In this introductory class, I’ll first share with you the story of why I’ve dedicated my life to help people like you to beat stress, anxiety and depression.

Then, I’ll provide you with an overview of the course, including how Thrive works. Finally, because it’s often misunderstood, I’ll provide an introductory overview of what stress really is.

This will set you up nicely to dive into the first section of the course, which teaches you the science of stress.

In the first of three classes about the science of stress, I’ll bring to life how stress challenges your equilibrium and how that affects your mental health and overall wellbeing.

You’ll learn the specifics of what kinds of stress you’re battling in your everyday life and the science of how you can beat it. Don’t worry if science isn’t your thing, I bring it to life with the use of props and the most important points are titled on screen.

In this next science class, you’ll learn the difference between good stress and bad stress (yes, there is such as thing as good stress!), plus how they affect your mind, brain and body differently.

Using a well researched model of how we respond to stress, I’ll bring to life how your body can adapt to stress, rather than being beaten by it. This will provide the springboard for you understanding why adapting to stress is the key to achieving good mental health.

In this 3rd class about the science of stress, we get deep into the really good stuff. You’ll learn how we in the Western world treat stress in a disembodied manner and why this is stopping you from achieving good mental health.

I’ll demonstrate to you how our mind, brain and body are connected and what this means for how you can positively adapt to stress. I’ll also teach you specifically how stress impacts upon your physiology, which will demystify why stress makes you ill.

Okay, we’re really motoring now and this class will transform your understanding of stress and why you react to it in the way that you do. You’ll learn how and why we’re wired to react the way that we do and what’s going on in your brain and body when you’re under stress.

When I teach you about a special part of the brain which I call your ‘Black Box’, you’ll have a real ‘Aha!’ moment. I’ll reveal how you can change your neurology, so that you have a positive response to stress.

Depression is a crippling illness and affecting more and more people, so I think it’s important for you to understand why a stressful lifestyle can lead to depression.

You’ll learn how stress physically manifests in us and why it affects the functioning of our mind and brain. That might sound depressing in itself, but don’t worry, the class ends by teaching you how you can develop resilience to depression through the subsequent practical classes in the course.

Now that you’ve completed the science section of the course, we’ll now turn our focus towards practical tools for beating stress and anxiety.

Attention training is the foundation for adapting your response to stress. This class explains how it works and how often you need to do it to get results, which will set you up for the attention training practical class which follows this one.

By now, you’ll understand the theory of how attention training works, so next we dive into some practice. This is the start of a journey of transformation that we’ll take together. Calm awaits you…

In this class, I’ll teach you the role of your breath in achieving good mental health. Because of stressful lifestyles, many of us breathe in a manner which doesn’t serve us well. Here, you’ll learn how to reverse that and how to use your breath to improve your wellbeing.

After the theory, comes the practice so next we sit together and learn how to use our breath to ground us, focus our attention and give our minds a well earned rest.

We live our lives in such a disembodied manner, so in this class, we go about reversing that. I’ll teach you how your body holds many insights into what’s going on in your mind, then show you how to begin the process of developing resilience to stress by reconnecting your mind and body.

Next we sit together in contemplative practice, so that you can learn how to recognise the signals your body is telling you, preparing you to positively respond to them.

In this class, I’ll talk to you about deepening your awareness of the signals your body is sending you. I’ll also discuss how we can bring about awareness of these signals and how we can live with uncomfortable sensations. This class provides the springboard into our practical class, which follows after this one.

In this class, you’ll deepen your awareness of the signals that your body is sending you. The way in which you react to body signals is vital to adapting to stress, so you’ll learn how best to respond to them.

You’ll also learn how to deal with uncomfortable sensations in your body and what this means for living with difficult emotions. This class begins to change your experience with sensations in your body, so that you can later learn to respond more wisely to your thoughts and emotions.

In the previous class, you learned about sensations in the body and now we’re going to turn our attention to emotions. In this introduction, I’ll explain the role of our emotions in developing resilience to stress.

By this stage in the course, you’ll understand the role that your emotions play in stress, so next we spend a few minutes together to learn how to recognise them as they rise within us. Once we recognise them, we can learn to gain mastery over them, so that they don’t disrupt our lives.

Now that we’ve spent some time learning how to recognise our emotions, we’ll next turn our attention to naming them. In this class, you’ll learn why naming emotions is an important part of developing resilience to stress.

I’ll explain why we alternate between two different kinds of mind training, so that you become practiced in knowing what to do when emotions arise within you during your everyday life.

You’ll now have a good understanding of how naming your emotions helps you, so next we put it into practice and learn how to become less reactive to our emotions. With ongoing practice, this mind training will help you to become calmer and become the master of your emotions, leading to better decisions.

How we deal with our thoughts has a huge impact upon how well we cope with and adapt to stressful situations. Which is why Thrive has a series of classes dedicated to dealing our thoughts.

The series begins with this class, which first teaches you what thoughts are and how you can better work with them to prevent stress from extending throughout your brain and body. Here, you’ll build upon what you learned in the science classes through practical tools for dealing with your thoughts.

Learning how to deal with your thoughts is a really important part of beating stress and anxiety, so this is a class that you might want to practice many times. Once you’ve completed the practice, we’ll advance to the next video where I’ll explain the role that your thoughts plays in mental illness.

In this video, using leading research from The University of Liverpool and the BBC, I’ll demonstrate why gaining mastery over our thoughts is so important in the battle against mental illness, especially anxiety and depression.

Research shows that half of the time, in our minds, we are either living in the past or the future. This class teaches you how to wake up from your thoughts, so that you live in the present, which has a huge positive impact on your mental health.

By this stage in the course, you’ll understand the importance of recognising your thoughts, so nextd we’ll sit together and practice how to go about waking up from them and returning to the present moment.

When we’re stressed, anxious or depressed, we can have thoughts which are difficult to live with. So in this class, I’ll teach you how to deal with them, which will help you to break the cycle of negative thoughts which can otherwise be so damaging to your mental health.

You’ll learn practical tools which will make a real difference and ones which you can use for the rest of your life. You can trust them to help you to beat stress and calm your anxiety.

During times when you’re having difficult thoughts, this is the class to turn to. It’ll teach you great wisdom of how to deal with unhelpful, intrusive thoughts. This will help you to calm your mind and reduce your levels of anxiety.

We carry around with us narratives about who we think we are, which are regularly engrained in us from years ago. Often, these narratives are unhelpful, negatively affect our wellbeing as well as hold us back from where we want to be in life.

So, in this class, I’ll introduce the idea of how you can work with the narrative in your head, so that you can live with more freedom and feel less anxious. Once you change the narrative of what you’re identifying with, you can change the story of who you are.

Next, we explore how we can begin to challenge the beliefs we carry around with us. We’ll investigate what you’re believing about yourself and learn how to let those beliefs go, allowing you to live with more freedom.

Having explored our beliefs in practice during the previous class, next I’ll discuss in more detail about how we can live with more freedom by examining whether the thoughts that we have, whilst real, are true.

Self-Compassion is extremely important in the fight against anxiety and depression. Depression lies to you and urges you to blame yourself, which further exacerbates the illness, keeping you stuck in a cycle of negative thinking.

The antidote to self blame is self-compassion and in this class, I’ll teach you how to practice it, so that you can develop resilience to depression. Research shows that self-compassion is one of the fastest acting practices in the course, which is great news for sufferers.

I bet you’re more used to providing compassion to others than yourself. That’s why, next, we’ll practice a few minutes of self-compassion together, and use this as a basis for moving forward in a kinder, more compassionate way towards ourselves.

In this class, we extend the practice of self-compassion to stop negative thoughts and resentment towards ourselves or other people. By stopping judgement and blame in this manner, we prevent stress from extending throughout our brain and body.

Next, we practice forgiveness and self-forgiveness, to stop the negative effects of stress on our physiology. This class is proven to boost positive feelings in as little as 7 minutes of practice. Another helpful tool in our toolbox against stress, anxiety and depression.

In this short video, I introduce to you the idea of guided breathing, which can be used anywhere at any time, to help you to calm your anxiety.

In this class, I’ll show you three practical exercises which you can use to calm your mind and relieve symptoms of anxiety and depression. They utilise the knowledge of our physiology, which you’ll also learn in the science section of the course, and can be used anywhere at any time.

You’ll begin to understand how we can balance our mental health through the balancing of our physiology.

In the formative years of your life, you learned to develop an ego boundary. It was a necessary stage in life, to help you to relate to the world, but your ego can represent a huge barrier to mental wellbeing.

In this class, I’ll teach you what your ego is and specifically how it can be problematic in achieving mental health. I’ll then demonstrate to you how you can collapse your ego, so that you can regain balance and develop resilience to depression.

Thrive not only teaches you the science and practice of how to beat stress and anxiety, but it also provides you with a framework for how you can live your life so that you don’t get knocked off course by stress.

In this class, I’ll provide you with tools for making sure that you end up where you want to be in life. With busy and stressful lifestyles, it can be all too easy to just live day to day, without ever thinking about what you want from your life. This video will provide you with the tools you need to live a wholehearted life.

In this penultimate class, I’ll teach you insights from neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) which will provide you with practical tools to help maintain your mental health. You can use the techniques when you’re out and about, at home or at work, to help you to reduce the impact of stress on your mind, brain and body.

In this final class together, I summarise what you’ve learned during the course, reinforcing the most important points and providing you with a springboard for the rest of your life.

The journey from the beginning to the end of the course is a significant one. In time, it will transform your relationship with stress and your ability to manage your mental health.