We’ve collated a list of some of the best free wellbeing resources, tools and services from across the web to share with your people, try for yourself, and add to your wellbeing toolkit!
What employees want and need from their organisation’s approach to health and wellbeing is regularly changing, while HR races to keep up to ensure their employee wellbeing initiatives deliver tangible value to their people and are enticing for new recruits.
Many businesses have ramped up their wellbeing efforts while also looking to find new and engaging ways of looking after their employees’ physical and mental health. However, not every initiative will work for everyone, and how much people are prepared to engage with any support offered in a workplace setting will vary between individuals.
We’d love to hear how you get on with our collated list of free wellbeing resources below, and we welcome any other wellness suggestions and recommendations in the comments too.
1. Headspace
Headspace has become one of the most popular apps for mental wellbeing. It offers a variety of guided meditation and mindfulness techniques that help develop positive and healthy habits. Whether you’re looking for help getting to sleep, ways of relieving everyday anxiety or stress, or just to be more present, Headspace features a wealth of content to help boost mental wellbeing including guided meditations, mindfulness exercises, as well as a range of helpful tips in the form articles, videos and animations.
2. NHS audio guides
The NHS has a library of free-to-listen audio guides promoting mental wellbeing. These short guides have been created with doctors to help boost the mood of the listener and cover everything from coping mechanisms for depression and low mood, to anxiety control training and confidence building.
3. Calm
Calm is a great mobile app that encapsulates different forms of self-improvement, including improving the quality of your sleep, reducing stress or anxiety, improving focus and more.
It typically costs £28.99 per year to access all of this content, however they have also made a library of free-to-access mindfulness content available on YouTube. This includes a guided meditation series called ‘Daily Calm’, a library of videos for helping with sleep, as well as stories from stars such as LeBron James, Camilla Cabello and Shawn Mendes on how meditation has changed their life.
The channel is an accessible entry point to meditation and the bitesize nature of the content has made it immensely popular, with the channel registering 815,000 subscribers and more than 130m views since it launched 12 years ago.
4. Insight Timer with Orlaith O’Sullivan
Insight Timer is a free app for better sleep and alleviating stress and anxiety. It boasts more than 100,000 guided meditations from some of the best teachers in their field, and you can even be guided by famous names such as Russell Brand and Armin van Buuren.
With so much to choose from, though, we thought we’d point you in the direction of Orlaith O’Sullivan, one of our previous expert guests in our HR Expert webinar series. Orlaith is a world-renowned mindfulness teacher who has been delivering sessions on the platform for four years, encouraging deep relaxation, post-work reset, self-care and much more.
5. My Possible Self
My Possible Self is an app created in partnership with world leaders in mental health, offering a variety of clinically certified content from Priory Healthcare using cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). It helps to identify habits you want to change, manage and reduce stress, anxiety and depression, improve sleep or reduce stress. It does this by giving simple tools that enable users to learn how to reframe their negative thoughts into positive ones, helping identify triggers of anxiety and building awareness of how and why you might fall into negative thoughts.
6. National Trust Guided Walks
Not only does exercise boost mental health on top of the obvious physical benefits it brings, but taking time out in nature has a positive mental impact too. That’s something you can reap the rewards of thanks to guided walks with the National Trust.
The National Trust host these walks with Walk Leader volunteers who guide amblers along walks of varying distances around some of the most scenic countryside locations around the country. They are perfect for people looking to explore the countryside and meet new people, and are accommodating to everybody taking part by walking at the pace of the slowest person.
7. Samaritans
Sometimes, our mental state can reach a point where meditation or a walk in the park simply isn’t enough. If you or someone you know is struggling to cope, and feel unable to share this with anyone around you, the Samaritans is a great place to turn.
With a free helpline that operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, Samaritans responds to a call for help every 10 seconds. The charity offers people ways to cope and the skills to be there for others; encouraging, promoting and celebrating moments of connection between people that can save lives. While it works towards a vision of fewer people being lost to suicide, their trained volunteers aren’t just there for moments of crisis – they also provide support to prevent that crisis.
Wellbeing resources, as seen on Natural HR
Ask yourself, does your workplace wellbeing strategy incorporate you? If you’d like to learn more about looking after yourself in the workplace, access our free webinar here.
Brought to you by Natural HR’s expert HR partners, discover wellbeing resources, support and guidance from leaders in the industry via our Free HR Expert On-Demand Webinars series. Explore topics on; how HR personnel can look after their own mental health, how to combat modern pressures in the workplace that may be adversely affecting your workplace wellness, and more.
