Mental Health Awareness Week (14-20 May) is less than a week away, and this year its organiser, the Mental Health Foundation is asking the question, ‘Stress: are we coping?’.
Ahead of this milestone, and to help people answer this question, Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) England has this week launched the ‘Address Your Stress’ toolkit. This practical set of resources is designed to help everyone identify signs and sources of stress, reflect on different coping strategies, and take steps to help reduce the impact too much stress can have.
The ‘Address Your Stress’ toolkit is free for anyone to download from MHFA England’s official campaign page and includes stress-themed GIFs, shareable infographics on stress, sources of stress and self-care and an email banner to help people show support for the campaign.
As part of this resource, mental health advocate, Neil Laybourn, also shares his top-stress busting tips and explains the ‘Stress Container’ - a tool used on Mental Health First Aid courses to help people understand and manage stress. An interactive digital version of this tool will be released later this week to help people further understand the impact of different coping strategies on their stress levels.
Commenting on the launch of the ‘Address Your Stress’ toolkit, MHFA England Director, Caroline Hounsell, commented, “None of us are immune to stress but some people are more vulnerable to it than others. It’s how we recognise we may be experiencing too much stress and how we manage it through positive coping strategies that can help prevent it overwhelming us or contributing to mental ill health.”
“That’s why we have created the ‘Address Your Stress’ Toolkit to enable more people to recognise the sources of daily stress, spot the signs of overstress in themselves and others, develop helpful coping strategies and recognise when they may need to access more support.”
Find out more about MHFA England’s campaign and download the materials from the ‘Address Your Stress’ toolkit by visiting mhfaengland.org/mhfa-centre/campaigns/mhaw2018