Stress Control 

Important Information

All of our group classes are now running online, and how we monitor your progress is online too. You are required to complete a mood measure questionnaire prior to each session. You will receive a text reminder and link to the questionnaires 48 hours before your session starting. You must complete your online questionnaires at least 2 hours before each session of your group to receive an invite.  

Amy, our of our class facilitators, walks you through completing the questionnaires and joining the group online in this short video...

Click here for more information about how our online courses work

The Classes

This course focuses on helping us to reduce and better manage stress and anxiety. It teaches a variety of strategies, including: problem solving, challenging unhelpful thoughts, improving sleep, managing panic, improving lifestyle, reducing safety behaviours and avoidance.

Week One: Information about stress

You will find out what stress is and what it is not, the main signs, the vicious circles that keep it alive and how Stress Control works. We will  look at case studies from people talking about how stress affects them. You will receive a workbook of information and resources (and another at each future session) and we will encourage you to start to apply the learning between classes.

Week Two: Controlling your body

We get down to tackling stress in this session. You will learn how your body signs feed stress. We look at why we get stressed and how the body reacts to it. You will learn three skills – breathing retraining, exercise, and progressive relaxation, and also look at caffeine. We will give you a link to audio relaxation and we would like you to try to start to use this regularly.

Week Three: Controlling your thoughts

You will learn how stress affects your thoughts, and how your thinking feeds stress. We will teach you ways to ‘think your way out of stress’ by understanding more about how our thoughts work and how we can learn new ways to view and understand them. Then you will learn ‘The Big 5 Challenges’ and, finally, you will learn a way to nip stress in the bud by ‘Breaking stress up’.

Week Four: Controlling your actions

This session looks at how the way we act feeds stress. You’ll learn ways to face your fears and a great skill called ‘Problem Solving’. Also we will look at why some people, who seem to be doing all the right things, still don’t get over their stress. We will then teach you how to overcome this by ‘Getting out of the Safety Zone’. These skills are really useful for building up self-confidence.  You might start to see the big picture in this session – seeing how all the skills you have learned so far fit together.

Week Five: Controlling your panic, stress prevention, and medication

Panicky feelings are part and parcel of stress. This session helps you to better understand them, why they happen, and ways you can start to manage them. We will also look at some great ways to prevent stress. In this session we will also take a look at some of the common medications used for stress and answer some of the common questions about these and how they work.

Week Six: Controlling your sleep, managing your wellbeing and looking to the future

Poor sleep is often a result of stress. It also keeps stress going as you don’t recharge your batteries. So, in this session, we will look at skills to help you get a good night’s sleep. Wellbeing starts the final set of skills as we look at ways of staying on top of stress.