Tag Archives: mentalhealth

Let your visitors in but don’t let them overstay their welcome.

When you’re in a certain emotion, it can feel like it’s never going to go. It takes over the right side of your brain and stops the logical left side from thinking straight, hijacking our sense of time. We overestimate the duration and intensity of our uncomfortable emotions and underestimate the comfortable ones.

For example, think back to a time when you felt anxious. Perhaps you were waiting for some test results. Did that wait seem to last a lifetime? Now think back to a happy time. Maybe you were on holiday with your family. Did time seem to fly by? Probably. This is called affective forecasting.

In fact, emotions come and go very quickly. They chemically come and go in ONLY 90 SECONDS!! (Dr Bolte Taylor, 2006)

They are visitors in our bodies that come to give us a message (for example, anger -the thought or event was unfair, jealousy – we would like something in our lives etc) and then they move on and leave us alone if you listen to them.

Everybody wants to feel heard. Think of a pre-speaking toddler who is trying to explain something to their confused parent. Imagine how frustrated they would get when feeling misunderstood and how this would be shown through their behaviour.

This can relate to our emotions. If you don’t listen to what they’re trying to say – for example, by blocking them out, not thinking about them, not feeling those sensations in your body, distracting yourself with work or social media, telling yourself that you’re fine – they’ll kick up a fuss, get stronger and louder and keep shouting their message at you until you listen and understand. They’re here to give you a message and they won’t give in until their task is complete. This is when an emotion can turn into a mood.

Moods are visitors here for a longer stay. They’ve bought their overnight bags and want breakfast too. They don’t want to check out and can overstay their welcome.

In order to let an emotion go, it needs to be FELT and EXPRESSED.

FEEL IT – Take the 90 seconds to stop and breathe. Take deep belly breaths and recognise what is going on inside. How does this emotion feel in your feet? legs? stomach? chest? shoulders? arms? hands? Work your way up your body. What thoughts is it creating? What is it here to tell me?
Feel those sensations and just sit with them. Feel them come and go in pulses or waves and watch them fade and disappear.

EXPRESS IT – Allow your face to show the relevant facial expression. Do what your body is telling you to do. Cry if your eyes are stinging. Shout into a pillow or squeeze your body tight if you have excess energy.
How can you express this emotion safely? If it is other peoples’ opinions that are stopping you expressing them, find a space where you can be alone. If this isn’t possible, go to the bathroom or face a wall.

Feel them and express them in the moment that they arise. By blocking them and distracting yourself, remember that they are still there. They’re still trying to give you that message. They’re not going anywhere until you do listen.

TEACHER REFLECTION:

Do you have an area in your classroom that pupils can access to be alone, to process and express their emotions by themselves? A calm corner is a great addition to any classroom and gives the pupils the message that emotions are valid and should be accepted and expressed.

When children are expressing their sadness or anger, do you reactively say “don’t cry, don’t be sad’ and “calm down”? Have you taught them how to return to calm and self-regulate their emotions? Do they know techniques to express how they’re feeling in a healthy, safe and socially-acceptable way?

Follow my blog and website for more support with this.

My classroom resources for your Calm Corner and your social, emotional and well-being lessons will be available online VERY SOON!

Mrs Morris
The Mental Health Teacher

References

BOLTE TAYLOR, Dr Jill (2006). My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey. 1st Viking ed. New York: Viking.

Government Education Recovery Commissioner Resigns just after post-COVID Funding is Allocated.

Sir Kevan Collins has resigned, saying that the £1.4 billion allocation is not enough to support a decent recovery programme for education. Hence, he has resigned as he feels that he will not be able to do it justice.

Good for him. We all know what it is like trying to do a good job of something without being given the right resources or funding needed – let alone doing it in the [very critical] public eye.

Perhaps he was hoping that this grand gesture was going to encourage Boris Johnson to increase the funding but it hasn’t. Collins was reported to be wanting around £15 billion for this mammoth task, which is a meagre amount in comparison to the £127 billion spent on public services.

In my opinion, it is the youngest generation who are high up on the most-affected by COVID list (them and the eldest generation) so as much money as needed should be spent on them but NOT ON their education. It should be spent on their mental well-being and social skills. (In my previous post, I speak about the £79 million the government have put aside for children’s mental health and discussed the issues with their plans). In years to come, the children won’t be asked about the science topic that they missed or the music lessons they went without. They will be asked about how they FELT during a worldwide pandemic. They will talk about the clap for carers, the board games they played, the time spent skyping their teacher, the masks they saw the adults wearing, the friends that they missed. NOT the lessons the missed out on.

At the end of the day, they are ALL in the same position. So surely nobody is behind, if nobody is infront?! In every classroom all over the world, the pupils are at different ability levels. Nothing new there. The pupils are likely to still be under-achievers or over-achievers, whatever they were pre-COVID.

For the months on end that they were either being home-schooled or in lockdown, the majority (?) of these children have still been educated, either by their teachers online or by their parents. It is the social skills, the face-to-face communication, the team sports, the hobbies, the interaction that they have missed out on and not advanced in.

Currently, the government are talking about spending this money on tutoring and making the school days 30 minutes longer (the latter was suggested by Collins). As a previous year 1 and 2 teacher, I know that at the end of the day, pupils are tired and hungry – not an optimal state to be learning. As for tutoring, how is this going to work? Will it be one-on-one? Delivered by teachers? Will this money subsidise tutoring payments, making it just for the more affluent pupils (when children from families receiving benefifits are statistically lower academically)?

Perhaps Collins wasn’t the right man for the job after all. Maybe the government should put their trust into the professionals hands and allow schools to decide how to spend the money that will best suit their unique set of pupils. Teaching needs to stop being an over-managed profession and the power should be in the teachers’ hands.

Mindfulness and the Wise Mind

In my Master’s lecture this week (I study Child & Adolescent Mental Health – level 7), we were shown this slide and it got me thinking:

On the surface our lecturer was showing that mindfulness is a relaxation tool to use to improve mental well being but I was hooked on the Venn diagram.

The ‘Reasonable Mind’ is our thinking brain for logic and reasoning and is focused on tasks, facts and statistics. This is our prefrontal-cortex and is the part of the brain that we traditionally use for thinking.

The ‘Emotional Mind’ is our limbic system. This is when our actions are governed solely by our emotions. The stronger the emotion, the less we think, we simply react without thinking about the consequences.

Both parts of our brain are very important and useful in different situations. For example, the ‘Rational Mind’ will be used when we are working or handling data and the ‘Emotional Mind’ when we are with our loved ones; but most of the time, we won’t benefit if we are using one or the other.

Let’s discuss a situation.

If you argue with your partner and are in the ‘Emotional Mind’, you may scream and shout, say things you’ll later regret and suggest that you’re better apart. You’re saying things to try and hurt your partner as much as you’re hurting inside but you’re not taking into consideration how you may feel tomorrow when you’ve calmed down. Do you really want to break up?

If you were in the ‘Rational Mind’ when you had the argument, you may suggest that each of you take it in turns to explain your point of view, then you may write a list of pros and cons and work out a solution that way but what about how you feel? With the rational mind, this doesn’t come into consideration. Using just the ‘Emotional Mind’ is like following your heart and we know that in love, nothing is rational!

So it is not great to use either mind by itself. When we combine the skill sets of both parts of our brain, this is where we connect the ‘Wise Mind’.

The ‘Wise Mind’ is reached by being MINDFUL. To do this, we are aware of our thoughts (rational) and aware of our feelings (emotional) but we distance ourselves from them. We know that not all our thoughts are true and that our feelings are derived from them. We can take a step back and let some false thoughts pass on by. We release them and let them go. In turn, this releases negative emotions that were linked to those thoughts.

In this space or peace, we can start to ‘hear’ or ‘feel’ our intuition/our gut feeling/our inner knowing.

So as we are more mindful and aware of what is going on inside ourselves (thoughts and feelings) and can let things go, we can connect more to our true selves.

When making decisions, it is always best to go with your ‘gut feeling’. This is your intuition telling you what is best for you. It may not be what will bring the best emotions or it may not be what has the most ticks on your spreadsheet, but your body knows what is best for YOU.

If you want to connect more with your body and be more mindful, then my short relaxation videos for calm, focus and mental wellness are on YouTube. My channel is ‘The Mental Health Teacher’ and teachers, you can learn the skills alongside your pupils!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFmUuRhirRUPRtROX0KiQcw

The ‘Wise Mind’ is a core dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) mindfulness skill, coined by Linnehan (1993).