 I'm now very briefly going to talk you through five practical strategies for reducing anxiety that you can use for yourself or a student if they're struggling. The first one is called 5 4 3 2 1. This is a really commonly used technique, it's called a grounding technique. You can google grounding techniques and you'll find lots of other similar ideas. These are designed to try and keep us in the moment and anchored in the here and now if we feel that we're becoming overwhelmed by difficult thoughts or feelings okay so what we do we look around the room and we name five things that we can see then we listen out and we name four things that we can hear right now and then we'll think about three things that we can touch I might touch my soft worry monster here and we go through our senses so I tend to do it and it doesn't matter what order you do it don't get hung up on the order at all I tend to do five things I can see four things I can hear three things I can touch two things I can smell and then I take a long deep breath I don't do taste and you could do in a different circumstance but that might be tricky in the middle of a classroom so we work through the senses and the idea here is to focus ourselves in the here and now to make ourselves feel fully present in the room and to distract us from the thoughts and feelings that are going round and around in our head. The next technique is one that I used to just use with younger children but I found it to be super super brilliant which is a fine finger breathing so here we put our hand out like a starfish and we start with the finger from the other hand at the base of our thumb and as we run our finger up our thumb we breathe in and then we pause breathe out pause in pause and you work your way round the fingers and thumb and you're just breathing in and pausing and out and pausing and the thing I like about this is it's really simple all you need is your hands and it's super tactile and then you get to the end and then you shake your hands out and you go I feel better or I want to take another five and you can do it absolutely anywhere and a kid can do it you know under the desk and no one would know they were doing it this is a kind of strategy that you know you can teach to your class and then send them home to teach it to their parents and suddenly everybody knows it and in a moment of panic we can go hey let's just take five and we do it there are loads of other breathing strategies out there and you might choose a different one but this is my absolute favourite and I have found I've had rooms of hundreds of people doing it together and you feel the mood almost instantly drop it's yeah quite phenomenal the next technique is another breathing one and this helps us to slow our breathing which can be helpful if we begin to feel feelings of anxiety and panic kind of rising within us often then what happens is our breathing gets fast and shallow and we're looking to try and revert that so sometimes we can try and sort of trick our body when we feel the physiological impact of anxiety coming in we try and reverse that by doing the opposite so we sit up straight and we put our hands on our belly and then we breathe in deeply through our nose right into our belly and you feel your belly actually pushes your hands out and then we breathe out as far as we can through our mouth and you feel your hands move back again so you're just becoming aware of breathing right down into your belly essentially in through the nose and we feel those hands coming out not that far and then we breathe out through mouth and we're trying to really empty the breath out and in doing that we make ourselves take big deep breaths we notice our breath and we tune into it and we really begin to slow it down and again it's a really tactile thing and it is the sort of thing you can do without anybody really knowing that you're doing it another technique I love is safe space visualization which jargon but it's a really commonly used therapeutic technique we use it in trauma therapy now this is about basically having a place in your head that you can go to that feels nice and safe so what we do is we think at a time of calm and happy about a time when we felt calm and happy and it might be a particular memory of a holiday or a joyful time or it might just be like a really bog standard regular time when we feel safe and okay so my safe space that I tend to visualize is sitting at the end of my daughter's bed reading her a bedtime story at night because I do that really regularly I can bring it to mind really easily I'm not very imaginative and it just feels good it's a nice safe part of my day that I enjoy now what we do is we explore this as much as possible and if you had a particular relationship with a child you might get them to draw it or write about it or you know explore it in other ways but basically we try and create as richer picture of this as we can think about the senses what can you hear what can you smell how does it feel and all those kinds of things and we practice just going to that place at times of calm and then if we find ourselves beginning to feel anxious and we've got difficult thoughts and feelings beginning to invade our head we try and return to that space of safety to visualize it in order to try and calm those feelings now we can do this either in response to difficult thoughts arising or actually as a proactive calming measure so you might do this to help with emotional regulation if you've got children who struggle with certain times of day for example you might get them to think about to visualize their safe space for a minute or two before they enter stressful situations it can help to carry a picture or a reminder or a prompt of the safe space to help us to kind of get there in our mind and the more that we practice going there the better that we get at it finally I'm gonna tell you about progressive muscle relaxation and again there's loads about this online and you can look up in more depth if you want it but basically the idea here is that when we're feeling stressed or anxious we tend to feel that all our muscles get really kind of taught and tight you'll know this like when you're feeling a bit anxious and your muscles get really tight in your shoulders and that kind of thing and what we're looking to do here is to try and actually relax them so again trying to change our physiology in order to try and change also how we feel but also giving ourselves a focus away from whatever it is that's weighing on our mind right now so here we just basically work through our whole body tightening and then loosening all of our muscles so I normally start from the feet up and I'll be thinking about tightening all the muscles in my feet and holding that for 10 20 30 seconds whatever feels comfortable and then really consciously letting them relax and then I work up through my legs and really tighten those muscles and again hold that for 10 20 30 seconds and then let them relax just working up through the body so doing my feet and then my legs and then my buttocks and my arms my neck and shoulder that's a really important one for many people my jaw and then strangely your forehead that can be a really helpful one and although other people might notice that you're doing it when you really tighten it but you're tightening it holding it and then letting it relax and actually if you try this do try it out you find it does really help you to feel kind of relaxed and your muscles feel really kind of nice and warm and you can leave them feeling yeah kind of stretched and more floppy rather than that torch tight difficult feeling again this is the kind of thing that can be done and nobody really knows that you're doing it and I think it's really important for our students and staff to have a range of these kinds of strategies that they can try out at a time of calm and then use if needed at a time of higher anxiety and all of these are ideas that students can learn for themselves they might carry around a prompt to encourage them to do these things if they need them and they need to work out which works better for them and which doesn't because not everything will work for everyone but hopefully these give you a few ideas a few starters for 10 of things that might help to calm your students at times of higher anxiety