Help your students deal more effectively with stress
Wednesday 2nd November marks Stress Awareness Day – the ideal time to highlight the far-reaching impact stress can have, and the tools we can use to manage it, before it becomes a real issue…
Stress is a fact of life and impacts nearly all of us at some point. In small doses, it can even be a good thing – helping motivate us to achieve targets we might not otherwise have reached.
But stress can also be hugely damaging and young people can spiral downwards quickly if their stress levels are left to run unchecked. According to the Mental Health Foundation, nearly one in three (29%) young people have self-harmed due to high levels of stress, while one in four (39%) have experienced suicidal feelings at times of high stress.
With stress amongst young people at its highest for decades, it’s worth using Stress Awareness Day to normalise discussion around the issue, and to help young people identify the tools they can use to minimise its negative impact in their lives.
Our Role Models ‘Worry’ resources are a great place to start. They come with a student workbook, teacher notes and an accompanying video, so you’ve got everything you need to run a dedicated lesson on the issue.
In the student workbook older ‘Role Model’ students talk through their own experiences of stress and how they deal with it, to help de-stigmatise the issue. The workbook also covers practical exercises to stimulate classroom discussion and help students identify new ways of coping with stress, while the teacher notes come with a handy list of carefully researched resources to recommend to students, parents and carers.
It’s also worth using Stress Awareness Day to flag all the free support that exists for young people who feel unable to cope. The Mix is a charity that provides free help to young people 25 and under. Young people can speak to their trained teams for free via phone on 0808 808 4994, through 1-2-1 Chat, or via their Crisis Messenger service. Click here to find out more.
Stress can be an isolating experience. But it needn’t be. Let’s pull together and show young people that they’re not alone and that they can, with the right help and support, learn to cope with the stress they’re experiencing and even see beyond it, however bad it currently feels.