I want to share my story with you, it is personal and I've been quiet whilst healing but I want to raise awareness, mainly because one of the responses I've recieved a few times is "you don't seem like the type of person who would suffer with that". Any of us can suffer with poor mental health at any time.

I've suffered with poor mental health since my early teens. As I've got older I have learnt to manage it, mainly through exercise but also recognising a bad day for what it is and knowing it will pass.

Earlier this year I had a crisis and was diagnosed with severe anxiety, depression and also agoraphobia meaning it's impacted my life hugely. The anxiety has been crippling but the diagnosis of agoraphobia was a shock. When you think of agoraphobia, you think of being scared to go outside, I was told for me it's the fear of not being able to escape when inside. I also don't like being in large groups of people.

Recovery is a slow process and the most important things I've learnt are, not to put pressure on myself, be kind to myself and to do things I like doing.

I was very lucky to have a fantastic Dr aswell as support from some very amazing people and I am so thankful to The Barn (my gym) who have been incredibly supportive and played a huge part in keeping me going!

I decided I wanted to raise awareness of the importance of mental health aswell as raise some money for this charity.  My lovely friends Jess, Kerry and Sue said they would support me, so we have set ourselves the challenge to burn 62,000 calories between us during the month of January. We all know that exercise is good for our mental health aswell as our physical so what better way to fundraise and burn off some of the Christmas calories 😆

Thanks for taking the time to visit our JustGiving page and thank you for reading to the end of my post. ❤

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