Professional Background
Settled Minds was founded by Annalie Mackenzie, a qualified counsellor with a Diploma in Person-Centred Counselling and Psychotherapy.
Her professional experience includes providing counselling and emotional support within community organisations, crisis support services, and GP surgery settings, working with individuals experiencing a wide range of emotional and psychological difficulties.
She has also worked within a secondary school environment as a support worker through a local organisation, supporting students navigating anxiety, overwhelm, social pressures and challenges within the school setting. This experience highlighted how many young people were not lacking resilience, but instead lacked clear explanations for the internal experiences they were having.
For the past three years, Annalie has worked as a Suicide Bereavement Support Practitioner, supporting individuals and families following a death by suicide. This work has reinforced the importance of early understanding, open conversations about mental health, and preventative approaches that help people make sense of their emotional experiences before difficulties escalate.
Across her work with both young people and adults, a consistent theme has emerged: when people understand how their mind and nervous system respond to stress, anxiety and uncertainty, those experiences often become less frightening and easier to manage.
Alongside her professional practice, Annalie continues to develop her knowledge and training, with a particular interest in the role of psychoeducation in improving emotional understanding and wellbeing.
Settled Minds brings together therapeutic training, frontline support experience, and a belief in clear, preventative emotional education for young people.
Who we are
Why Settled Minds exists
Many young people experience anxiety, stress and emotional overwhelm, yet few have ever been taught how the mind and nervous system actually work and why these reactions happen in the first place.
Students often describe racing thoughts, tightness in the chest, or feeling overwhelmed, but without a framework to explain what is happening in their brain and body, these experiences can feel confusing or personal. This can lead to shame, avoidance, or the belief that something is “wrong” with them.
Settled Minds was created from a therapist-led perspective, informed by experience working with both young people and adults. In therapeutic settings, one of the most helpful starting points is often simply understanding how the mind and nervous system work. When people understand why their thoughts, emotions and physical reactions occur, those experiences often become less frightening and easier to manage.
The same principle applies to young people. By helping students understand how their brain responds to stress, social pressure and uncertainty, Settled Minds aims to provide a clear and accessible framework for experiences that many students are already having.
Understanding does not remove all difficulty, but it can be the first step towards reducing shame, increasing self-awareness, and supporting healthier ways of responding to pressure.
Our Approach
Settled Minds is grounded in structured psychoeducation and was developed from therapeutic work with both adolescents and adults, where understanding how the mind works is often the first step in helping people feel less overwhelmed by their internal experiences.
Rather than beginning with coping strategies or techniques, the starting point is understanding.
The programme focuses on helping young people understand:
• what anxiety actually is
• why overthinking happens
• why students experience pressure around exams
• how the brain’s protective systems operate
• why their reactions make sense
This approach does not pathologise normal human responses, nor does it aim to remove difficult emotions entirely. Instead, it helps young people develop a clearer and more balanced understanding of what they are experiencing.
When emotional responses are understood as protective rather than defective, self-blame often reduces and students are better able to respond to their experiences with greater perspective.
Settled Minds delivers calm, therapist-informed audio sessions that:
• build understanding progressively
• strengthen emotional literacy
• encourage student autonomy
• complement existing school wellbeing support
• require minimal staff intervention
At its core, Settled Minds is early intervention through clarity and education.
Safeguarding and boundaries
Settled Minds is an educational resource. It is not therapy, a crisis service or a replacement for safeguarding procedures.
The platform is designed to support early understanding of anxiety, overthinking and stress. It does not provide risk assessment, emergency response or clinical intervention.
Schools remain responsible for safeguarding processes and referral pathways. If a young person discloses risk or requires urgent support, established school and clinical procedures must always take precedence.
Guidance is provided to schools on appropriate use, referral language and boundaries to ensure the resource is used safely and ethically.
We are committed to working alongside schools and families within professional and safeguarding frameworks at all times.