. Some people can actually have high self-confidence but low self-esteem.”

Low self-esteem

When we engage with our sense of low self-esteem, Billie continues, it can leave us with a sense of heaviness or hopelessness. “We can tend to have an overall negative view of ourselves, which can make us judge and speak to ourselves harshly. We can sometimes feel unloveable, incompetent and fearful of making mistakes or letting other people down.”

How low self-esteem presents to the outside world, she notes, is very individual.It could manifest in the avoidance of other people and relationships, overworking, being constantly busy and productive and having issues around boundary setting and people pleasing.

Working on yourself

The good news is that it is possible to work on low self-esteem and improve this over time. Billie outlines some of the practices we can start to include in our daily routines to address our low-self esteem straight away.

• Check your self-talk. Don’t allow it to run, try to counter it with another voice that is more compassionate or kind. That also goes for jokingly putting yourself down in a self-deprecating way. It’s really not helpful.
  
• Be more mindful and come off autopilot. Find a quiet place and ask yourself these questions regularly. ‘How am I feeling?’ ‘What do I need?’ ‘What’s going on?’ No