About Our Live Online Classes

Are they suitable for me?

The answer is YES if …

• you are experiencing symptoms of a common mental health concern such as stress, anxiety, worry, sleep issues, depression, low mood, or lack of motivation
• you want to understand more about why you are feeling the way you are and learn way to overcome this
• you are feeling motivated to make changes to improve how you feel
• you have access to the internet
• you have not also made a referral to us, already engaging in an online group, you are not waiting for or engaging with one of our other therapies

How do the classes help?

• They are based on guided self-help cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) – an effective therapy for treating depression and anxiety symptoms. You will learn how your thoughts, feelings, behaviours and physical symptoms and how these interact and impact you emotional wellbeing. The classes are run by qualified psychological wellbeing practitioners
• These are psychoeducational classes, not group therapy – you will be watching, listening, and learning about your mental health and ways to improve it, and encouraged to make changes outside of the classes to improve how you feel

How does it all work?

• Same time and place (online) – the sessions run online as a Microsoft Teams Live Event, at the same day and time consecutively each week. You don't need an account, you can simply join using the link we send you each week. 
• We monitor your progress – we want to make sure that everybody is benefiting from the classes, and so each week you will be required to answer a set of mood measure questionnaires prior to the session. You will be sent a reminder by text 48 hours before the session to log in and complete these online, and once complete you receive your weekly session link and workbook. For more information on these measures please see below.
• Session Links & Workbooks – following you completing you will receive a link to each session and a workbook which covers what was taught and helps you to put the learning into practice
• The classes are completely confidential – you have no camera or mic on during the session, but we encourage you to speak with us through a live chat at the side of the screen (and in the chat you use whichever name you like – it can be your first name a nickname, an initial, or you can be anonymous)
• What if I don’t feel better? - You need to make a change to see a change! Therefore, we would encourage you to attend all sessions and put into practice the techniques taught. However, if at the end of the group classes we feel you may need a little further support, you will automatically be offered an appointment with one of our psychological wellbeing practitioners after a few weeks. We will assess whether we feel you need further support using you mood measure questionnaires, or you can also get in touch to let us know.

More About the Questionnaires

These are nationally set questionnaires which we are required to gather as a mental health service. They look at very common symptoms of anxiety and low mood that we all experience form time to time. Please note that they do not indicate any mental illness. The questionnaires help us and yourself to monitor your progress throughout your treatment with us, and let us know if you benefit from the treatment and if you want require some more support. 

How is your data used?

LMWS work together and observe the NHS Code of Practice on confidentiality.   We work in the same way and use a single, secure, electronic patient records system which is approved nationally by NHS England. For attendees to our groups, we are required to create a treatment record in order for us to report to NHS England on how many people are accessing our service.  The reports only include statistics, for example about the numbers of patients attending, or the degree of symptoms reported by attendees. No information that could reveal a patients identity is used in any of these reports and your record on our system is closed once the workshop is finished (unless you go on to, or are already receiving further treatment with us). 

Your Safety 

It is very common to have distressing thoughts when feeling overwhelmed. One of the questions therefore asks about “thoughts to harm yourself or end your life”, which is just as common as all of the other symptoms listed. We require you to answer this question, so please do not leave it blank. We assume that all attendees are able to keep themselves safe and will not follow up on this question. If you would like to talk to somebody, please get in touch.

Having these thoughts is different from making plans or having intentions to act on them, and if you feel you may be at risk you can find sources of support at: https://www.mindwell-leeds.org.uk/i-need-help-now#/

The Stress Control 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.