Mental Health Awareness Week – Diary-keeping to Relieve Anxiety

Followers and friends of the Reimagining the Diary (RtD) project will know that supporting educator wellbeing and metal health is at the heart of the Diary Toolkit.

This week, starting 15^th May, it is Mental Health Awareness Week – which this year focuses on anxiety.

In support of this, we offer a practical blog post linking RtD findings with advice from mental health charities and organisations. Read on to find out how keeping a diary could help you and/or your colleagues cope with anxiety today.

High levels of anxiety in education staff

The study conducted for The Teacher Wellbeing Index (TWI) 2022, showed that the trend of higher-than-average anxiety in education professionals continues, with 44% of education staff (46% of teachers and 41% of school leaders) experiencing signs of anxiety compared with 37% of the general population as reported by the ONS (see below).

Graphic from The Teacher Wellbeing Index ¹

The TWI cites a variety of reasons for these levels of anxiety which include workplace culture, not feeling supported or trusted, feeling pressured to attend work when unwell and, of course, workload.

Findings from the RtD project suggest that creating a bespoke diary using the toolkit “may help address the feelings of loss of time, anxiety and overburden that characterise the contemporary teaching profession in the UK, with implications for other groups of ‘busy’ professionals too.” ²

Signs and symptoms

In their advice regarding reasonable adjustments for teachers suffering from stress and anxiety, the NEU lists the following well-known symptoms:

• Unexpected attacks of heart-pounding panic;
• Trouble concentrating;
• Irritability;
• Restlessness;
• Stomach upset and dizziness;
• Frequent urination or diarrhoea;
• Shortness of breath;
• Headaches;
• Fatigue;
• Insomnia; and
• Muscle tension.

These symptoms can have a big impact on both personal and professional life and can make creating and maintaining a healthy work-life balance very difficult.

How can diary-keeping help?

So why are diaries useful for alleviating anxiety? There are several reasons why the process of stopping, recording, remembering, and reflecting are good for an anxious mind:

1. Take control

At number three in their list of ways to cope with anxiety the Mental Health Foundation recommend keeping a diary in order to note the causes of your anxiety and take time out to ‘worry’, allowing you to free up some mental space (or cognitive load) and move on with your day. They state that:

“It’s important that we don’t try to ignore our worries. Taking the time to keep a record of what’s happening in your life and how it’s affecting you can help you understand what is triggering your feelings of anxiety. Knowing this can
help you better prepare for and manage situations that may cause anxiety.

Sometimes it helps to give yourself a certain time of day to be your ‘worry time’. It could be half an hour first thing in the morning for to sit with your worries and write them down in your diary. When that’s out of the way, you can move on with the rest of your day. This can help you take control and stop anxiety getting in the way of what you want to do.”

This space to worry can be both a reassuring and “cathartic experience that lowered anxiety” ³; for some the diary process ‘was like talking almost to a friend’ (RtD Focus Group 2019).

2. Know your triggers

Mental health charity Mind also suggest keeping a diary to help with anxiety, they say

“It might help to make a note of what happens when you get anxious or have a panic attack. This could help you spot patterns in what triggers these experiences for you, or notice early signs that they are beginning to happen.”

 

Mind also offer lots of information around the causes and triggers of anxiety which you can read about here. Knowing what causes you to feel anxious can help you develop strategies to deal with anxiety and plan for situations you know will make you feel anxious.

3. Identify solutions

Mind’s point above is further supported by the NHS who suggest that understanding your anxiety can help address it:

“Keeping a diary of what you are doing and how you feel at different times may help you understand why you’re anxious and identify ways to manage or get rid of anxiety.”

Keeping a diary and using a variety of techniques to do so, can help you gain a sense of perspective. It can provide the opportunity to zoom out or to look at things from a different angle, and perhaps find ways of addressing issues you can solve, and recognising the things that you can’t!

4. Celebrate good times

As we said in our post on Lucy’s book, diaries offer a space for celebration and a chance to capture what goes well. This can help overcome negativity bias, which is the tendency to focus on negative feelings and recall negative events and comments more readily than positive ones.

Mind suggest

“You could also make a note of what’s going well. Living with anxiety can mean you think a lot about things that worry you or are hard to do. It’s important to be kind to yourself and notice the good things too.”

 

In this way, education professionals can benefit from using the diary to move between caring for others (caregiving) and caring for themselves (caretaking).

5. Mix it up

Verywell mind advocate a range of journaling techniques. They suggest free writing, planning, thinking differently about problems, using prompts, reflecting on successes and keeping a thought diary.  This varied approach to diary-keeping is reflected by the Diary Toolkit which is designed to be a playful, creative, and multimodal space drawing on a mix of physical and digital resources.

This creative and varied aspect of the Diary Toolkit is experienced positively by those that have been part of the project to date:

“I’m really enjoying using the different activities and trying new ways of thinking about wellbeing.” (Participant in phase 5)

 “It is good as a guide and a prompt” (Participant in phase 7)

Find out more and/or seek help:

Whether anxiety is seriously affecting your life, or you only notice anxious thoughts from time to time, these tips provide strategies for self-care that may help look after your mental health. See below for a list of contacts and information from the organisations drawn on in this post. If you would like to be involved with the Diary Toolkit project in the next phase, please contact Lucy Kelly or Pen Williams; we would love to hear from you!

What can we do to cope with feelings of anxiety? | Mental Health Foundation

Anxiety and panic attacks – Mind

Education Support, supporting teachers and education staff

Anxiety – Every Mind Matters – NHS (www.nhs.uk)

Stress and Anxiety reasonable adjustments | NEU

Journaling for Anxiety Relief (verywellmind.com)

https://www.samaritans.org/ or call 116 123 – 24 hours a day 365 days a year

Notes

1. Teacher wellbeing Index 2022 full report avaliable at https://www.educationsupport.org.uk/media/zoga2r13/teacher-wellbeing-index-2022.pdf
2. and 3. Lucy Kelly, Grace Huxford & Catherine Kelly (2020): ‘In Our Daily Struggles’: Diaries as a Tool for Teacher Well-being, Life Writing, DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2020.1763232