National Stress Awareness Day Interview
Duration: 4 mins 57 secs
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| Description: | Sarah Hughes, a Senior Counsellor for the Staff Counselling Centre at the University of Cambridge took a few minutes to sit down with HR Communications Co-Ordinator Alexandra Collett for the HR Division, to answer a few questions on the series of Calm Spaces, Sarah and her colleague Caroline McSharry are providing over the next few months. |
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| Created: | 2023-10-30 09:59 |
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| Collection: | HR Division |
| Publisher: | University of Cambridge |
| Copyright: | Alexandra Collett |
| Language: | eng (English) |
Transcript
Transcript:
Alexandra:- Can I just ask for you to explain a little bit about what you do in your role with Caroline?
Sarah: Yes. So, well, we both work at the Staff Counselling Centre where we provide 1 to 1 counselling for members of staff with the
university contract and also for college staff if their colleges have signed up. My role as a senior counsellor. So I do some client work
and we also offer other services and calm space is one of those.
Alexandra:- My second question that I would like to ask you is can you explain what calm spaces is?
Sarah:- Absolutely. So we just hold a 30 minute space on teams once a week, we run it in 1010 week blocks. So currently we're running it on a Thursday at 1:00 o'clock, but we do change the day and time with each new block of session so that the most amount of staff can access it at some point and it's basically it's really simple. It is we open the session.
One of us will facilitate so Caroline or myself, and sometimes we have guest appearances from other people in our service and we offer maybe one or two practises of reflection of breath work, of mindfulness exercises, and it's just really want to invite everybody to take a moment out of their busy days and just be able to ground themselves, see themselves and have a moment of calm.
Alexandra:- Lovely and why do you think these calm spaces are so important in this day and age, especially with our the way we're working and stuff at the moment as well?
Sarah:- That's that's a really good question. I think that no matter what we do, we are living in a time and in a part of the world where we're just constantly sort of informed and we can feel quite overwhelmed whether we know it as that or not. You know, we often use words like feeling stressed, feeling burnt out, feeling rundown and I think that what I understand about that Alex, is that there are people that are experiencing a stress response, so their body is flooded with adrenaline more often than they imagine, and so one way and the best way to manage that is to change our breathing.
Alexandra: Brilliant. So breathing is obviously a really important part. I know there's obviously lots of other things that like yoga, for example, meditation. I find them personally really, really helpful. You know, having that time out and I can see there's quite a lot of sessions books. So they're going to be running through this month and next?
Sarah: They are. I think we've got we've got six more sessions in this block. We're wondering whether it might be a value to the staff to run a sort of pre holiday period one in December. But then we will start again in the new term for definite with another block of 10.
Alexandra: Brilliant and what would you say to people on stress Awareness Day, would you? What would your advice be basically?
Sarah: I think that we are all living with various amounts of stress. Some of it we can manage, OK, some of it for some of us it will be chronic stress. There will be things going on in our lives or in our job that on a daily basis we are feeling sort of a lot of anxiety, maybe some low mood and then there are those sort of intermittent stresses as well. So it's just about what do you need to best support yourself?
It's about finding something that's a good fit for you, because mindfulness isn't for everybody, and yoga isn't for everybody and we can often feel, oh, well, those are the big ones. So what do I do? And I would say small and often is really important. And it's like fitting something in as you would, for example, twice a day. We clean our teeth. We don't think about it. That's what we do. We know we need that to do that.
Taking care of our teeth and we just want to do that with the grounding and the breathing exercises. So small regular.
Don't set yourself an unreasonable target
It's right and proper to look after your mental health. It's not a sign of weakness. We all experience high levels of stress.
And it's a good thing to take care of that.
Alexandra: Thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.
Sarah: Yes. So, well, we both work at the Staff Counselling Centre where we provide 1 to 1 counselling for members of staff with the
university contract and also for college staff if their colleges have signed up. My role as a senior counsellor. So I do some client work
and we also offer other services and calm space is one of those.
Alexandra:- My second question that I would like to ask you is can you explain what calm spaces is?
Sarah:- Absolutely. So we just hold a 30 minute space on teams once a week, we run it in 1010 week blocks. So currently we're running it on a Thursday at 1:00 o'clock, but we do change the day and time with each new block of session so that the most amount of staff can access it at some point and it's basically it's really simple. It is we open the session.
One of us will facilitate so Caroline or myself, and sometimes we have guest appearances from other people in our service and we offer maybe one or two practises of reflection of breath work, of mindfulness exercises, and it's just really want to invite everybody to take a moment out of their busy days and just be able to ground themselves, see themselves and have a moment of calm.
Alexandra:- Lovely and why do you think these calm spaces are so important in this day and age, especially with our the way we're working and stuff at the moment as well?
Sarah:- That's that's a really good question. I think that no matter what we do, we are living in a time and in a part of the world where we're just constantly sort of informed and we can feel quite overwhelmed whether we know it as that or not. You know, we often use words like feeling stressed, feeling burnt out, feeling rundown and I think that what I understand about that Alex, is that there are people that are experiencing a stress response, so their body is flooded with adrenaline more often than they imagine, and so one way and the best way to manage that is to change our breathing.
Alexandra: Brilliant. So breathing is obviously a really important part. I know there's obviously lots of other things that like yoga, for example, meditation. I find them personally really, really helpful. You know, having that time out and I can see there's quite a lot of sessions books. So they're going to be running through this month and next?
Sarah: They are. I think we've got we've got six more sessions in this block. We're wondering whether it might be a value to the staff to run a sort of pre holiday period one in December. But then we will start again in the new term for definite with another block of 10.
Alexandra: Brilliant and what would you say to people on stress Awareness Day, would you? What would your advice be basically?
Sarah: I think that we are all living with various amounts of stress. Some of it we can manage, OK, some of it for some of us it will be chronic stress. There will be things going on in our lives or in our job that on a daily basis we are feeling sort of a lot of anxiety, maybe some low mood and then there are those sort of intermittent stresses as well. So it's just about what do you need to best support yourself?
It's about finding something that's a good fit for you, because mindfulness isn't for everybody, and yoga isn't for everybody and we can often feel, oh, well, those are the big ones. So what do I do? And I would say small and often is really important. And it's like fitting something in as you would, for example, twice a day. We clean our teeth. We don't think about it. That's what we do. We know we need that to do that.
Taking care of our teeth and we just want to do that with the grounding and the breathing exercises. So small regular.
Don't set yourself an unreasonable target
It's right and proper to look after your mental health. It's not a sign of weakness. We all experience high levels of stress.
And it's a good thing to take care of that.
Alexandra: Thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.