This week we’re chatting with Tee Twyford, coach and founder of HUSTLE + Hush. 

Hi, Tee! If you could recommend One Good Thing everyone should do for their mental health, what would it be?

I would start your week with a beautiful bit of poetry. I started an experiment in January 2022 and sent out a poem to my subscribers on a Monday morning at 6:45am. It got such a good response that I continued to do it every week for over a year, until my second maternity leave. I started it up again in the autumn of 2024 and I just love the practice of curating a poem to share, as well as all the lovely comments I get back from people when it lands with them on Monday.

Interesting. Why is this your One Good Thing?

I’m forever saving poems, taking screenshots, copying and pasting them into my notes app, folding over the corners in an anthology. I’ve also surrounded myself with friends who send me anthologies that align with periods of my life, and I even recently received a gift from The Poetry Pharmacy, which was so cute!

I love the idea that the first email to land in your inbox at the start of the week isn’t asking anything more of you than to just listen and embrace the beauty that sits there. You have no need to ‘circle back’ on a poem.

Poetry is incredibly moving. Amid all of the busyness of our lives, it’s so powerful to have someone put into words something that stops you in your tracks, that challenges you, that articulates the intensity of emotions you’re experiencing, that inspires action. 

So true. Tell us a little about how poetry could benefit our mental health. 

Reading poetry helps us to express our feelings (Mazza & Prescott, 1981) and promotes self-discovery (Mazza, 1981).

During the pandemic, researchers at the University of Plymouth and Nottingham Trent University found that many people who took to sharing, discussing and writing poetry as a means to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic experienced “demonstrable positive impact on their wellbeing”. Just over half (51%) of respondents indicated that reading and/or writing poetry had helped them deal with feelings of loneliness or isolation, and for a further 50% it had helped with feelings of anxiety and depression.

Apparently, reading a poem out loud can activate your relaxation response and bring about a sense of calm. It’s all to do with the way it slows and controls your breathing rate, which in turn stimulates your parasympathetic nervous system and can lead to many beneficial effects, according to Dr Michael Mosley.

Starting your week with some poetry is a lovely pause on the autopilot of your day – a little buffer before you get swept up into “all the things” and a chance to ask yourself how you’d like to start the day and the week, with intention, from a place of reflection.

Are there any ways we can get this routine ‘wrong’? 

I guess there’s the chance you get lost on your device and caught up in other things in your inbox, rather than sitting with your poem. 

How do you personally do your One Good Thing?

I love to designate a beautiful expanse of time once every few months and map out the coming 12 or so weeks, looking for any relevant calendar moments to align with, and then immerse myself in researching new poems and going through my treasure trove of favourites to schedule in for Monday mornings.

On Mondays themselves, I like to sit there with a cup of tea in bed, open the email as it arrives in my inbox and let it land with me and reflect on a line or two that resonates the most.

How has this changed your life for the better?

It’s brought some consistency to something that brings me joy. And connection. I love to share some of the poems with my kids and I adore receiving notes back in my inbox from people when a particular poem has really landed – the messages that say “how did you know that’s what I needed today?”, or “this one was really special and spoke to me”.

Frame Of Mind is Stylist’s home for all things mental health and the mind. From expert advice on the small changes you can make to improve your wellbeing to first-person essays and features on topics ranging from autism to antidepressants, we’ll be exploring mental health in all its forms. You can check out the series home page to get started.

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