When did you last ask yourself: How am I doing?
Are we aware and able to manage our stress, especially when it becomes too intense? When do we notice that it is getting difficult to fall asleep, or we wake up in the middle of the night, when we eat too much or not enough, when our bodies ache, when we lose our motivation or when negative thoughts create anxiety? You are not alone.
After working in a stressful hospital environment for more than three decades, I realized that part of my responsibility and role as a professional principal is to take care of my team’s wellbeing.
Take the experience that we all had during the Covid-19 pandemic, when teachers, educators and medical teams had to face one difficult situation after another without adequate resources. At some point, if they didn’t find a way to release their stress, they started to experience symptoms. Those symptoms of unease are indicative of our autonomic nervous system which needs to “reset” and to allow for the spring to regain its movement of polarity between tension and relaxation, between constriction and expansion.
The Covid-19 crisis further exposed the public in a physical and emotional sense. People are now, more than ever, in need of emotional support and need to learn how to reconnect with their resources to overcome challenges.
We got acquainted with a language which we can use to communicate with the stressed and dysregulated parts of our beings, a language that can remain with us.
This language provides the necessary basis for self-help and a way to manage our daily anxieties and stress related symptoms. This unique language –EmotionAid is also an answer to the helplessness of educators, medical and paramedical staff, first responders and the myriads of professionals exposed to other people’s stress. The experience of working with different teams over the years, proved to me how essential it is for our resilience and the meaningful impact that it had. Their feedback was “I do not take my stress home anymore!”.
Today, the experience of acute stress is not present only in high-risk countries. The whole world is in constant crisis, and these tools are more relevant than ever.
As a result of the build-up of stress, people may display physical, emotional and behavioural symptoms which sometimes result in emotional injury, compassion fatigue or professional burnout. Damage caused by stress exacts significant costs from our society in many senses, yet it can be avoided.
Working with hospitalised children and their families, it became very clear that there was a need for a short and efficient intervention. EmotionAid® gave me the answer for the growing need for emotional first aid and short interventions for people suffering from various symptoms as a reaction to their medical situations or to their work surrounding. The tool can be used immediately after the event, or anytime thereafter, while waiting for therapy or in between sessions.
EmotionAid’s protocol contain 5 steps and is based on advanced research in neurosciences and psychology. We know that an early response from the onset of symptoms prevents more severe symptoms from developing.
In addition to relieving intense stress, the systematic use of the 5-steps protocol prevents burnout or trauma from taking root. Every time we successfully cope with stress, , and release any symptoms remaining inside us, we can be sure it will be easier to deal with the next challenge. I believe that these 5 steps can make emotional self regulation available in many places that teams like ours are involved in, such as war zones, hospital wards, classrooms and various emergency situations.
In our work we increase our resilience every time we overcome a challenge. This way, we can regard life’s challenges as opportunities to learn, grow and become stronger.
I believe that unleashing our natural ability to heal is like life insurance for wellbeing.
Maskit Gilan Shochat (from Israel)
E-mail address: scmcied@gmail.com
