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Learning to enjoy life is a skill in itself - in fact a whole collection of skills.

Worry is one of the greatest blights of good performance.

Depression can sometimes show itself as tiredness, boredom or irritability and doesn't fit the classical description of feeling very sad and low. Stress and depression can show itself as sore muscles, disturbed eating and sleeping habits, poor socialising, and inability to concentrate.

Sometimes depression can be hidden in well-behaved and hard-working young people who are suffering badly in silence. How well do you really know your best friend? Would they dare to share their pain with you?

If you're dieting, losing even a few pounds in weight can leave you weak, irritable and depressed. Simply cutting down on food-calories won't do you any good at all. You need to develop a whole new attitude to exercise and good nutrition.

Get yourself a high quality multi-mineral and multi-vitamin supplement. Very importantly, you should considerably increase your exercise routine. Twenty minutes here, twenty minutes there of some enjoyable activity…and take the excuse to walk places whenever you can. All these measures together will quickly add up to leave you feeling a great deal better, and will let your body find a weight to fit your new, more active lifestyle.

Depression is often caused by a painful loss, perhaps of our job or of a loved one. But commonly, it can also be due to setting unrealistic targets for ourselves, with too few stepping stones in between, so we never feel as if anything is being achieved. Hence, it helps greatly to reintroduce some easily achievable goals and rewardingly pleasurable activities into our lives.

Don't set your 'mini-goals' too high, otherwise you won't get a sense of achievement often enough en route. That isn't to say you can't aim for something really challenging, it's just that the best way to reach it would be to break it down into as many small steps as possible.

Doing something kind will always make you feel so much better, mainly because it takes attention away from yourself.

Bear in mind that Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), caused by too little sunlight, can emotionally depress up to 40% of people during the mid-winter months. A daily walk outside even on an overcast day can pep you up no end and help prevent the blues.

The best way of preventing depression is to build up a wide and rich variety of activities and people in your life who bring you pleasure and satisfaction, so that if something goes wrong or is lost from one part of your life, you don't feel as if you're sinking.

Very often our thinking is irrational or unrealistic, and if someone can help us realise this, or we can realise it for ourselves, we will feel a lot better about things.

Don't let 'pleasing others' be a central preoccupation in your life, otherwise you forfeit control over yourself.

Letting work or obligations exhaust you isn't impressive, or strong, or kind. It's very often the weakness of not being able to say no, or not being able to plan or prioritise properly, and it will only lead you to let everyone down, including yourself.

Beware of being hyper self-critical and slipping into 'perfectionist-mode' that will only result in such pressure-related symptoms as nervous disorders, addictions, depression, exhaustion, and anorexia or bulimia. Perfectionism can easily be well entrenched by as young as 10, and is often brought about by someone else having set our goals for us, by one means or another. That could mean the well-meant expectations of friends and parents, or the selfish demands of a boss or some unrealistic media-image. Take a moment to reconsider the facts: that the world is not meant to be perfect, nor is everyday life, so all you can expect of yourself is to do as good a job as you can under the circumstances in which you find yourself, taking into consideration all of your other needs, aspirations and responsibilities. With this 'bigger picture' in mind, it makes clear sense to start afresh, and work out for yourself some achievable and deeply pleasing goals and the enjoyable manner in which you want to tackle them.

Perfectionism condemns us to live for ever in the future rather than the present, and to exhaust ourselves without rest, because we are striving for something that cannot possibly be achieved. Perfectionism should not be confused with striving for excellence, as the achievement of excellence very often requires a healthy balance to achieve and sustain it.

Challenge the 'shoulds' and the 'musts' in your life - those things that you assume you have no choice over, those things that are expected of you, and that you might even expect of yourself. It could be your job, your qualification, your sport, your looks, your relationships, the where and how you live. The fact is, you do have the choice, you just have to do something about it.

Don't aim to get things done on time, aim to get them done well ahead of time. This will take much of the stress out of the situation, and will provide a useful safety-net for unexpected problems. Besides which, doing things late can give the impression that you don't really care, whereas very often it's exactly because you do care that you've tried to cram too much in, and have then over-run.

It helps not to dwell on past traumas in our lives. Move on to the future. Seek to be self-reliant and in control of your own destiny as much as possible, which will help restore your faith in things. To achieve all of this will take careful planning, good advice, and lots of practice.

Exercise is a very well-tried and tested means of making us feel better mentally. It can cheer us up for 24 hours, no problem. Exercise might mean a 20 minute brisk walk, or it might mean a 2 hour work out - you choose what works for you.

There is always pressure and stress. Stress comes about when you have no means to channel and cope with pressure.

Relaxation is something you need to learn how to do well. We tend to assume it comes easily, but it doesn't. Hence we end up drinking pints of alcohol to make it happen, or smoking, or eating too much, or a whole range of other activities which only work in the short term but cause us even more problems soon after.

Life will chase you around until you stop and chase it around. Hunt down your fears and problems and hopes, hunt them into a corner and face up to them. Know them and do something about them. Not next month. Now.

Second to exercise, other good activities for mood improvement are relaxation techniques, listening to music, talking with someone else, or busying yourself with some chores.

Balanced and reliable good moods seem to bring a lot more life-satisfaction than occasional binges of extreme happiness. As frequently as possible, do a good variety of things that bring small packets of satisfaction, rather than go hell for leather for some big hit of euphoria.

A hot bath followed by a good night's sleep will sharpen your pencil.

Let yourself have a huge sense of humour.