Having Zen students is an art, and the gift of these schools has been an investment in mental health.

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Before preparing for the national exam Professor Anna Alves’ students spent a few minutes on the beach. He sensed their tension and realized that they needed to relax. The hot sand was enough to relax and activate the review of the material presented. But the nearest beach with sea water was half an hour away from the Maximinus Schools Group in Braga. How did the students get to and from Esposende Beach during the break?

Magic pass from nurse Paula Rigada – Strong support from the physics and chemistry teacher, the health education project coordinator at Maximinus – who worked on different forms of relaxation with the students, I always think about improving their abilities. Psychological health. During the national exams – which started this week with the second phase – everyone at school is more stressed and the sessions with the nurse help to deal with the anxiety. In addition to relaxation, there are sessions to manage emotions or, for example, learn to control your breathing. The group, between preschool and twelfth grade, has around 1,600 students, and almost all of them have been in contact with this project, in one way or another.

The teacher recalls one day preparing for a physics and chemistry test. “I get so anxious, I try not to walk past them, but I do, when I see their anxiety. My subject exam was on June 21 and two days before that, I was anxious when I saw their anxiety and tension. He said, ‘Let’s stop here, let’s talk.’” Before going to my class, everyone goes to Nurse Paula’s for a relaxation session.

And they were. That day, Nurse Paula used a guided meditation technique, where the students ended up imagining themselves on the beach. When they came back, calmer, things went much better in the review class.

There are several similar sessions throughout the year and the teacher says that sometimes, The students are so comfortable that they fall asleep. They are the most enthusiastic about working with nurses. “Some of them said to me, ‘Professor, we should always do this, even if it’s before exams. We should do these things more often throughout the year.’ So they feel it and we feel it too. Their state of mind is really different. In exam preparation classes, after these sessions, they came to my class with a completely different look and ready to do things.

For Anna Alves, the impact on students is almost immediate.

Nurse Paula does not belong to the school, but the mental health and psychiatric specialist has been assigned to the group of seven schools – five in the first cycle with preschool, one EB23 and one secondary.

The health education project includes all educational institutions, with a greater focus on older institutions, although The teacher’s desire is to start working with a preschooler in a more systematic way. “We are fortunate to have this registered nurse in many mental health settings. We have worked on physical health for many years, but recently mental health has become a very big concern. Why? Why We see more and more different problems. We have many ethnicities, with all the good and bad that brings. So we started thinking about mental health interventions for students, faculty, and non-faculty.

The starting point was the feeling, especially after the pandemic, that students are different. “We started noticing, for example, in the context of the classroom, that when we asked a question in class – a simple assessment question at that moment – ​​we had students crying on one side, and others stressed out because they weren’t prepared, and it was a huge stressor,” the teacher says. Furthermore, more and more students with anxiety also showed up at the school psychologist’s office.

Essentially, the sense of malaise was present throughout the educational community, among faculty and non-faculty, and prioritizing everyone’s mental health turned out to be an easy decision. Draw the future too.

Next school year, the group wants to invest seriously in the young ones. “The goal is to train them so that later on it is not necessary to intervene with such force and fire, when things have already reached a higher percentage.” In addition, Anna Alves wants to work more systematically with students to make sure everyone has the tools to help them deal with anxiety and other mental health issues, even while pursuing higher education.

In Arouca, emotions are a world worth exploring.

The challenge is to join three separate points into three parallel groups with four straight lines. The problem: you can’t all pass through the same point. It may just be a game that teens play between classes, but it’s so much more than that. When done well, in an emotional regulation session, it helps students realize that they can see beyond the three dots (and many other things in life).

This is just one of the many exercises that psychologist Pedro Ferreira, who has a doctorate in educational sciences, carries out with students in Arouca schools. The “Equilibra-te” program is a project of the council – the psychologist works for the municipality – and focuses on promoting mental health. It began in March 2023, and last school year, more than 300 students from 14 classes took part. The groups that will work with Pedro Ferreira are indicated by the school psychology office and teachers.

“Teachers who spend long hours with students have a special connection with the classroom, and can easily spot the students who are the most nervous and the most anxious about assessments,” the psychologist explains. “If there is something that is really making the student feel anxious, to the point of blocking out during assessment moments, having crises, or having panic attacks, they will be flagged immediately.” For the school psychology services that build this bridge with the municipality through me.

The cases that come to him are not only related to anxiety symptoms. “Sometimes there are depressions, mournings, self-harming behaviors,” he explains.

Looking at your community this year, The Arouca School Group has identified the issue of emotional regulation as a priority area of ​​work. To regulate emotions, there’s a lot to do, besides connecting the dots – there are all sorts of techniques, disguised as games, that get students to discuss emotions, even ones that have a bad reputation, like anger or fear.

He explains that working with students “is about exploring emotions, finding out what they are, getting to know them, and getting to know yourself.”“It is also a work of self-knowledge. At the class level, it leads to passing on strategies to be able to regulate certain emotions and understand, first, that they all exist, that they are all valid and that we have moments in which they all work,” explains Pedro Ferreira. Basically, the idea is to teach students strategies so that they can understand that it is normal, for example, to feel anxious, worried or afraid.

“everyone It is related to the complex functions of the brain. “We try to explain that to older people,” he says. “It’s normal for them to feel some emotions and even to feel some physical effects, like having stomach pain, needing to go to the bathroom, shaking, or feeling a change in breathing — issues that are physically visible, but have their origin in the brain.”“Realizing this validates a lot of what students feel,” adds Pedro Ferreira.

One idea the psychologist also tries to get across is that it’s not when you have an anxiety attack that you learn how to deal with it. There’s work to be done beforehand so that students can solve the problem when it comes. This also applies to exams and tests, which in themselves create stress. “There’s nothing better than preparing for your studies in advance, organizing yourself, having a good calendar, having your materials, and having everything organized and in order,” he says, as an example of the advice he gives students.

He adds further, There are very simple but very effective techniques related to the issue of breathing: “When we start to feel stressed, we start to breathe faster. The heart races, so our nervous system does its job, preparing us physically and mentally for something that is challenging, and fortunately, we have the ability to voluntarily control our breathing if we want to.

Through systematic work, each student will realize what kind of breathing calms him, and how long he needs to relax. “And in stressful situations, we are more likely to use these techniques again effectively,” says the psychologist.

At the end of the year, when he sees the students independent in the sessions, and realizes what works and what does not work in each case, Pedro Ferreira knows that the work is successful.

“We hope that this work, as it is being done on several fronts, will in several respects achieve the great overall goal for which it was undertaken,” says the psychologist.This project is about creating a mentally stronger community, more healthy“The idea is to have everyone, everyone more prepared, and in times of need, psychologically able to have the desired response,” concludes Pedro Ferreira.