Take care of your well-being during Mental Health Awareness Week

Mental Health Awareness Week is off to a splendid start! Our Well-being Team have been out in force offering advice and support to all students. Throughout the week, they will promote self-care as a way of managing anxiety, the national focus for this year’s event.

Today’s focus is self-care with the demonstration and provision to students of self-care calendars. York Mind has offered advice and support, and YO1 Radio also joined us to share students’ and staff’s perspective. Be sure to listen to Chris Marsden’s in the Afternoon Show for their interviews.

Tomorrow, there will be explanations and demonstrations of breathing techniques. Changing Lives will offer advice and support and will hold workshops in the Lecture Theatre at 10.45am and 3.00pm. We will also have the Public Living Room in Lounge on 1 providing a comfortable, relaxed space to chat to friends and play games.

More to follow . . . in the meantime, look out for the Well-being Team’s ‘Big Hand’ and stalls in the Atrium all week.

Have you every tried grounding techniques using your five senses?

Our staff and students have had the opportunity to do just that, as part of Mental Health Awareness Week 2023!

These simple exercises focus on our five senses: the things we can see, the things we can feel, the things we can hear, the things we can smell and the things we can taste. This can help us to focus on the right here and now.

Why not give it a try?

As part of day three of Mental Health Awareness Week, we also welcomed into York College & University Centre...

Papyrus | Mental Health Matters | The School Well-being Service

The companies displayed in the atrium and chatted with our staff and students about how they can offer us support with our mental health - Thank you for visiting!

Coming up tomorrow...

Dig out your green sequined ballgown because it's 'Wear it Green' day!

As Mental Health Awareness week draws to a close today, we thought it important to share the words of Lou Baker, our Well-being Team Leader, and our students Eva Dudding and Mimi Browne, who we’d like to thank for speaking so openly on YO1 Radio about their views on issues such as exam pressure and the continued impact of the pandemic.

Lou reminded students that mental health support is available to students all year round, not just during this awareness week, and spoke of the importance of being able to disconnect from social media and the all-consuming fear of missing out.

She said: “Mental Health Awareness Week is all about allowing young people to really look at how they manage on a day-to-day basis in terms of looking after themselves. They are so focussed nowadays on the what ifs, the maybes and about catching up and keeping up with everybody else on social media.

“We want our young people to learn how they can be resilient in life and that they don’t have to be the same as everyone else and that they can have a focus on supporting their own needs. Anxiety and the common mental-health issues have increased in recent years.

“We’ve also seen that, after Covid, there was a spike in referrals and a spike in students struggling and not just with the common lower-level, mental-health issues, but with more complex issues as well. There has been an increase in students who feel they can’t disconnect from digital technology and social media, who have this all-consuming fear of missing out.

“We want our students to allow themselves that space for down-time and allow themselves to disconnect to focus on other things they enjoy other than being face down in a phone. We want students to know who we are and where to find us so we can let them know about all the services that are out there to support their mental health and wellbeing.”

Eva added: “It’s really important in this generation, with things like the news and political situations, to make people aware that their feelings and stresses are normal and providing coping mechanisms is really important. Over the past couple of years, especially being in Higher Education, there’s a lot of stress.

“We’re coming into exam season, and everyone is feeling stressed. There are tensions rising, so it’s about working hard but also knowing that it’s important that you make time for yourself.

“In education, there will always be pressure – teachers are under pressure and students are under pressure – but there are ways to outlet.”

Mimi pointed out: “It’s really important this week to provide help to young people suffering with mental illness but also to educate people who aren’t dealing with it so we can grow as a society and help people who are struggling and be more aware of what people need.

“As students, Lockdown put us behind quite a bit and more stress has been added on from those experiences because there was a long period of time when we weren’t at school and people’s exams were either missed or changed so, for A Level students, this could be the first exam they are taking because they missed GCSEs. I can imagine that heightens people’s anxiety and stress a lot and they might need extra help during this process.”