Stress Awareness Month

According to the Prince’s Trust Natwest Youth Index, released late last year, 62% of young people say they always or often feel stressed. With the COVID pandemic being a very recent memory and the cost of living crisis coming on top of all the normal issues and concerns of growing up, it’s no wonder that stress among young people is so high.

Stress Awareness Month has been held every April since 1992 to raise awareness of the causes and cures for our modern-day stress epidemic. According to the Stress Management Society, it is a time when we have an opportunity for an “open conversation on the impact of stress and we can dedicate time to removing the guilt, shame, and stigma around mental health.”

Stress will affect people in different ways but can often lead to feeling of anxiry, anger, frustration or depression. This can lead to physical symptons such as headaches, indigestion, sweating, heart palpitations and more and as a result this can lead to behavioural changes such as struggling to sleep, snapping at people, becoming tearful or possibly increasing consumption of cigarettes, drugds or alcohol.

Here at the Trust, we understand the importance of both physical and mental wellbeing and the positive connection between the two. Our sporting champions work with young people to get them active and to think positively about ways they can improve their mental wellbeing. In the last full year we’ve reported on, mental wellbeing rose by an average of 7% across all programmes.

To mark the start of Stress Awareness Month, we’ve pulled together three top tips from our athlete mentors to help deal with stress.

THE FIVE WAYS TO WELLBEING

The Five Ways to Wellbeing is a concept that is discussed on all our programmes and forms an integral part of the way we encourage young people to think about wellbeing.

Connect

Connect with the people around you. With family, friends and neighbours. At home, school, work or in your local community. Think of these as the cornerstones of your life and invest time in developing them. Building these connections will support and enrich you every day.

Be Active

Go for a walk or run. Step outside. Cycle. Play a game. Dance. Exercising makes you feel good. Most importantly, discover a physical activity you enjoy and that suits your level of mobility and fitness.

Take Notice

Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savour the moment, whether you are walking to school, eating lunch or talking to friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you appreciate what matters to you.

Keep Learning

Try something new. Rediscover an old interest. Sign up for that course. Take on a different responsibility at school or at home. Fix a bike. Learn to play an instrument or how to cook your favourite food. Set a challenge you will enjoy achieving. Learning new things will make you more confident as well as being fun.

Give

Do something nice for a friend, or a stranger. Thank someone. Smile. Volunteer your time. Join a community group. Look out, as well as in, seeing yourself, and your happiness, linked to the wider community can be incredibly rewarding and creates connections with the people around you.

THE STRESS CONTAINER

In this clip below, Adam Whitehead talks about how stress can affect people in different ways, and how some people can become stressed more quickly than others. Adam uses the Stress Container or Stress Bucket analogy to explain that your ability to handle stress  can depend on the size of your stress container.

When working with young people – or indeed with our corporate partners – our athletes will talk about the coping strategies that you can use to ensure that your stress container doesn’t overflow, such as the Five ways to Wellbeing and the importance of breathing properly.  

THE IMPORTANCE OF BREATHING

The ability to control your breathing is a key technique to controlling and managing stress. Calming, breathing techniques are really useful as they can be done anytime and anywhere and can be a real benefit for stress, anxiety or panic. In the video below taken from a longer wellbeing talk, taekwondo champion and athlete mentor Henry Cookey demonstrates a breathing technique to help reduce stress and to help you feel more relaxed.

We’ll be posting tips more from our athlete mentors throughout the month, so do keep an eye out for those on our social channels.

If you’re looking for more tips on dealing with stress, the NHS have some excellent resources and information available online and you can find out more about Stress Awareness month here. The Mental Health Foundation also have an excellent resource about stress and ways to manage it on their website.