This is the perfect time to make lasting changes – whether embracing exercise, learning a new language, planting seeds or painting your house

Take it from a hopeless dopamine addict, spring is inarguably the best season to get into outdoor exercise. The trick to building the habit – as with any habit, really – is to start small, and reduce friction. Decide what you’re wearing and charge your phone before you go to bed. For your first few sorties, don’t worry about distance, speed or doing a whole workout: just get yourself used to getting up and out of the door. Counterintuitively, it can help to not dress like an athlete: if you go out covered in Lycra, it can feel mortifying to slow to a walk, but if you’re less formally dressed you can stop for a coffee. Keep it playful, and enjoy what your body can do: if that’s some step-ups on a bench or pull-ups on a tree branch, great, but even if it’s just going a little bit faster when a good song kicks in, the endorphin rush is what you’ll remember the next time it’s wet and windy. Oh, and don’t underestimate the value of a well-curated playlist. Many’s the morning I haven’t wanted to go anywhere, only for this Rihanna/Game Of Thrones remix to put a spring back in my step. Joel Snape, fitness writer

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Conversations about menopause have matured but the question of when and how to treat perimenopausal symptoms remains confusing – even to a science journalist

There’s a meme featuring a confident, suave, smiling Henry Cavill – the actor best known for playing Superman – posing for photographers on the red carpet. Sneaking up behind him is wild-looking, maniacally gleeful co-star Jason Momoa.

To me, this is the perfect metaphor for perimenopause. Cavill is at the peak of his career, he looks great, clearly feels great, exudes confidence, strength and self-possession. And he’s about to get crash-tackled by a capricious and unpredictable force.

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NASUWT annual conference backs plan for staff trained in mental health first aid in all schools and colleges

All school leaders should receive suicide prevention training to help tackle a “mental health emergency” among teachers, under a plan unanimously backed by a vote by union members.

A workforce survey of members of the NASUWT teaching union found some teachers were driven to the point of suicide by the stress of the job.

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This mindset wears us down and disrupts relationships. To feel empowered in the present we must come to terms with past traumas

How we shape our identity plays a vital role in determining our wellbeing. This shaping, often unconscious, can propel our personal growth but also sometimes limit it in unintended ways.

As societal awareness grows about the traumatic impact of issues such as racism, domestic violence, prejudice, discrimination and poverty, there has been an increasing focus on trauma-informed therapy. This approach recognises trauma’s influence on wellbeing and shifts away from historically blaming victims for their circumstances.

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Exclusive: Katie Sidle warns of more avoidable deaths without major changes after inquest found missed chances to save sibling

A consultant neurologist whose brother died after a series of failures by an NHS mental health trust has warned there will be more avoidable deaths without fundamental reform of psychiatric care.

Dr Katie Sidle’s concerns about the refusal of Norfolk and Suffolk foundation trust (NSFT) to give her brother Christopher, who was psychotic, a crisis admission were repeatedly ignored in the days and weeks before his death last July, a coroner found this month.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie . In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org , or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org .

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When it comes to studies, work or social abilities, some fared better than others. But the pandemic left its mark on all of us, whether we realise it or not

I recently came across a folder on my laptop labelled “Covid”. Inside I found screenshots I had taken of the government website, showing daily cases, ICU admissions and deaths from Covid-19. These reports were released every weekday during the first lockdown, and each afternoon I would collect them in this folder and study them, trying to understand what was happening in the wider world – before I began a busy evening of Zoom birthday quizzes, Netflix Party and WhatsApp.

I was shocked – both that I had ever been so macabre in the first place, and also that, four years later, I had forgotten doing it. I don’t remember being anxious or depressed during lockdown, but I have 60 image files suggesting otherwise.

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The Derry Girls actor is funny to her bones in this sitcom about mental health and long-term friendship. It’s full of lovely touches, if not enough nuance

In the opening episode of Big Mood, struggling playwright Maggie (Derry Girls’ and Bridgerton’s Nicola Coughlan) is on a mission. And on a scooter. But that was an expensive mistake, so she gives it away to a passerby. She needs her best friend Eddie (It’s a Sin’s Lydia West) to take the day off work, running the bar her late dad left her, and come with her to her old secondary school, where she has been invited to make a speech about her career in the theatre. Maggie is hoping to meet her old history teacher, Mr Wilson, on whom she developed a passionate teenage crush after he saved her from lecherous maths teacher Mr Phillips. “Because he wouldn’t shag a child!” she beams, full of blissful memory. “Wow,” says Eddie. “We should nominate him for a Pride of Britain award.”

Off they go, and a parade of increasingly manic hijinks ensue. Which is very much expected sitcommery until Eddie asks, as they escape the now chaos-filled school, if Maggie is, well, manic. And she is. She has bipolar disorder, and has stopped taking her meds because she can’t write while she’s on them. Thus, we find ourselves in this bleaker territory for the rest of the six-episode series, which explores the limits of a decade-long friendship between the two women as the pressures of post-20s life start to mount. “I fix problems – you have them,” says Eddie cheerily at the start. But no relationship can survive such a state for ever.

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When my relationship imploded, I chose to remain alone and isolated. It was the start of a new, much happier life, in which I became the safe place I could always return to

Almost a decade ago, I lay on my back on the floor. Through the open window, I could hear the wind rattling loose stones and blackthorn. I was alone, which meant – although I didn’t know it yet – I had made it out of the worst years of my life.

A year earlier, depressed and in a state of heightened anxiety induced by the unhappy relationship I was in, I had looked for something to steady my mind and my hands. A lover of the medieval, I had got into painting illuminated manuscripts and would come up with imaginary commandments, one of which read: “If all else fails, just lie on the floor and wait for something to happen.” Now, I was.

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Are growing rates of anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD, Alzheimer’s and motor neurone disease related to rising temperatures and other extreme environmental changes?

In late October 2012, a category 3 hurricane howled into New York City with a force that would etch its name into the annals of history . Superstorm Sandy transformed the city, inflicting more than $60bn in damage, killing dozens, and forcing 6,500 patients to be evacuated from hospitals and nursing homes. Yet in the case of one cognitive neuroscientist, the storm presented, darkly, an opportunity.

Yoko Nomura had found herself at the centre of a natural experiment. Prior to the hurricane’s unexpected visit, Nomura – who teaches in the psychology department at Queens College, CUNY, as well as in the psychiatry department of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai – had meticulously assembled a research cohort of hundreds of expectant New York mothers. Her investigation, the Stress in Pregnancy study , had aimed since 2009 to explore the potential imprint of prenatal stress on the unborn. Drawing on the evolving field of epigenetics, Nomura had sought to understand the ways in which environmental stressors could spur changes in gene expression, the likes of which were already known to influence the risk of specific childhood neurobehavioural outcomes such as autism, schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

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