Helping Students Take Control of Their Own Emotional Wellbeing
Students who struggle with anxiety often feel overwhelmed. This can lead to them avoiding lessons or homework, and not knowing how to manage their feelings.
They often have low self-esteem, are confused by a distorted view of life, and become reliant on others to guide, support and help them get through the day.
Whichever way you look at the reality, it’s a high price to pay, in staff, budgets, mental health and wellbeing. Without the right intervention, students won’t learn to take back control of their thinking.
When we teach new ways of thinking we can expect new behaviours.
Gandhi reminds us that “We are that we think”. So it should be no surprise that students’ behaviour shows how they think of themselves and their place in the world.
But how are we to shift a student’s thinking, so that it makes the best use of the time left before summer exams?
How can we ask them to change the conscious choices they make so that they come to make better decisions about what they ‘do’, and how they ‘are’?
We know where we want them to be:
- we want them to become more self-reliant so they come to believe in their own ability to work through anxiety
- to feel more in control of their feelings, so that fear doesn’t push them sideways
- to have options in how they respond to challenges, so they don’t default to disruptive patterns that might affect others
- to trust their own instincts in how to act wisely
- to take the best route through any challenge
There’s a common thread behind all these sound objectives. Equipping our young people with the ability to make sound choices that takes responsibility for their emotional well-being.
Why ask Students to take responsibility
When we’re in charge of our decisions, we’ve no-one to blame but ourselves. We can’t fall back on finger pointing. It’s OUR choice and we need to own it.
Any successful school stress management programme needs to have accountability and responsibility at its core. Involving your students in their own solutions will set them up for success because you’re asking them to commit to the individual course goals.
Once you get their agreement, they can see that they’re at the heart of any change strategy.
Programmes that ask students to step up to take responsibility have a much greater success rate than others because you’re not ‘teaching at’, you’re ‘sharing with’.
When students start to feel more in control, they’ll be able to manage their emotions better, and feel more confident.
But feeling in control won’t come until they’ve found how to manage their stress.
You can put any number of strategies in front of them, but until you give them time to try them out, again and again, they won’t find what works for them.
There are many stress management strategies they could choose from. None will become their ‘go to’ until they:
- Understand the nature of a particular challenge (know their triggers)
- Try a range of solutions to help overcome it (test the ideas)
- Keep practising with a favoured technique to embed the learning (repeat the process)
- Find it’s now their new habitual way of managing the initial challenge (set this as their default reaction pattern)
What do we mean by Emotional Wellbeing?
It’s a heavy term, loaded with feeling. Our emotions are largely biological. They’re a short-term physical reaction to a personal trigger. It’s the feelings that follow behind and around the initial emotion that can lead us into more deep water or onto high ground!
When our emotions are well – we are well. Think of being emotionally out of balance as the opposite of emotionally well. When we’re out of balance we’re said to be in a state of dis-ease.
Emotional Wellbeing then is us firing on all cylinders and not ‘out of sorts. It’s a state of harmony and ease where we’re not fazed by much and able to bring ourselves back ‘into balance’ when we’re thrown a ‘googly’! 553
The 3 things you need to have in place before you ask them to be accountable
Having worked in prisons for the past 15 years, I’ve come to see some of things we need to set up before learning (or at least a start at learning) can take place.
You can't expect any student to agree to accountnablity until they have acknowledged and accepted 3 basic things:
- That there is something that needs shifting
(that something is going on with them that needs attention. It needs looking at by them, themselves, and also by others they’ve come to trust) - That whatever they decide to do/change/become is worth their time and effort (that wherever they choose to get to is do-able and within them)
- That they can count on the help of others to support them on the way
that you or others will be with them as they experience the ups and downs on ‘getting there’
Conversations on accountability will turn to dust if these aren’t a given and set up in advance.
And of course, they’ll need to know HOW to get there and WHAT to do after they’ve figured out the WHYs.
We can, and we should ask our students to take responsibility for their own wellbeing. Of course we have a moral obligation to support them, but when THEY take ownership, they’ll be wanting to shift their responses.
They’ll be willing to try new ideas. They’ll be hopeful and finding solutions
Ask them to join you in establishing joint ways of working on a challenge and let them seek THEIR way to finding a way through.
When we believe in them, and show them a route through the problem, they may start to see possibilities for themselves too.