What are skills for wellbeing?

What are skills for wellbeing?

So my name is Sarah and I’m Helen and we’re both psychological well-being practitioners with talking therapies. So in talking therapies, we support people who are experiencing low to moderate symptoms of both anxiety and depression. We support people by using something called low inensity cognitive behavioral therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy is helping you understand how your thoughts and your behaviors are being influenced by your physical sensations and your emotions. By having the understanding of how they all work together, we have an understanding of what a vicious cycle is. So, cognitive behavioral therapy is helping you break out of that vicious cycle by showing you different techniques and strategies to manage, reduce, and control those symptoms. Our skills for well-being courses last over six sessions and throughout those sessions we hope to provide people each week with a different strategy or technique to put themselves back into the situations that are making them feel anxious or to manage the worries and the anxious thoughts alongside the physical symptoms. Our skills for wellbeing courses aren’t group therapy. Although they’re in a group setting, there is no expectation to speak or share your experiences. With symptoms of depression, you might often hear people say, “We’ll just snap out of it.” But with our service and with cognitive behavioral therapy, we’re wanting you to understand that it isn’t a choice and it is a recognized illness. You might find that you’re struggling to enjoy things you previously did. You might also find that you’re lacking motivation and having lower energy. This is what that vicious cycle is keeping you in. And the skills for well-being course will show you those techniques so that you can change your behaviors and also challenge your thoughts that are bringing out those symptoms of depression. With anxiety, you may also experience physical symptoms such as their heart racing, sweaty palms, that nauseous sort of butterfly feelings in their stomach. Um, and alongside that, they can also experience worries and anxious thoughts. And hopefully the course will help you understand that that is an automatic bodily response. Due to those physical symptoms and the thoughts, people might then start to avoid situations because they don’t want to feel those feelings. So they might even remove themselves or not go all together. With our course, we hope to provide people with the different strategies and techniques to um kind of put themselves back into those situations that they might be avoiding, but also to look at managing the worries and the physical symptoms. People who have completed the course have said it’s helped them to understand and recognize their own symptoms of low mood and anxiety and they feel that they’ve come away with a toolbox of strategies and that helps them to manage those symptoms sort of on a dayto-day. So we want to make sure that the skills of wellbeing course is a welcoming environment and accessible to everyone which is why we have sessions both online and face to face. If at any point you do have any worries or you do have any concerns, then you are able to contact us either by our number or by finding our information on our website. While you are waiting, our website has further resources and information about what it is that we offer as a service. There will also be further information about crisis services and services available in your area if you ever needed that further support. So, we hope you found this information helpful and we look forward to meeting you all soon.