Local Solihull-based author, coach and mother of two, Ali Swift, is set to publish her second book later this month as she strives to help readers overcome mental health challenges.
Written through the COVID-19 pandemic, Your Wellness Toolbox presents readers with tools designed to help them to cope with anxiety, stress or depression. The book also includes hands-on coaching exercises and presents real-life scenarios to help demonstrate how readers can deploy the tools in their own Wellness Toolbox to help them cope with and overcome mental health challenges.
The book is a follow-on to Ali’s first publication, the award-winning My Wellness Toolbox, which explored 26 of the tried and tested tools that helped the author to navigate her way forward as she learned to manage and overcome her anxiety.
Ali’s decision to write a second book was profoundly influenced by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. She recognised how the major lifestyle changes people across the globe had been forced to make to prevent the disease from spreading had the potential to have huge impact on mental health and anxiety. Ali explains: “Watching the people around me struggle to come to terms with the new world we live in thanks to COVID made me realise how much we take our mental health for granted until it is challenged or put at risk. It was something that only became more obvious when my family and I came down with the virus and had to spend weeks isolating.”
Ali has a very personal reason for being so passionate about sharing tools for coping with mental health challenges: in 2006 she reached what she now describes as her ‘rock bottom’ having struggled for many years with anxiety and crippling panic attacks. Her first book, My Wellness Toolbox, was born from a desire to share her coping mechanisms in the hope that she might be able to help others struggling in similar circumstances.
“I felt like I’d unlocked all the answers when I was writing My Wellness Toolbox” she shares, “I wanted everyone to have access to what I’d found. But then I found myself struggling with that same anxiety again. I felt like such a fraud. I wanted to find everyone who had bought a copy of My Wellness Toolbox and give them their money back.”
Ali continues, “However, talking things through with my husband helped me to realise that the tools in my Toolbox hadn’t stopped working, I’d just stopped remembering they were there! You can have all the tools at your fingertips, but it is so easy to forget how to use them. Coping with anxiety, stress or depression is never a straightforward journey, and that’s something I’ve learned from experience! The key is knowing how to recognise the signs and having the confidence in your tools to know they will help see you through. I felt like I had to write a follow-up to my first book to share this journey. If my books help even one person to overcome their own personal struggles, then it has all been worthwhile.”
Your Wellness Toolbox will be released on 28th January 2021. Ali will be officially unveiling the new book at a re-arranged launch event hosted by John Lewis Solihull as soon as possible, in line with COVID-19 restrictions. The event will be free to attend and members of the public are invited to come along.
