Celebrity Health – Anna Williamson
TV relationship expert Anna Williamson offers some tips and advice for maintaining a positive mindset during challenging times
Image of Anna Williamson © James Rudland
Anna Williamson is a TV and radio broadcaster, bestselling author and TV relationship expert. She has appeared on our screens on GMTV, This Morning and Splash. Anna, who is 41 and a mum-of-two, can currently be found dispensing advice on the E4 show Celebs Go Dating.
Q Do you think that things like exercise and healthy eating can help to promote a healthy and positive mindset?
Anna: Absolutely! The relationship between mental and physical health is extremely important and one needs the other in order to maintain a holistic, happy and healthy whole self. A good diet and exercise is proven to help improve our mental and emotional wellbeing, and therefore helps create a much more positive mindset. I have never felt worse after having a gym workout than I did before – in fact quite the opposite.
Q It can be difficult to follow a healthy path at times, especially when life is challenging. Do you have any tips?
Anna: Make things manageable and realistic. It’s all well and good knowing that you need to do a certain amount of exercise each day or eat certain amounts of freshly cooked food, but if it isn’t realistic with everything else you are juggling within your day you are only setting yourself up to fail. Maybe just choose one or two things that you can do each day/ week in order to maintain a healthy lifestyle. That way it won’t become overwhelming and disappointing if you don’t manage to fulfil a long list. Focus on the end goal. How would you like to feel/look/be? When we can really visualise and future-pace what it will be like when we get there, it can really help in keeping our motivation going. Otherwise, we would be like a boat without a sail, drifting to nowhere in particular.
Q Can you offer any advice for how to keep upbeat now that winter is on the way?
Anna: Stay in the moment and focus on what you enjoy about this time of year. Okay, we can’t do anything about the daylight hours, but what can we do something about? We can create a warm, inviting home environment. We can get outside in the fresh air as much as we can during daylight hours, which does help to boost our vitamin D even if the sun isn’t shining. Make sure to set yourself activities and goals that aren’t dependent on the time of year/weather.
Q As a relationship expert, what would you say are the key elements involved in maintaining healthy relationships with those around us?
Anna: Communication and compromise. Far too many relationships go down the pan due to appalling communication, and to be honest we can all lose sight of how well we communicate with our loved ones around us – me included! We all have unique communication preferences. Some people like to talk face-to-face, some people communicate best through the written word, some people through songs or actions, some people like space and others need constant reassurance. It’s about actively communicating to work out what you need and what your loved ones need and how you can best serve each other to keep happy and fulfilled.
Q How can people foster a healthy relationship with their own self-image?
Anna: Focus on what you like about yourself, not what you don’t. We are biologically pre-dispositioned to focus on the negative over the positive, so we have to work that little bit harder to tease out the positives. Never measure yourself against anybody else.
Don’t subscribe to what society’s version of perfection is and embrace your unique talents and qualities.
Q Tell us about your online platform, the Relationship Place.
Anna: The pandemic really highlighted how challenging people within relationships were finding it, and indeed people exploring the dating scene, and my inbox just exploded during that time. My husband came up with the idea of me having more of a platform to offer my support and advice to those asking for it. So we put together a team and we’ve created an online coaching hub where anyone can access videos (by me) which cover a range of personal and relationship issues, and crucially advice to help navigate through it. We’re on a mission to destigmatise couples’ coaching and this is perhaps the first rung on the ladder for anyone to reach out for help and acknowledge that they could use some help for themselves and/or their relationship to get things back on track.
Anna Williamson’s new online platform is the Relationship Place, which is a self-help hub offering relationship support and advice. Visit therelationshipplace.co.uk
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