Looking after your mind: Look after yourself
Source: Kind, Beyond Blue (2017)
Look after yourself
A small amount of stress can be useful to stay motivated. However, there are times at school - especially exam time - where stress levels can increase, resulting in a dramatic decline in performance.
Proven strategies for beating stress include:
- Meditation
- Listening to relaxing music
- Participating in mindful activity
- Art therapy
Meditation
Meditation is the practice concentrated focus on a single point of reference, either a sound, object, visualization, or movement in order to increase awareness of the present moment. The process promotes relaxation to reduces stress. There are many useful tools - apps, videos, sound files - to guide you through a meditation session:
- Mental Stillness APP
Designed specifically for young people, it quickly and effortlessly upskills young people with a simple, evidence based mindfulness/meditation method that reduces stress and improves mental wellbeing.
- Headspace APP
A guided meditation app that teaches you how to meditate, and provides bite-sized meditation sessions.
- Stop, Breathe and Think APP
Stop, Breathe and Think (SBT) is a guided meditation app that analyses your mood before leading you through a meditation session based on the results.
- Meditation for students on Soundcloud
A compilation of short meditation exercises from soundcloud. Short descriptions of each track can be found by clicking the titles.
- Guided meditation on Youtube
There is a large array of videos on youtube to guide your meditation sessions. You don't have to use the ones linked here - explore the site with keywords for the meditative experience you want.
Relaxing music
Music can have a profound emotional effect. Something with a slow tempo has the ability to release stress by quieting your mind and relaxing your muscles. Listening to music with around 60 beats per minute can cause your brain to enter a relaxed state. Music found to be relaxing includes Native American, Celtic, and Indian stringed-instruments, drums and flutes. Sounds of rain, thunder, and other nature sounds are also relaxing when mixed with light jazz and easy listening music. Because music is not often labeled with its beats per minute, the best relaxing music to listen to can be found by trial and error. Here are some good places to start:
- Relaxation music on 8tracks
8tracks is an internet radio site that features the sharing of user-curated play-lists. The relaxation lists featured through this link can be further refined to suit your particular listening mood.
- White Noise APP
Curate your own calming background noise with this app. It gives you great flexibility for painting your own soundscape, mixing up to five sounds at once.
- Relaxion music on Youtube
Youtube hosts a large variety of relaxation videos.
Mindfulness activities
So much time is spent thinking over things that happened in the past or worrying about things that may happen in the future. Mindfulness is a meditative technique which enables appreciation and enjoyment of the present moment. Mindful people:
- Focus on the moment,
- Try not to dwell on the past or future,
- Purposely pay attention to what's happening around them,
- Aspire not to label the things they notice as 'good' or 'bad'.
Some mindfulness activities can be found here:
- Pocket mindfullness
Six mindfulness activities to calm the mind amidst the madness of a hectic day.
- Smiling mind APP
A mindfulness meditation app designed to assist people in dealing with the pressure, stress and challenges of daily life.
- Mindful tea drinking
A quick and simple way to bring mindfulness into your daily life is with a cup of tea. Doing so can remind yourself to be conscious in the now, leaving you more calm and relaxed. Peppermint tea (Mentha Piperita), chamomile tea (Matricaria Recutita), lemon balm tea (Melissa Officinalis), passion flower tea (Passiflora incanata), green tea (Camella Sinensis), and rose tea (Rosa centifolia) are 6 teas which can help reduce stress.
Art activities to de-stress
The creative process of making art has been found to decrease stress levels. Try some of these:
- 10 easy art therapy techniques
These art exercises are designed to promote relaxation through artistic imagination. The focus is on the the therapeutic, meditative ritual of the creative process, rather than the final product you create so you do not need to be a brilliant artist to benefit.
- Colouring pages
This site has 1,300+ free adult colouring pages to download in PDF or to print. Images are of various themes, artists, difficulty levels and styles.
- Doodling techniques
Doodling has a bad rap as a style of unconscious drawings made while preoccupied. However, doodling can be self-soothing. Once you've found a few enjoyable and pleasing patterns and images you can return to them again and again.
- Water colour your feelings
This exercise can be followed to create an abstract painting without judgment and overthinking and by freeing your hand and mind from perfection and anxiety.