22/5 - PD: Stress & Anxiety

PD - Stress & Anxiety

22nd May 2017

For Mentor Period today the girls had been asked to go to the Lecture Theatre for a talk on Stress & Anxiety. Staff had been asked to accompany the girls for help with crowd control. I was unsure of the buy in that this talk would get. I feel that when stress and anxiety is a key focus in Mentor Periods or Health classes some students find it hard to buy into conversations surrounding these topics.

It was our two school counsellors Karen & Paul that were running this session with the girls. Paul started the session by talking about what stress is and the difference between acute and chronic stress. I found this very interesting as no one had ever explained this to me before. Chronic stress is the type of stress that I feel the most. It is the build up of stress over a longer period of time. They then went through some of the impacts that stress may cause or ways that we might recognize that we are stressed.

After looking at what stress is and how it can impact you they went through the four preventative actions for stress. These included:

1. Good organization & planning - included planning your free time to ensure you get some time to relax
2. Analyze how you are using your time - this may show you that you aren't as busy as you think you are and you may find that you have more free time than you thought
3. Look at taking something out of your cluttered life
4. Practice self-care

I like that not only did they touch on the need to practice self-care but they also put a list of different ways this could look like. They also emphasized that self-care could look different for each individual. 

Other key points of the talk was how to deal with stress. They confined these to four ways:

1. Check the Balance in your life - the self-care vs stressors
2. Talk to someone
3. Keep the big picture in life - is it going to be important in a year?
4. Avoid over-thinking and negative self-talk 

To finish off today's session Paul took everyone through a simple guided breathing technique. He told us that if we focus on breathing in a stressful time it can help to trigger the nervous system and help create a calming feeling. The breathing exercise started with noticing the air going through nose and your hand moving up and down on your tummy. This was followed by seeing if you could hear the air going in and out your nose, allowing thoughts to enter your mind, acknowledging them and then return back to your breathing. Then you could start to notice your the emotions you feel and then return back to your breathing (can be done by counting 5 breaths). The idea is that your breath acts as a physiological barrier. When you notice what you are thinking or feeling and then return to your breathing it helps you to acknowledge these thoughts/feelings, while still feeling calm.

To also help encourage students to take control over their own stress levels school will be running a Mindfulness course. It will run over 4 weeks in an after school session. They encouraged students to try practicing mindfulness to them them to live in the present without having life being overrun by your thoughts and learning to control these thoughts rather than feeling trapped in your own mind. 

Personally I found this talk to be a great reminder that sometimes in life we do need to slow down and take some times for ourselves. I managed to take away tips to apply to my own life to try and minimize future stress levels. I also hope they open the Mindfulness course to staff!

Well heres to a less stressful future - hopefully!

A handout from today's session can be found here.