Sarah Barr from New Beginnings has teamed up with trainee counsellor Julie Harrigan to launch a new online course on managing stress and anxiety. Here, they explain the benefits their techniques can bring:

Our next “Managing Stress and Anxiety; Your Guide to Well-being”
will be taking place on Saturday 16th January, from 10am to 1pm via zoom.

The aim of the workshop is to help you build your own wellness toolbox. This workshop is full of CBT techniques and ways to incorporate mindfulness into your daily routine.

We will also show you how to create your own daily journal. Helping you to create a healthier routine whilst decreasing your stress and anxiety levels.

Anxiety and Stress: what are they?

What are anxiety and stress, and is there is difference between them? In short, the answer is yes. Stress is your body’s reaction to a trigger and is generally a short-term experience.

Stress can be positive or negative. When stress kicks in and helps you pull off that deadline you thought was a lost cause, it’ s positive. When stress results in insomnia, poor concentration and impaired ability to do the things you normally do, it’ s negative. Stress is a response to a threat in any given situation.

Anxiety, on the other hand, is a sustained mental health disorder that can be triggered by stress. Anxiety doesn’t fade into the distance once the threat is mediated.

Anxiety hangs around for the long haul, and can cause significant impairment in social, occupational and other areas of functioning. Anxiety and stress go hand in and hand and unfortunately, they have become more common in our every day lives – ask someone how they are feeling and 9 times out of 10 the word ” stressed” will appear.

Despite what some of the programmes out there offer, you cannot completely banish anxiety and/or stress, but what you can do is learn helpful coping strategies which, when adopted into your everyday life, will help you to counterbalance the negative effects.

In our talk we discuss the coping strategies that we feel can help to counter-balance the negative effects of anxiety and stress.

Here is a sample of our workshop: https://cloud.3dissue.com/44641/45184/56139/thelookingglass/index.html?r=8

If you would like more details or to book a place, please email: thelookingpoint@gmail.com. Cost for course: €40

Take care, Sarah and Julie.

Course Facilitators Sarah Barr, Moville and Julie Harrigan, from Fahan

A little bit of information about your facilitators:

Sarah Barr is a qualified integrative counsellor (MBACP) at her private practice, New Beginnings.

Julie Harrigan as a passion for mindfulness, seeing the benefits this practice can have to our well-being and is in the process of furthering her knowledge and training in this area.