The Mind Your Head Challenge is proud to work with the Dorset Mental Health Forum and is grateful for their support of the Mind Your Head Showcase on August 12th. The Forum was established in 1992 and employs people with lived in experience of  mental health problems. It is a local peer led charity (number 1073818), which exists to improve […]

Raymond Keene, OBE, Chess Grand Master provided a unique fund raising simultaneous chess tournament at Kingston Maurward on Sunday 12th.  Competing against twenty Dorset players, he won 15 games, drew four and lost 1. He was beaten by Allan Pleasants from Weymouth Chess Club, which makes him the second Grand Master that Allan has beaten

The Mind Your Head Challenge is extremely grateful to Henry Howarth for being such a pro-active ‘Brain Cell’.   He is now involved with taking his course into HMP The Verne, Portland, to improve mental stimulation for prisoners. We wish him every success. This is what he has to say about the benefits he has

Active Mobility’s Weymouth Centre has kindly agreed to provide free hire of  several of their mobility equipment at the Mind Your Head Showcase on August 12th at Kingston Maurward. This means that anyone who finds walking any distance difficult can gain a lift from the car park to the entrance to the Showcase (and back!).

The latest Brain Cell to register is Alive! This is a new Charity which is helping bring older people back to life with activities. This ties in with the Phoenix Legacy and Mind Your Head Challenge, which are all about getting people more active in mind, body and spirit. Alive! conducts interactive activity sessions which

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young”. Henry Ford Due to Professor Crawford being retained by the UN to speak in Korea, we had to find a replacement for the Mind Your Head Conference

The key note speaker for the Mind Your Head Conference on August 12th is the legendary Tony Buzan. He will provide invaluable tips on how to increase your mental potential and challenge your perceptions of ageing. Find out how to increase your creativity and maximise the power of your mind, so you can retain an

The Dorset Echo is running a fund raising quiz on July 20th at Weymouth College. The money raised will go to the Will Mackaness Trust. Will was a 16 year old pupil of Wey Valley School, who tragically died of a brain tumour. It goes to show that mental ill health can strike at any

“Not everything that can be counted counts, not everything that counts can be counted” Albert Einstein While talking to people about tickets for the Mind Your Head Conference, some have commented that it is expensive. In these difficult times I can appreciate that any expenditure has to be carefully assessed. Is it about how much it

Good news for Optimists (but then any news would be good news for them!) – positive thinking is good for you! It has been suggested for some time that your ‘explanatory style’ influences your health, but more research is proving that. A key study in 2002 by Maruta et al. (read it here) showed that

Our sincere thanks to Bryony Shaw, RS:X Windsurfer for Team GB, for taking time out from her busy schedule to share with the Mind Your Head Challenge why mental resilience is important to an Olympic athlete. This is as relevant to those of us trying to cope with every day life, when we don’t know what the

At the St John Ambulance ‘In Sickness and in Health’ event at Poole this week, the focus was very much on providing information and relaxation for the Carer. This is part of their Carers Support Programme. There are over 42,000 people who are known to provide regular care in Dorset. There are probably many more

We have all been told that stress is bad for us. The Type A personality and heart disease link is well known and the benefits of a stress-free life are heavily promoted by organisations, therapists and lifestyle coaches. If hearing all the damage stress was doing wasn’t making you more stressed already, here is some

Susan Jeffers’ quote is ‘face the fear and do it anyway’. That is what I did yesterday by going to Bournemouth to attend the Good Food Chess Club. My ambition was to encourage them to become a Brain Cell, enter the Simultaneous Chess tournament against Raymond Keene at the Showcase on August 12th and maybe