 Good evening and welcome to socio-emotional tools for maintaining mental health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic, a webinar produced by the Australian National University in partnership with the Black Dog Institute. My name is Bruce Christensen. I'm a clinical psychologist and head of professional programs in the research school of psychology and associate dean of culture and well-being in the College of Health and Medicine at the Australian National University. I am pleased to be your host and moderator for tonight's webinar. I want to begin tonight by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands we are meeting on, the many endeavors First Nations of Australia. I pay my respect to their elders past, present and emerging and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples present tonight. The impact of COVID-19 and the associated restrictions designed to thwart its spread has been deep and truly global. We have found ourselves isolated from friends and colleagues, worried about the safety of ourselves and others, adapting to the stress of working and living differently, coping with job loss and financial hardship and grieving the loss of loved ones. The broader consequences have been profound. The United Nations projects that those living below the poverty line could increase by 580 million and that hundreds of thousands of additional children will be at increased risk for experiencing domestic violence and early death. Researchers have also estimated that the direct cost of COVID-19 to the USA alone will be over $153 billion. Moreover, these impacts are disproportionate among those most at risk, including those living in poverty, the elderly, persons with disabilities, children, youth and Indigenous peoples. Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that the pandemic has also drastically affected the mental health and well-being of our communities. A large representative study conducted by the Australian National University and led by one of tonight's panelists, Dr. Amy Dahl, shows that Australians are experiencing high levels of depression and anxiety, related mostly to financial disruption and social isolation. Similarly, in their recent meta-analysis, Samantha Brooke and her colleagues at King's College London pointed out that quarantine and isolation frequently cause exhaustion, detachment, irritability, poor concentration, guilt, PTSD symptoms and grief. Research has also shown that negative reactions may be exaggerated among those already living with mental ill health and that several factors can fan the flames of poor mental health and well-being during and after quarantine, including job losses and stigma. Situational influences that mitigate negative impacts on well-being are shorter, quarantine or restriction periods, adequate education and communication, a good supply around basic needs, activities that prevent boredom, and voluntary isolation connected to altruism. Yet these situational factors notwithstanding, Australian communities are longing for tools and information that can be applied to coping with the current crisis. They are asking, how do we stay connected? How do we best help our kids? How do we handle negative or overwhelming emotions? To address these questions and continue a very important conversation, we have brought together a panel of experts to explain our best understanding of and tips for using socio-emotional tools. We will first hear from all of our panelists then turn it over to you, our listening audience for questions. Your questions can be sent to us using the questions and answers box on Zoom. And I would also like to make our audience aware that tonight's webinar is being recorded and that the questions and answers will be saved. Our first speaker this evening is Dr. Caitlin Lance Hope. She is a clinical psychologist who trained at the Australian National University and now manages the therapeutic team at SFAC, Strengthening Families for Abandoned Children in the UK. Caitlin's experience also includes working with trauma survivors and vulnerable children in India and Kenya. Her talk this evening is entitled, What do we mean by socio-emotional tools? So Caitlin, over to you. Thanks very much Bruce. Okay, I'm just going to share my screen with you. Thanks for having me everybody and we're going to have a chat now about what exactly we mean by socio-emotional tools. In my work, I talk a lot about being and feeling safe. So this idea of physical and emotional safety is at the core of whether we're just surviving or whether we're thriving. And it's really been brought to the forefront by the current pandemic. There's a physical threat to our lives of the virus itself and then there's the uncertainty that goes with it. So the emotional bit, that's uncertainty about job security, uncertainty about accessing food and basic necessities, when we'll be able to travel, hug people we love again. And this isolation compounds this sense of being unsafe. The people in our lives are a huge part of what makes us feel safe. And so when our usual ways of connecting are interrupted or those people are under threat, our sense of safety quickly deteriorates. When we feel unsafe, our capacity to cope shrinks. So this is where coping strategies or those socio-emotional tools, the tools we're talking about today come in. These strategies and tools help our wonderful brains and they also help the amygdala, which is a key part of the brain's emotion department. It acts like an alarm and conveniently it's also shaped like an almond. So there's lots of lovely illiterative A's there to help you remember it. So when the alarm sounds, when the amygdala sounds the alarm, it sends brain leaping into life-saping superhero mode. In superhero mode, brain shuts down all non-essential departments. Well, they're not essential in immediate everyday life-threatening situations, but they're kind of important in everyday life. So things like the thinking, planning, dreaming department, digestion department all get shut down. So this is great for those moments where we're faced with an oncoming car or a snake and need to get out of the way ASAP. But it's not so great for longer term or less visible stresses like a pandemic quarantine situation. Using coping strategies helps the amygdala to be just a little less jumpy and a little less trigger happy when it comes to sounding that alarm. And if you remember, I mentioned the amygdala as part of the emotion department. Emotions come and go. Some might be more comfortable or enjoyable than others, but they all give us really important information about how we're experiencing the world. The challenge is when emotions start to get big. As they grow, they can start to get more and more in the way of our ability to do the things we need to do every day to just get through life. And as you can see from this little guy here, they interrupt. If you're anything like me, this pandemic has triggered some big emotions. Curfing strategies won't take these emotions away, but they can help to reduce their intensity to make that sad feeling smaller again, or whatever emotion it is that you're experiencing. And because they do that, they can help make life more manageable. One way to get a clue about how big of our emotions might get and how quickly they might get there is to consider our starting point or our baseline. And we can imagine this by drawing a graph with stress going up the side and time growing across the bottom. Towards the bottom of the graph is where we're feeling safe and coping with the challenges of day-to-day life. And as we move up a little bit, this is where life's throwing a few more challenges our way. So we're still coping, but stress levels are creeping up. By the time we hit the red zone, we're feeling totally unsafe, no longer coping. Everyone starts their day at different points on the graph. And even within individuals, within individuals, it will vary as to how big our emotions will get and how quickly they'll get there. So just imagine for a minute, we're in pre-pandemic life. Remember that? We've just done a load of washing. Put the basket down on the floor for a moment to answer your phone. When you come back, the wet once-clean washing strewn all over the room, covered in muddy paw prints, and there's a cheeky puppy looking up at you from the midst of it. If you're starting in the green zone, you might bump up into the yellow zone. Or on a good day, you might even just laugh. Good theme at puppy is so cute. The washing goes back in the machine for a second wash and life goes on. But now we insert that same experience into pandemic life. Internet isn't working properly. Kids are refusing to do their schoolwork. Everyone's missing friends and just want to get outside for a while. You're already well into the yellow zone, maybe even the orange. The same clean washing, dirty puppy scenario produces very different results. And of course, pandemic life is thrust on top of ordinary life, which is not always green zone friendly. For someone struggling with illness and so already in the yellow zone, the fear associated with increased vulnerability can quickly escalate their stress into can't cope, overwhelmed, unsafe red zone. Or similarly for a refugee with a history of trauma or being separated from family culture, the red zone might already be familiar territory. And all the associated threats of the pandemic can see them taking out permanent residents there. So how do coping strategies help? They can do two things. They can start to lower out that starting point. They help bring it down to help make us feel safer again. Strategies that help in this way could be something like regular meditation, gratitude practices, regular exercise, things we do consistently and repeatedly over time. Coping strategies can also help to bring down our stress levels when something sends them skyrocketing. This might be asking for a hug, having a good pride, getting outside, connecting with nature. So now that we have a sense of what they do do, what coping strategies do do, it's also important to know what they can't do. And unfortunately, they're not a magic wand. They're not a cure. And I would love to give us all a magic wand right now. They won't fix your situation. They won't even change it. But they might change you and increase your capacity to cope. And it's surprising just how much difference that can make. So all the strategies that the panelists will be recommending today are there because careful research has shown them to be effective. But that doesn't mean they're going to be effective for everyone or in all circumstances. So this is your chance to experiment, to become a detective and to see what works for you. So some strategies need a while to take, need a while to show their effects. And so make sure you give them a good chance, even if they don't seem to have much effect initially. After you've explored one or two for a while, try some new ones. Over time, you'll develop your very own unique coping kit. Your coping kit could just be a mental list, or you could actually find a container and create a physical collection of things to remind you of each coping strategy or tool. It's a great activity to do with kids. Your container could be anything from a box, garbage from a recycling bin or a fancy bag. Having a range of strategies is really important, because if, like now, one of them is not available to you for some reason, any kids out there missing grandparent hugs, then you've got a range of other options to choose from if your coping kit is all set up. And a great way to get started with building your coping kit is to think of your senses. Your five senses, pick one, and think of some things associated with that sense. So if we think of sound, it could be birdsong, it could be listening to the waves at the beach, the voice of a loved one, anything you associate with feeling calm and safe, pop it in your coping kit. Pandemic life is hard, it's no denying it, but with the right tools and support, we can do this. Your coping kit will help give you a sense of control, and having a sense of control is a big step towards helping yourself feel safe again. And now I'm going to hand back over to Bruce, so the other panelists can give you more ideas for what to add to your kit. Thank you very much, Caitlin. Our next speaker is Dr. Amy Dahl, who is a clinical psychologist and lecturer in the Research School of Psychology at the Australian National University. Amy's research focus is on how people understand emotions and the role of emotional processing and empathy. Tonight, she will present befriending your emotions. Amy, over to you. Thanks for that introduction, Bruce. Give me a second and I'll share my screen too. Okay, so what I'm going to do tonight is give you a couple of tools to put in your coping kit for emotions. So we all know people who attract a lot of friends. They're generally smiley and cheerful, and a lot of fun to be around, which makes them pleasant to be around and makes us want to be around them more. We generally feel the same way about positive emotions. We like feeling happy, we do our best to feel that way most of the time. Inevitably though, we feel a huge range of emotions and that becomes even more so the case when something like this pandemic is going on. So for many of us over past weeks, we might have found ourselves feeling unexpectedly or expectedly sad. We might have felt quite angry or grumpy or irritated at times. And of course, many people are feeling very anxious and very worried. We might be feeling just plain out of sorts. That instinct when these emotions first come along can sometimes be just to ignore them. But we know this doesn't work and in fact, ignoring them can lead to them becoming even bigger, bringing their friends along. And when that happens, we try and employ more drastic strategies that might get rid of them quickly, but may have some other longer term consequences. So we might do things like drinking more coffee, eating more junk food, drinking more alcohol, or watching a lot of Netflix to try and distract ourselves and feel good in the short term. Now, although this does work in the short term, in the longer term, it can have negative consequences in that it tends to breed more negative emotions. So what is it that we should do and what can we put in our coping kits here? Well, research really shows that coming to accept our emotions and understand them as something informative and useful to us in our everyday life can help us to manage them much more effectively. As Caitlin said before, we can't get rid of our emotions, they come and go on their own, but what we can do is manage and regulate them in ways that keep them small enough that we can make choices about how we want to live our lives effectively and not let them distract us or interrupt our lives in ways that are unhelpful. So the first step to befriending our emotions is, of course, to learn their names. We know from quite a large body of research that even just adding these names to our emotions as they come up can help us to regulate them. And by regulate, I mean, take some of that intensity out of them. We can do this with labours like sad, angry and anxious, but we can also get much more nuanced and look at families of emotions. And what these do is add in the dimension of intensity. And this is when we're talking about going from that green to yellow to orange to red, so I'm that Caitlin was talking about before. So why I would like angry might sit in the middle. At the lower end, we might feel irritated or annoyed. And at the red end, we might feel furious. The trick is to try and catch these emotions when there's still irritation and annoyance so that we can manage them before they keep on escalating. One of the things that parents can really help their kids with in this space is labeling their emotions for them. So when you notice your child feeling an emotion, you can check in with them and say, I can see them. You seem to be feeling angry in this space and your child can help learn in that way. The second thing we need to do is get to know our emotions more thoroughly. Now, there are a lot of different theories about emotions, what they are and what they do. But one of the most influential is that they have some kind of evolutionary survival basis for us. So they help us to behave in ways that will get us to survive. Now, sometimes this means taking action. Other times this means communicating to other people what it is we need. So sadness is one of those communication tools where we express through tears and we draw the need for help and that can help survive. But for other emotions, it really involves this action tendency, which means that they spread to our bodies as well as our minds. And we see this in common ways that we refer to emotions. So, for example, we get hot flesh at banger. And what this reflects is the increased blood flow that we get in anger, getting us ready for that fight response. Or in anxiety and worry, we talk about having butterflies in our tummy or sweaty palms. Both signs of the sympathetic nervous system is becoming more active as well. One of the ways to get to know your emotions is just to give them a little bit more attention. So if you check in at the very start of the day when you first wake up and at the end of the day and have some awareness of how you're feeling in that space. If you've got children, one of the things you can do with them is just check in when you notice them experiencing an emotion, asking them how they're feeling in that moment. So giving attention helps with getting to know emotions. The final step is to be a good friend to them. Like any human friend you have, your emotions want to be listened to. They need to be heard. Listening to them and hearing them can help with regulation in and of itself. Be kind to your emotions. We tend to be harsher with ourselves than we are with other people. And we can be particularly harsh when we're feeling emotions that are really unwanted or unpleasant. Yet research shows that self-compassion is an important component of psychological well-being, particularly in times like this. Finally, we need to encourage helpful actions. Now, this doesn't mean giving your emotions what they're telling you that they want. Sometimes it means going a little bit beyond that. So sadness might tell you that they want to withdraw and have a good cry. And while there can be some value in this, they might also need a bit of encouragement to go for a walk and to do something else soothing like having a bath or engaging in a hobby. Anger might need a bit of encouragement to take a bit of time out and calm down before they take action. And anxiety often needs a little bit of gentle encouragement to be brave. So to summarise, to regulate your emotions, some tools for your toolkit, learn their names, get to know them and how they feel in your body as well as in your mind, and be a good friend to them by listening, being kind and encouraging helpful actions. And if anybody would like to find out a little bit more, some resources here. Thank you. Thank you very much, Amy. Our next speaker is Associate Professor Evan Kidd, a developmental psychologist in the Research School of Psychology at the Australian National University and a senior investigator and group leader, sorry, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycho-Linguistics. Evan's research includes work on the contributions of play to childhood development. And tonight he will present on the importance of play. Evan. Bruce. I'll just share my screen with you all. Where are we? Right at the end. Let's go back to the start. Okay, so what I'm going to talk to you all about is the importance of play in child development. Now, first of all, I'll give you a bit of a disclaimer. Unlike the other panelists here, I'm not a clinician. So what I'm going to do is tell you about some of the research that we know about play and why it's beneficial for children. And at the end, I'll give you a few tips to see what helps construct a good play episode. So I think we all have an intuitive understanding of what play is because we're all human and we've hopefully all engaged in a bit of play throughout our lifetimes. But because play is describes a wide range of activities, it's difficult to actually give it a good definition or a scientifically accurate definition. So let's start with the working definition. We could say that play is a non-serious self-generated activity conducted for pleasure and enjoyment. There's a few key terms there. The first is that it's non-serious and I think that we can all agree that it's part of the defining features of play. The second is that it's self-generated and this is going to be one important theme of this presentation. It's because it's self-generated and because children are choosing their own activities and they're gaining agency through activities. And by virtue of that, what they're doing is they're creating their own individual learning environment and that's the key to understanding child development. So let's now talk about a few of the actual individual play activities that are common to childhood and why they're important for a child's development. So first we have social contingency play. So within the first few months of life, children start to engage in contingent smiling which is in response to positive emotional expressions from people like their mothers or their fathers or any other humans for that matter. And what this does is it teaches children the dynamic to and fro of communication. It starts the process of them building a template for the basis of social interaction and as we all know at the moment social interaction is at a premium and it is quite important and this can then lead to important games like peek-a-boo as we see here with these two. Moving on to object play. What we have here is a little fella playing with some commercially available toys but object play doesn't need to be with toys. It can be with any household items for instance or things that children find in the backyard but please safety first. Object play is important because it helps children develop manual dexterity but it also helps them understand the physical properties of objects in the world. So what this little guy is doing is building a tower which will no doubt and by building that tower he's understanding things like different sizes. He's understanding even invisible things like gravity for instance. So when children engage in object play with others they also can have additional benefits. So when they place for instance with a significant other like their caregiver what this guy might learn are things like colour labels or even object labels so the name for block or the name for window. And we actually see that there are associations between joint object play and things like language development. Then let's move to pretend and social dramatic play so what we have here is a slightly older boy playing a doctor to his teddy bears patient. And pretend and social dramatic play is quite notable for its role in the development of many important and uniquely human skills. It's related to children's understanding of their own thought processes so their own minds and how their own minds are different from other people's minds. Because it's inherently social, social dramatic or pretend play helps children develop and refine their social skills and because it's also inherently creative what we find is that engaging in this type of play is associated with creativity outside of this play context. Research in my own lab has shown that young as two years of age engage in around three times the amount of sustained attention when a play episode has a pretend element than when it doesn't and sustained attention is really the basis for all kinds of learning in childhood. We've also found that social dramatic or pretend play is robustly associated with children's language development right throughout childhood. Finally physical play. Physical play has some obvious and obvious benefits. Some obvious benefits include motor development which promotes a healthy lifestyle. When physical play becomes games with rules such as sports or sports like activity it teaches children rule following and of course then rule enforcing for those of you who have played games for an extended period with children. Importantly physical play is stress relieving so expending excess energy through physical play promotes learning and studies with animals we know that engaging in physical play leads to the development of parts of the brain that are important for social functioning. So to recap developmentally appropriate play with peers and adults promotes the development of social emotional skills, language and cognitive processes, self regulation and healthy physical condition. Now developmentally appropriate means that age appropriate or the kind of play that's appropriate for a child's developmental level and what you notice here is I've said that it's with peers and adults so with other people social play. Now it's not the case that that solitary play doesn't confer any benefits for children but really play in childhood is a social enterprise and all of these benefits are best conferred when the child, when children are playing with each other or with another adult for instance. Importantly play also acts as a buffer for children's anxiety and lone mood which is relevant in the context of this webinar. Now why is this the case? I guess understanding why something is so lets us be able to harness the power of a particular behaviour. And of course the most obvious reason is that play is fun and promotes well-being. As I was saying before play is directed or generated and this provides a sense of agency to children and thus allows them to create their own optimal learning context. Play with others be they real or imaginary in the case of the teddy bear before is social and humans learn best from each other and this is particularly the case for children. So this allows children when play is social to learn from and about others. And finally play with competent others such as a caregiver or older sibling scaffolds children's development to new levels. So a founding father of developmental psychology was a Russian psychologist called Lev Fagotsky and he said that in play children are a foot taller. And what he meant by that was that in the safe context of play children are free to explore their environment. And when play is social such as that when it's with a caregiver or an older sibling these competent others are free to explore their development levels. So play is the child's optimal learning context. So I said I'd give you some tips really giving tips about play is quite difficult because play is a very individual activity in the sense of what one person plays another person's nightmare but I've tried to distill it down to a few tips that hopefully should be relevant to all the children out there and the first is that we should allow unstructured time in our days for our days and for children as well. So in primary schools we have recess and play time and we know that giving children this unstructured time is related to better academic outcomes. Unstructured time is a precondition for play. We can give children props that can help structure their play episodes. These need not be commercially available toys. These are pots and pans from the kitchen. They can be blankets or sheets and children can build cubby houses or forts with them or they can be things that children make themselves or find outside. Third, let your child lead but help them construct. What we find in our observations in the lab is that the most beneficial forms of play arise when the children introduce the topic and then their caregiver helps them construct that topic. They help them flesh out that play episode. And finally trust your instincts and have fun. Everyone knows has a sense of what play is and therefore it's really an instinctual type behaviour. And have fun because play shouldn't just be fun for kids. It should also be fun for adults and there's a school of thought that argues that when we play with children we are reigniting those fun warm childhood memories that we had when we were playing and this has some benefits for us too. So here are some resources that you might want to check out if you're interested in any of these ideas. These are all freely available on the web. And that's it from me. So thank you. Thanks very much for that Evan. Finally this evening we'll hear from Dr. Tegan Cruz. Tegan is a clinical psychologist and senior research fellow in the research school of psychology at University of New York. Her research has the dual goals of advancing our theoretical understanding of the social determinants of health and translating this science to improve outcomes for vulnerable and disadvantaged populations. The title of her talk this evening is building community. Why it is important to find your people and find ways to connect to them. Tegan. Thanks Bruce. I think I've got that up there now. As part of this evening I want to talk about I guess how can we rebuild and maintain one of the biggest things that this year has taken away from a lot of us which is our capacity to connect with the people we care about in the ways we are traditionally used to doing so which is mostly face to face. So when it comes to the impact of COVID-19 on our health the most obvious impact is obviously on physical health and of course that's been devastating in many countries around the world. But we shouldn't overlook the impact that it seems to be having on our mental health as a population either. In Australia lifeline is experiencing its busiest time ever in terms of the demand for its services and as Bruce highlighted earlier some research out of our school at ANU has found that there is higher levels of depression and anxiety in the community than we would generally see at the moment. Interestingly though that is not actually to do with a degree of exposure to the virus itself it's not necessarily the case that people who live in communities that have higher rates of COVID-19 are the ones who are experiencing the strain on their mental health. Instead it seems to be the case that this impact on our mental health and our well-being is being driven largely by the measures we're putting in place to try and restrict the spread of the virus. So here is a graph of the frequency of the search term loneliness on Google right across the entire world across the last five years and what you can see there is a spike beginning at around the beginning of March and peaking at a highest rate it has ever been by that 25% over the last five years around the middle of April which is also when lifeline services were hitting peak demand in Australia. These two things happening at the same time are not a coincidence in fact decades of research have told us that actually loneliness is one of the strongest risk factors for developing mental ill health right across the board. So this is really important for us to address as a community and to make sure particularly that the more vulnerable people in our community are being supported to stay connected during this time. Importantly too I want to add the caveat that this is not to argue against the need for social distancing measures. All the lockdowns that have been put in place around the world they're responsible for preventing some really tragic circumstances but it is to say that we need to manage these restrictions in a way that tries to mitigate or ameliorate as much of the mental health impact as possible and the way to do that is by focusing on how we can stay socially connected. So I want to talk about three main things today and how we can stay connected. If you're anything like me you look at a stock photo like this right now and go oh no those people are much too close together and that speaks to I think how much we've had to adjust from our normal day-to-day ways of staying connected during this period of pandemic life. So what are the strategies we can use to try and stay connected during this time? Well there are three I want to touch on today. The first one is focusing on quality over quantity. The second is being open to using new platforms and finally I want to talk about why it's important that we seek out group-based belonging and not just one-on-one relationships during this time. So firstly quality over quantity what do we mean by that? Well really I think there are some misguided recommendations out there that suggest that it's all about how often we touch base with others in terms of preventing loneliness. But the thing is loneliness is actually subjective it's about how much we feel like we're not getting our social needs met and so actually if you feel like you are catching up with people as often as you need to then you don't need to meet any kind of external guideline for how often you need to be touching base with friends and family. Instead it's the case that actually the science tells us that amount of contact with the people we care about is actually much less important than the quality of that contact that we're having with our loved ones. So focusing on quality interactions is really what we should be doing right now rather than setting ourselves some kind of goal in terms of frequency. The second tip is really about being creative and innovative when it comes to using new platforms. So as a researcher who's been doing work in this space for a long while I can tell you that pretty much the first question I always get asked when I present on the link between social connectedness and mental health is what about online connections? Do they count? Do the connections we have on social media or online are they good for our health too? And I think we're all will all be aware now suddenly that the answer is of course they can be good for in times like this they can be really critical for maintaining connections. In fact the medium that we connect across is actually really not that important. I think we should see these different platforms whether it's Zoom or text messaging or Facebook Messenger or my neighbors yesterday had a drive-by birthday party where all their friends drove past and honked their horns and waived and dropped balloons and flowers on the lawn. All of these creative ways of staying connected can be beneficial to the degree that they allow us to maintain quality in our relationships. So I think rather than being preoccupied with what kinds of mediums we're using we should be orienting ourselves to whether they facilitate us to have the kinds of connections with others that we want to have and if they don't we need to be creative and find new ways to do that. Now the final tip that I want to focus on this evening is around group based belonging and I think this is one that is often overlooked but one-on-one relationships we have with the people we care about are really important to us and they're absolutely good for our well-being but actually what the research tends to suggest is that the connections we have with social groups can be even more powerful in terms of protecting our well-being and this is because when we have a sense of belonging with a community of like-minded people that gives us a lot more than just a recreational social contact that feels good. It also informs our sense of who we are. Our group connections can give us a sense of identity whether that's our professional identity our national identity a sense of definition of who you are as a person and that is really important in terms of its link to our well-being. Groups can also provide us with support but it's not just about receiving support it's also about having the opportunity to provide support to others and that's part of what the way in which group has a sense of purpose and meaning in our lives that is really critical to having something to get out of bed for in the morning and really maintaining your well-being in the challenging times in which we find ourselves. So if you're trying to seek out quality groups at a time like this, what sorts of groups should you be looking for? Well the first key is that a group should share your values or interests. You should have something important in common with those groups and these could be existing groups that were important to you prior to COVID-19 but they could also be new groups potentially that you seek out during this period. A quality group should be positive in that it should make you feel good about yourself and also about the group itself. A quality group is one that's enduring so it's going to stick with you it's not just a COVID-19 group it's a group that you're going to continue to value and have contact with over the longer term these are the ones that are going to have the most benefits in terms of your well-being. And finally a quality group is one that provides us with opportunities to contribute so that it's not merely a matter of taking and receiving support from the group but that it gives us those opportunities to have purpose to serve a unique contribution to that group that makes us feel like we have something to offer for others as well as just receiving benefits for ourselves. So just those key takeaway points then from what I've discussed today is that we should be looking at a quality over quantity with our social connections and being kind to ourselves that we may not be able to reach ideal social connection right now under these circumstances. We should use whichever platform works best for us and be flexible and creative about how we do that and we should prioritize our connections with social groups especially those that are important part of who we are. And I'll leave it there. Thanks very much. Thank you Tegan and thank you to all of our speakers for these enlightening and stimulating talks. In the face of COVID-19 our mental health and well-being can be challenged and many experience feelings such as stress anxiety and sadness. To manage these tonight's speakers have helped us understand how baseline stress changes our reactions and how certain behaviors temper our negative emotions. That getting to know our emotions and accepting them as informative help us to manage. We've learned about the importance of play for children's development and happiness and that the quality of connection is more important than the number of connections and that group interactions play a unique and important role. Once again, thank you to all of our panelists for getting us started on this important conversation. I would now like to take questions from the listening audience. If anyone has questions for our panelists pre-send them through on the question and answers box, the Q&A box in Zoom. The first question tonight comes from Zee and it's a question that I would like to direct to Caitlin. She asks, any practical tips regarding coping, especially for those who might not be able to travel overseas to care for their family or to just visit family because of border control? Especially when it is hard to talk about emotions with family through Zoom or chats because you don't want them to worry about you. Thank you. It's a great question Zee and one that I particularly relate to as I'm based in the UK and my family is based in Australia and it's challenging. It's really hard when we're worried about our family and we don't want in turn our family to worry about us. So one thing I would suggest is trying to find a person, whether that's a family member or a friend that you almost make an agreement with that you can be emotional. You can share whatever emotions you need to over Zoom and that you'll try and be brave with each other and sit through those times that might be uncomfortable and that way you've got some outlet that you know you can rely on and come back to and it's essentially creating a safe space for yourself and other conversations where you might feel like you need to be brave or be strong and with people that you perhaps don't want to worry that you know that you've got that safe space and that safe person that you can come back to. And in other contexts it might be worth taking a risk it might be worth picking something that's perhaps not the scariest thing and still a that's still an uncomfortable thing it's taking step by step try having a conversation about a small hard thing rather than diving in with a big hard thing I hope that's helpful. Thanks for that, Caitlin. Our next question comes from Rachel and this is a question for Amy when we speak about getting to know our emotions would the general public have insight or a desire to assess this on an ongoing basis and how could this be facilitated in the broad sense? This is an excellent question and it's one I spend quite a lot of time thinking about. I really believe that schools have a strong role to play in teaching and helping children to learn from a very early age about what their emotions are and why they're important. My experience has been that everybody you start talking with about emotions has kind of a theory about what they are and what they do and I'm curious about it and ready to engage in it and we have so many resources out there now that I would encourage people to look online there's a lot of stuff out there and the resources that I shared with you at the end of the talk today are just a starting point to get into that. So excellent question but getting it in a broader way is going to be a much longer term kind of project for us. Thank you. Thanks Amy. Do your tips on play for children also apply to adults? Thanks for the question Agnes. The short answer is no for a specific reason. So those tips are about young children who are in a situation where they know less about the world than an adult does. But the point about unstructured time applies. So we don't stop playing when we're 11 or 12 we just channel our interests into other types of activities so I think that a lot of the stuff that Tegan was talking about is really one could construe it as adult based play if you're finding like-minded people and you're engaging in common activities of course it doesn't have some of the features of play but it does involve you or adults or one however you want to make that reference. It does involve you putting your energies and your interests into activities that are play like. So I would say that would probably be the best way I can answer that question. Thanks very much Evan. Tegan we have a question here from Rachel. She asks when you say that those struggling with mental health issues are not necessarily due to exposure to the virus is there individual differences that could be contributing to this like for example if there were some predictor for the extent to which certain people will experience loneliness. Yeah thanks Bruce and thanks Rachel. That's a really good question. There has been a bit of research done on who is most vulnerable to loneliness and of course we see it. We see a two way relationship here with mental health where for instance if someone has quite a lot of social anxiety they often become lonelier over time because of not having the opportunity for quality interactions. But then being lonely puts someone at further risk for developing more mental health issues and so it can be a bit of a vicious cycle. But there are also a variety of different aspects of where you find yourself in our society that can put you at risk for loneliness. So we know for instance that at a population level young adults are by far our loneliest group in Australia and that data has been replicated in a number of countries around the world as well. Young people between about the ages of 16 and 25 are at the highest risk of loneliness and that might surprise us because we often see young people as being having a large number of social connections. But again if we remind ourselves that this is about quality contact and it's about feeling like we belong that's often the age when we struggle the most to find our people and to feel that sense of connection. Finally there is also some evidence that experiencing disadvantage or being vulnerable for whatever reason can make people feel lonely. If your social world is isolating and it's exclusionary or you're experiencing stigma that can make you feel very isolated because indeed you're on the receiving end of exclusion. So people in our community who are often on the receiving end of stigma, people with disabilities, people who are in minority ethnic groups that might be receiving of discrimination they're much more likely to be experiencing loneliness as well. Thank you very much Tegan. I'd like to throw open a question to the entire panel. This comes from Gulzabine and they ask are there any practical tips for teachers to use with teenagers? Is there anyone that would like to answer that question and get us started? Amy, could you go ahead and start with that? Hi. So this is an excellent question because we do find teenagers can really struggle at a time like this where they're becoming more disconnected from their peers as Tegan's talked about and some really big emotions can come up during the teenagers and managing those becomes a real challenge. One of the things that we often work on with people is around anger and irritation and learning how to spot that early. So one of the exercises you could do with younger teenagers is something like developing an anger thermometer here is that we figure out when visually on a thermometer when we are at low boiling point where there's not much going on whether that's going to be called annoyed or irritation for us and how that feels physically in our body what the signs are that we're feeling irritated. It might be those bodily signs but it might also be that we notice ourselves snapping a little bit more. And then as we go further up the thermometer labelling where anger is and where becoming nervous is and we use that the moment to do a bit of research over time where we're paying a bit more attention to figure out what's going on in our bodies what the signs are and catch it early so that we can take a step out and manage that anger and irritation more effectively. There's similar kinds of things that we can do around stress levels like that so Kate McGavin excellent example earlier on in the presentation when she looked at colour codes going from green through yellow through orange through red and figuring out what those green yellow orange and red zones look like for us so developing our knowledge around emotions in the 1080s can be particularly important. Hope that helps. Thank you. Thanks Amy. Is there anyone else in the panel that would like to address this question? Okay let's move on. Caitlin I have a question here from Nora. She asks do you have any advice on how to deal with anxiety in kids especially among special needs kids such as autism for example my son keeps asking repeatedly when will all this finish and wakes up in the middle of the night due to all the anxiety around this unfortunately I joined 10 minutes late so this has already been covered by apologies. Well it's such a good question and I think a lot of what you're talking about there comes back to this sense of feeling out of control and there's three things that I talk about when that I find really helpful when uncertainty comes into the mix and there's not knowing when this is going to end and that's time limits and control and choices. So I think for your son and to try and help him one of the things is to try and come up with creative ways of putting a time limit on it so when we don't have a clear fixed time limit for when quarantine is going to end or when certain restrictions are going to lift there might be other ways that you can put time limits on what he's experiencing and what he's feeling so perhaps having a calendar and you can mark off the quarantine days or the restriction days but then putting in things that you know will be happening so perhaps say he's in call with grandparents or something like that so helping him to refocus on the things that he does know when they're coming and he does know what the time limits are so this will be school time this will be when this next event is happening so that there's other aspects in there rather than just the one I don't know this one and then it's looking at ways that you can help him feel like he can have control and looking at ways that in this situation he can have choice so there are things that obviously we can't do because of restrictions but perhaps coming up with a few small choices of things that he can do within the confines of this current situation but I find those three things the time limits control and choice keeping them in mind and trying to think of the things that we can control essentially things that are under our control it's really valuable hope that makes sense thanks very much Caitlin our next question comes from Carla hi Tegan in the same way that new platforms for connection can be beneficial are they also not somewhat detrimental towards our mental health is online connection just as beneficial as a personal connection and if not is there anything you could recommend to make online connections more beneficial thanks Carl it's a good question I can see there's another couple of related questions in the chats I might try and answer them at the same time I think that in terms of this let's just say the short answer is that it's very nuanced I think that there are multiple ways in which we can use online media so if you are merely scrolling through your Facebook and comparing yourself to old school friends and feeling inadequate then yeah that's probably not so great for your mental health but if we're using online tools to connect with our communities that we care about then that's when it's going to be most likely to be beneficial for our health and I think that's a big part of why we see quite contradictory results in the literature about whether online connection or face-to-face connection is better because I think in some ways that's not the question that is going to get us a straight answer because I think there are certain times when online tools are going to help us to enrich and facilitate connections which are sometimes face-to-face and there are other times when it might replace meaningful contact or be used in a way that's about social comparison or in a way that kind of alienates us from others as well since showing that online interaction can lead to radicalization and polarization of attitudes so I think it isn't a straight answer but I think it's definitely the case that online tools can be used for meaningful social connection. A related question in the chat I saw was about video games as a form of social connection in fact we're seeing a complete resurgence in cooperative online video games at the moment as people use this as a means to connect with one another and I think at its heart those are the kinds of connections we would absolutely expect to be positive. Full disclosure as a gamer I'm not answering this question in a fully scientific way I've got a vested interest but I do think that there are lots of ways in which we can use these tools positively that's not to say they can't also be used negatively but I think in these times we need to try and seek out as many tools as we are able to to kind of fully utilize them to benefit our mental health and maintain our connections. Thanks for that Tegan. Amy this is a question that comes from Amanda. She asks when we ask our kids about the emotions they're feeling how do we respond to their naming of their feelings and further guide them through what would that conversation look like? Thanks Amanda that's a fantastic question and it's something that we've actually done a bit of research around in the research school of psychology it depends a little bit on how old the children are so where they are at developmentally so the work that I've been involved in in this space has worked with four to eight year olds and what you have to do in that space is quite a lot more scaffolding so in this case the child may or may not be able to come up with a label for their emotion and your job might be to even kind of pick it out at time so you might see a time when your child's feeling sad and come back to talk to them about it a day or so later and say I noticed the other day you seem to be feeling quite sad when you had that argument with Billy about the toys was that how you were feeling and if your child then responds yes working through with them okay so what was that like when you felt sad and what did you do next and developing a narrative around it and it doesn't have to be extensive if we're talking about a four or a five year old here this conversation is going to be quite brief the most important thing is showing empathy through that scaffolding through that and doing it often so little bits often are important in this space I hope that helps thanks very much Amy Evan this is a question from Danish they ask why what does the panel think about video games and the type of play this play in terms of where does the evidence conclusively sit good or bad very good question very difficult which is very difficult to answer so the research on video games is in its infancy so we don't have there's a lot of conflicting findings so for instance some studies show that it has a positive effect in terms of like attention and other studies show that for instance it can have a poor effect on academic outcomes and I think the way to think about this at least from my perspective because I'm a developmental psychologist I don't really know about the stuff that Tegan's talking about which does I do agree there's probably a good sense in which cooperative games allow connection in times like this but I think with any kind of media in a child's life there should be a rule for moderation so if you're engaging in a lot of video games then that takes that's an opportunity costs there and it takes time away from that child to do things like their homework or to do other things that are going to be important for say school so that's the kind of common sense approach I think to video games of course they're enjoyable but sometimes too much of a good thing can have a bad effect in other areas Thanks Evan and I think we have time for one more question again I'd like to open this up to anybody on the panel this comes from Holly she asks for those of us that may be coping with an already very emotionally stressful period in their lives what are some simple things they can do to help initially yes Amy that's great Hi Holly really good question it's something that a lot of people across Australia are really struggling with at the moment my general advice would be get back to basics and keep it simple one of the most common pieces of advice that's been going out at the moment I think it's a really good piece of advice is about establishing routine and that doesn't have to be complicated it can be around establishing when we have our meals each day basic hygiene like showering and brushing our teeth and having a regular bedtime we know that some of those things are really important for caring for our physical health then have very strong spillover effects into our mental health getting stability across those areas is going to then allow us to start building in other ways into some of those more complex coping skills that we've been talking about tonight so that would be my advice about where to start thank you Amy is there anyone else on the panel that would like to address this question okay well to our listening audience thank you very much for your questions and for your interest and engagement in tonight's webinar this brings us to a close this evening as attendees you will receive an evaluation survey to give us feedback on the webinar if I can encourage you to complete this survey it would be really appreciated in closing I would like to also thank the College of Health and Medicine at the Australia National University the Black Dog Institute the many staff these organizations that have helped us organize tonight's webinar finally I'd like to thank the many communities in Australia who are finding ways to help and support those most impacted by COVID-19 we extend our wishes for a healthy and happy rest of the week thank you for being with us and good night