Our trainer, Laura, began with a ‘How are you feeling today? ‘poll. As most of us scored ourselves 4-7 out of 10, we were clearly not entirely stress-free!
Laura spoke of her personal journey towards mental fitness and stress reduction and hoped this training session could help us to achieve it for ourselves.
Asked to describe a good thing that had happened to us last week, we came up with a wide range of responses. We were all very pleased for one member of the group who reported that her baby has at last been persuaded to eat carrots!
After small breakout groups we discussed ‘What is Mental Health and why is it so important? ‘and looked at ways of improving mental well-being by reducing stress.
Resilience
As we can’t avoid stress in our lives, we need to develop a capacity to recover from difficult or challenging times, and to focus on post-traumatic growth.
Stress Container
We all have a unique stress signature which determines what goes into our stress container. This will overflow unless we can release the pressure.
Cognitive Flexibility
To transform something, we feel we can’t control into something we can, we need to discover helpful coping strategies to replace our unhelpful ways of thinking. Laura gave us some thought-provoking examples along with useful suggestions for changing our behaviour.
A B C (Activation event, Beliefs, Consequence)
We fall into cognitive traps when we interpret the meaning of an event in the wrong way, with potentially damaging consequences.
We should try to work out the true reason for people’s behaviour before making assumptions.
PITS and PATS
Reduce
Performance Inhibiting Thoughts
Increase
Performance Enhancing Thoughts
And most importantly
Be kind to yourself!
Leave a Reply