Heath promoting activities to reduce stress

Being mindful and paying attention to what you do for yourself, your health and well-being every day and every week is the most effective way to achieve a sense of balance. In a very practical way, we can attend to the frequency that we actually engage in activity that fills us up—emotionally, physically, socially spiritually or developmentally with new interests and skills. Research suggests that one of the most important factors that protect mothers from experiencing poor mental health and higher levels of stress is more frequent participation in activities that are:

• Aimed at self-care
• Physically active and involve being alone or with others
• Spiritually fulfilling
• Social and with others who are supportive towards you
• Quiet activities that involve being alone or with others

In this website, we have designed a questionnaire for you to complete. The questionnaire will ask you about what you are currently doing in terms of health promoting activity. Then you will be asked what your desired level of participation is. Finally, you will have access to some fact sheets for you to think about ways to increase how frequently to participate in healthy activities that are important to you and health promoting.

Please proceed to the next module to complete this activity.