Our featured service for March is THIS WAY UP’s Mindfulness Program, a self-help or clinician-assisted program teaching simple mindfulness strategies for managing stress and boosting wellbeing.

During March we celebrated world sleep day, promoting good sleep health and the importance of quality sleep. There are a wide range of factors that can affect someone’s sleep, outside of sleep disorders like insomnia, such as stress, screen time, and more. Poor sleep can impact on mood, energy, and concentration, and have long-term health impacts.

Mindfulness skills can help people feel more focused and at ease, help improve wellbeing, and improve sleep. Consciously making time to pause, notice, and engage with what’s meaningful and important, can greatly improve mental health and create a mental space for healthier, quality sleep.

The THIS WAY UP Mindfulness program teaches foundational mindfulness skills to help people manage normal life stresses and improve the way they feel.

About THIS WAY UP Mindfulness Program

THIS WAY UP is an Australian organisation providing online treatment, education, and research in the realm of mental health. They offer a range of low cost online and app CBT programs for a range of mental health and wellbeing issues including tools to help people manage anxiety, depression, chronic conditions and more.

The Mindfulness Program is a 4-lesson program designed to introduce participants to the principles, practices, and techniques of mindfulness and how to use mindfulness strategies to tackle stress and improve general levels of wellbeing. Throughout the program participants follow an illustrated story of ‘Liz’ and ‘Rob’ as they learn how to use mindfulness skills to tackle stress and start to feel more relaxed and at ease in their daily life. Each lesson focuses on a mindfulness skill for participants to build their levels of mindfulness and wellbeing. Once completing a lesson participants spend 5 days practicing the new skill before moving on to the next lesson. The lesson focuses are:

• Lesson 1: Becoming aware – what is mindfulness?
• Lesson 2: Learning about your mind and common difficulties with mindfulness
• Lesson 3: Listening to your body and recognizing roadblocks
• Lesson 4: Mindfulness in daily life

In addition to lessons, the program contains a range of materials to help support participants including:

• Workbooks: exercises designed to help participants tackle their symptoms
• Action Plans: step-by-step activities to help participants put new skills into practice
• Extra Resources: Tools to help participants overcome common challenges
• Alerts and Reminders: reminder emails and texts to help participants stay on track
• Process Tracking: questionnaires to help participants monitor their wellbeing

Who is THIS WAY UP Mindfulness Program for?

The THIS WAY UP Mindfulness Program is designed to help Australians aged over 18 years seeking to learn foundational mindfulness skills in order to manage normal life stresses and improve the way they feel.

The program may be suitable if you:

• Tend to feel constantly busy, scattered, and rushed throughout your day
• Often catch yourself doing thing on “auto-pilot” without paying attention
• Tend to be forgetful and find it hard to relax or feel at ease
• Seem to be stuck in the way you feel and would love to learn how to get out of this cycle
• Ready and willing to learn new skills to change the way you feel

This program may be especially helpful for people new to mindfulness and would like to learn simple ways of using mindfulness strategies in their daily life.

Is there a cost to use THIS WAY UP: Mindfulness Program?

There is no cost to enrol in the self-help or the clinician-supervised version of this program, however the supervised option does require a prescription and must be completed with the participant’s clinician.

How to access THIS WAY UP: Mindfulness Program

All of THIS WAY UP’s programs are available to access through their website at https://thiswayup.org.au/program/

To enrol in the program as self-help participants must register with their given name, email address, age, and gender. The program content is available for 12 months following completion of the program.

To enrol in the program with clinician assistance participants must speak with their regular clinician (eg. GP, psychologist, or other health professional) and see if they can prescribe the program and monitor the participant throughout the online treatment. THIS WAY UP provides a downloadable Clinician Letter to take to their appointment. The program content is available for 12 months following completion of the program.

Find out more about the THIS WAY UP Mindfulness Program and how to get started here: https://thiswayup.org.au/programs/mindfulness-program/