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National Stress Awareness Month - The Open College of the Arts

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National Stress Awareness Month

The month of April is National Stress Awareness month, organised by the Stress Management Society. After the year we’ve had I’m sure everyone is feeling stress in at least one aspect of their lives. Whether it’s additional work responsibilities, no work, ill health, mental health, or anything in between there’s a lot going on that can be a trigger for stress.

It feels timely to be thinking about stress as we head into Spring with lockdown restrictions in the UK starting to ease slightly. In many ways, this lockdown has felt tougher than those that have come before, and it’s nice to think about putting the winter behind us and look forward to nicer weather if nothing else.

With stress awareness month, give yourself the time and space to step back from things if you can, and think about the stresses that you’ve gone through or are going through. Perhaps you could engage with the 30 day challenge from the Stress Management Society, with physical, mental, and emotional challenges to build positive habits. Or if that’s too much, try alternating them every three days, or use the wellbeing circle in the OCAWellbeing app where there’s two things a day to focus on.

In addition to the activities from the Stress Management Society, we here at OCA are going to be looking at the aspects of studying with OCA that might be stressful, and then how we might mitigate those stressors.

We’ll also be talking about some of the things that we have learnt as staff undertaking the Mental Health First Aid courses, in particular looking at our stress containers and how we think about stress.

We are going to break all of this down day by day, over on OCAWellbeing, our new app to support OCA student wellbeing. If you haven’t yet downloaded the app, you can find it on either the App Store or Google Play, and see what will be happening over the course of the month.

Apple Store

Google Play

If some of these things speak to you, and you have your own experiences and methods of dealing with the stresses of studying let us know on social media and on the app. Keep checking in on OCAWellbeing every day for new posts and content throughout April, and if you’ve done some work or artistic practice around stress or well-being and you’re happy to share, please send them to us as we’d love to put these up.

 

Featured image: Jessica Watson

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Posted by author: Craig Dewis

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