NEW PRESENTATION: Addressing Faculty Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma: Recover, Renew, and Rewire

People cannot perform at their potential when highly stressed. Anxiety, stress, and/or trauma not only can damage health and lead to long-term mental disorders such as depression, but they impair performance in the moment.  Anxiety and high stress inhibit higher order executive functions in the frontal lobes while more strongly activating the emotional centers.  This makes it harder to remember, pay attention, think critically, plan, organize, and control emotions. Unfortunately, faculty stress is contagious to students.

It is critical to address this during these stressful times.  Prior to COVID 19, burnout affecting faculty retention was already higher than desired.  One teacher in 10 had taken antidepressants and 1 in 3 missed work due to stress.  We can only imagine how high those numbers would be now. Trauma can affect family life at home.  Under trauma, there are higher rates of substance abuse, domestic issues, and health issues. Faculty home life can affect work with students. 

Helping your faculty, staff, and administrators will help all students.  Research shows that faculty with higher socio-emotional behaviors affect student learning outcomes.  Faculty trying to take care of their home situation while teaching from home can create high stress.  Helping them reduce stress and protect their mental and physical health until they can return to school is a major priority.  Students are under extreme stress right now as well and a calmer teacher can help them be at their best.

This presentation for faculty, staff, and/or administrators will provide information about why they are having trouble thinking and functioning optimally and relieve their anxiety about that.  Then they learn and practice together some strategies for reducing anxiety and stress in the moment that allow for recovery.  Then they learn practices to renew themselves for another day rather than letting the stress accumulate.  Finally, they acquire strategies for rewiring their brain from patterns of anxiety, stress, and trauma toward resilience and greater happiness.

The presentation can be 90 minutes to 5 hours, depending upon your needs.  It will be done synchronously but it can be broken down into weekly segments.  Ideally, I think 3 hours over 3 weeks or 4 hours over 4 weeks, one hour at a time would be best.  This could allow them to practice the new strategies.  The first hour is informative, to help them understand what is happening and how the body/brain/mind react so that they will understand the strategies that follow. After the first 45 minutes to an hour, the workshop becomes interactive, as they actively do many of the strategies suggested. You could even do 90 minutes the first time to get them started with some strategies and then a second hour and a third hour if you want.  I would work with you to get the best scenario for your faculty, staff, and administrations.

I can provide the Zoom conference for up to 100 people.  They will not be on camera and will be muted unless there are fewer than 10.  If you want more than 100 people, there would be an additional charge of $500 for the technology or you may be able to use your system.  I will work with you on this.

If you need a different length of time, let’s talk about your needs.  The description of the talk is attached.