Managing your stress

To mark Stress Awareness Day on 2 November, King’s Health Partners (KHP) is highlighting a range of resources to help you recognise and tackle stress in yourself and others.

What is stress?

Stress is often described as a feeling of being overloaded, tight, tense, and worried. We all experience stress at times. It can sometimes help to motivate us to get a task finished or perform well. But too much stress can also be harmful and it can interfere with our ability to get on with our normal life.

The NHS has been identified as having higher-than-average levels of stress-related sickness absence according to a recent report. The 2021 NHS Staff Survey results revealed that 47 per cent of staff report feeling unwell as the result of work-related stress (increased for four consecutive years and now more than eight per cent higher than 2017).

Therefore, it is vital to address how stress experienced both inside and outside of work can be damaging to staff and organisations, so that we can best support colleagues to be happy, healthy, and offer excellent patient care.

We have shared some helpful resources below to help you better manage stress in yourself and others.

Mind & Body Health and Wellbeing: a toolkit for staff

The KHP Mind & Body Health and Wellbeing toolkit offers all staff working across health and care services a collection of resources in one place that they can use to support their teams.

It provides a detailed section on managing stress, including a breakdown of the types of stress, how to recognise stress in yourself or others, top tips for managing everyday stress, and partner initiatives for those seeking professional help. Click here to find out more.

Mindfulness For All

The KHP Mind & Body programme has pioneered the Mindfulness For All (M4ALL) platform – an open access and free resource for everyone including KHP staff and students, as well as key workers in health, education, social care and primary care settings, and local carers, patients, and residents.

The platform provides a number of guided mindfulness sessions, facilitated by healthcare professionals across the partnership, and covering a range of common topics, including several videos dealing with stress:

• Meditation on mindfulness and stress awareness: breath to notice tension
• Meditation on the discomfort of dealing and seeing distress in the body: Self compassion & common humanity
• Meditation on perceived disappointment
• Meditation on health, worries and sense of vulnerability

Click here to access all the mindfulness sessions for free.

KHP Mind & Body also offers its ‘Mindfulness for All’ live meditation program that happens every Tuesday between 8:30am - 9am. A group of experienced mindfulness facilitators - including psychologists, nurses, junior and senior doctors - guide a meditation practice.

If you would like to be included on the regular invite list for these sessions, then please contact carl.nwabudike@slam.nhs.uk.

Further resources

Additional support can be found on our website, and NHS Employers has also highlighted a number of helpful staff wellbeing toolkits and guides to mark Stress Awareness Day.