Throughout October FD Consultants will be looking at the impact COVID-19 has had on all of us in one way or another. We’ll be focussing on our new webinar service entitled “Living in uncertain times”, sharing tips on how we can all look after ourselves, exploring the positives of living with Coronavirus, and the impact it may have on our future. As staff return to the workplace or continue to work from home it is important that management consider the wellbeing of their teams and implement the following:
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s the importance of creativity, to be more patient, and to stay connected with family and friends. Being flexible helps us to stay resilient during difficult times, as does appreciating others more, and offering acts of kindness. Whilst this is a frightening and stressful time, it’s also an opportunity to grow. At FD Consultants we often experience, first-hand, Post-Traumatic Growth (Joseph, 2011), where individuals who survive trauma become stronger, more resilient and turn the negative experience into something positive to help others heal in the future. FD Consultant’s team of accredited specialists will offer ongoing support to help manage stress, prevent burnout and provide specialist trauma care where required, enabling your staff with the tools to cope, and recover more quickly. If you want to find out more request one of FD Consultants webinars to support your staff by emailing us at [email protected] Date: Oct 2020 Author: Maddie Nixon (Associate for FD Consultants)
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Throughout October FD Consultants will be looking at the impact COVID-19 has had on all of us in one way or another. We’ll be focussing on our new webinar service entitled “Living in uncertain times”, sharing tips on how we can all look after ourselves, exploring the positives of living with Coronavirus, and the impact it may have on our future. In last week’s blog we talked about challenges people were facing, this week we’re going to look at resources we can all implement to reduce our stress and anxiety levels.
FD Consultant’s team of accredited specialists will offer ongoing support to help manage stress, prevent burnout and provide specialist trauma care where required, enabling your staff with the tools to cope, and recover more quickly. If you want to find out more request one of FD Consultants webinars to support your staff by emailing us at [email protected] Date: Oct 2020 Author: Maddie Nixon (Associate for FD Consultants)
Over the past six months we’ve all faced new challenges as a result of lockdown, including:
Thinking about the challenges you’ve faced, or are continuing to face, and writing them down is a great way to logically look at your situation and address what is worrying you. What can you do, practically, to overcome, or reduce, these challenges? In next week's blog we will look at helpful routines you can put in place to combat challenges, concerns and worries. FD Consultant’s team of accredited specialists will offer ongoing support to help manage stress, prevent burnout and provide specialist trauma care where required, enabling your staff with the tools to cope, and recover more quickly. If you want to find out more request one of FD Consultants webinars to support your staff by emailing us at [email protected] Date: Oct 2020 Author: Maddie Nixon (Associate for FD Consultants) Throughout October FD Consultants will be looking at the impact COVID-19 has had on all of us in one way or another. We’ll be focussing on our new webinar service entitled “Living in uncertain times”, sharing tips on how we can all look after ourselves, exploring the positives of living with Coronavirus, and the impact it may have on our future. Coronavirus continues to spread across the world, with 31,664,104 confirmed cases worldwide and 972,221reported deaths (WHO, 24/09/2020), and in many countries the cases continue to surge, while others who believed they had the infections under control are now seeing another rise in cases. This is a learning experience for us all, but no one, including world leaders, have ever experienced anything on this scale for over 100 years, since the 1918 flu pandemic known as ‘Spanish flu’, and so we are living in unchartered territory. Scientists, drug makers and governments around the world are moving with unprecedented haste to develop a vaccine. The aim is to develop one by the end of the year, or early next year, which if successful would be a scientific feat as no vaccine has ever been developed so quickly (which goes to show what can be achieved when we work together). The collaborative working on these vaccines may hopefully mean that we will have more vaccines emerging that can deal with different aspects of the disease. While we wait for the vaccines we have to take individual responsibility for ourselves and to protect each other, such as hand washing, wearing masks and social distancing. Governments across the world have been forced to limit public movement and close businesses and venues in a bid to slow the spread of the virus. This has had a devastating impact on the global economy. Reviewing how COVID-19 has impacted the world it is understandable that it has been difficult for all of us living in these uncertain times to adapt quickly to the challenges we are facing. As human beings we do not cope well with uncertainty, it leaves us feeling as though we have no control over our lives, which means we may feel more stressed, anxious, depressed and powerless. Our minds start to search for answers playing out the ‘what-if’ scenarios, worrying about what might happen, trying to think through every possibility, and desperately trying to find solutions to take back control. However, this doesn’t work, we are not able to predict the future and so uncertainty is inevitable. What happens instead is that we end up feeling overwhelmed, anxious and exhausted. If you recognise these feelings, it is important to remember you are not alone, many of us have experienced these feelings at some point during this time and there are steps we can take to learn to cope with the uncertainty. FLARE is a useful model to refer to when living in uncertain times. FLARE is an acronym that offers a step-by-step approach to managing uncertainty (DR Inna Khazan).
Offer kindness and compassion to yourself and others in these difficult times. Uncertainty is difficult for all human beings. There is nothing you can do to eliminate the uncertainty. Offering yourself and others kindness and compassion will help ease the discomfort of uncertainty. FD Consultant’s team of accredited specialists will offer ongoing support to help manage stress, prevent burnout and provide specialist trauma care where required, enabling your staff with the tools to cope, and recover more quickly. If you want to find out more request one of FD Consultants webinars to support your staff by emailing us at [email protected] Date: Oct 2020 Author: Maddie Nixon (Associate for FD Consultants) Throughout September FD Consultants want to highlight the impact of negative thinking, which often gets activated when we are stressed. In this week’s blog we look at a mindfulness approach to letting go of negative thoughts which entails accepting the presence of these thoughts, and, as best you can, simply letting go of them. It is easy to get swept away by our thoughts, especially in the face of strong emotions. We get stuck ruminating and dwelling about the past, filled with guilt or regret. Our minds start racing and we cannot stop worrying about the future and imagining all the things that could go wrong. Or we replay conversations repeatedly in our heads, trying to make sense of them or figure out what we could have said differently. When our minds get going like this, not only is it exhausting; these patterns of thinking tend to make us feel bad, intensifying the emotions we are already feeling and generating additional negative emotions as well. Because this experience is so unpleasant, it is natural to want these thoughts to stop, and to be able to prevent yourself from even having them in the first place. We often wind up trying to make these thoughts go away and shut them out completely. But just like we cannot control our emotions or suppress our emotions, neither can we control or suppress our thoughts. So, what can we do when our thoughts start racing, we get stuck ruminating, or we just cannot quiet down our minds? One way of approaching negative and disruptive thinking is to examine our thoughts and see if there are some alternative ways of thinking about the situation. One approach is to bring mindfulness to our thoughts and learn how to just let go of them. “We do not need to fight with thoughts or struggle against them or judge them. Rather, we can simply choose not to follow the thoughts once we are aware that they have arisen,” write Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, John D. Teasdale and Jon Kabatt-Zinn in their book The Mindful Way Through Depression, about the Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) approach to depression. Mindfully letting go of thoughts is something we learn to do when we meditate. Many people think meditation involves having a blank mind completely void of any thoughts. However, in mindfulness meditation, the idea is not to shut out thoughts altogether, but simply to not allow yourself to get carried away by your thoughts. In mindfulness meditation of the breath, for example, we bring our attention to our breath, and try, as best we can, to keep our attention focused on our breath. Despite our intentions, our mind inevitably does wander from the breath, and we start thinking. For a guided meditation please click here When this happens, we simply acknowledge that our attention has wandered to our thoughts, and then let go of those thoughts and return our attention to our breath. And when our mind wanders again and we start thinking about something else, once again we acknowledge our thoughts, let go of them, and return our attention to our breath. Just as we learn to repeatedly let go of our thoughts and return our attention to our breath when we meditate, we can do the same thing as we go about our everyday life. When we practice letting go of thoughts in everyday life, we don’t always need to return our attention to the breath (though taking a breathing time out or returning to the breath for a few moments is always a great way to relieve stress). Instead, we can let go of a thought and return our attention to the work we were doing, or the book we were reading, or the person we were talking to, or whatever else we were doing when our thoughts began to steal our attention. Another way we can let go of a thought is to refocus our attention from our thoughts to our senses: the taste of the food we’re eating, the sound of the music we’re listening to; the sights around us; or the sensations of our feet striking the ground as we walk. Letting go of thoughts is as simple as acknowledging that our mind is off thinking about something other than the present moment, and then allowing that thought to pass out of our mind as we return our attention to whatever it is we are doing and whatever is going on in the present. For organisations looking for employee psychological support, FD Consultants are the trauma specialists and well-being service who will best deliver a reliable, quick, and bespoke support system in the workplace. FD Consultant’s team of accredited specialists will offer ongoing support to help manage stress, prevent burnout and provide specialist trauma care where required, enabling your staff with the tools to cope, and recover more quickly. Please do contact us at [email protected] if you require our psychological support services, either as an individual or organisation. |
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