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Hey there, Maureen Chana here, founder of the Mindsight Academy, neurocoach to executives, leaders, entrepreneurs, and a neuroleadership trainer using insights from neuroscience to help you flourish and exceed expectations. Welcome back to another episode of Lead to Excel Podcast. I am so thrilled to be with you today because today we're talking about students' health matters. Now, there's been a lot of talk recently about mental health awareness. But what I find is a lot of the discussions are centering on the symptoms. What we're going to be looking at today is empowering our youngsters to be able to manage their mental health effectively. It's giving them the tools to understand how their brain works so that they can effectively manage their thoughts and emotions and ultimately their mental health and emotional health. It's so important this happens to give them the tools to be aware of when they need to seek help or speak to someone. So let's dive in. Alan Percy, head of counseling at the University of Oxford, is quoted as saying, A lot of difficulties are not caused by medical problems but by normal life problems such as family or relationship issues, even anxiety about work. Mental health awareness has reached an inflection point with so many public figures coming out now to discuss their own challenges. But many people still do not feel safe talking about mental health at work or even in the university, at colleges, and at schools. The national trends in mental ill health among young people have shown a rising trend, and we know that it determines how these students or young people learn and also their productivity. In this podcast, I'm focusing on university students because moving to university is hard as these young people navigate their way and their new life away from home. Universities need to support students through the transition with the right mental health services. I'm not talking just about services available when they're already struggling. Young people need to be taught how to be in control of their emotions, how to be in control of their thoughts in order to enable them to manage their mental health effectively. A recent survey by The Guardian shows that university students are asking to be taught how to look after their mental health. I really believe that this is very important as the saying goes, prevention is better than cure. The survey shows that students want well-being modules in their curriculum to ensure that they grow up to be confident, resilient, and supported to fulfill their goals and ambitions. I've just created a module in emotional intelligence for university and I cannot tell you how excited I and the lecturers delivering this module are because the students started reflecting on their own limiting beliefs, limiting behaviors and attitudes from the first workshop. And by the third session, you can visibly see the improved confidence, adaptability, and sheer determination to succeed in life. Over half a million young people have just made the transition to further or higher education, but in the midst of all the excitement of this new phase, many find themselves vulnerable, worried, and extremely emotional. Universities already play an important role, but as participation in higher education has expanded, many of the initiatives already offered can be strengthened with initiatives that actually teaches these young people to control their thoughts, their emotions by actually teaching them how the brain works so that they get back into the driving seat of their life to enable them to thrive and excel. Mental and emotional health and well-being are basically driven by what's going on in the brain. So it's basically teaching them to be aware that they can control what's going on in their brain and empower them to be confident to ask for help when they need it. With higher study costs and increasingly competitive job markets, there is a greater pressure than ever on our young people today. A lot of the stress they face is due to the uncertainty of coping with social and academic aspects of university life, juggling the need to earn and study, financial difficulties, and feeling lonely away from home. Another major source of stress for students which emphasizes the need to actually teach them the skills to manage their emotions and mental health, even starting in sixth form and college, is the process of clearing. Now talking of clearing, over 67,000 students entered university through clearing this year. My goodness, the build up to results day and the actual day is not fun, and for many it can be a disappointing time if they don't achieve their grades. Expectations are not met, the feeling of being a failure arises, and for some the desperation to just get anything into any university sets in. More support is definitely needed for A-level students on results day because students are forced to make decisions in a hyper-emotional state, often with limited help from inexperienced teachers and parents. So it's important that they have time to readjust to the new offer that they've received and train them from the first week of lectures how to manage their thoughts and emotions. This will go a long way in helping them adapt easier and eliminate or at least reduce the amount of stress that they experience. Things as simple as what accommodation they have also matters. You see, having worse quality accommodation because they came through clearing late would definitely impact on someone's sense of belonging and well-being during their time away from home. There's also evidence to suggest that students who enter university through clearing are more likely to drop out. Some of these students are more at risk, especially if they haven't thought through their decision or taken the time to check out the university that they accept before they arrive. In the recent article by The Guardian, they said more than a third, that's about 35% of the students surveyed complained that waiting lists for counseling and mental health support were too long. More than a fifth, about 22% said university only offered support when mental health became a problem, rather than preemptively looking to build resilience among students. Students are a particularly vulnerable group since mental health problems often start in late adolescence to early childhood. These students are therefore in the high risk period for developing mental health problems, so it's extremely vital both to understand and then offer acceptable, effective, and accessible support for this potentially vulnerable group. This is why it's so important to equip them with skills to be resilient, adaptive, and change agile. They need to know that they can control and manage their thoughts and behavior. They need to know how to do it and they need to know how to manage their emotions and even help others manage theirs. They need to know how to relate effectively with other people. There's a lot of pressure within the education system to achieve great outcomes rather than turning out well-rounded future leaders, properly equipped for the world and workplace, and many are prone to anxiety, overwhelm, and are emotionally fragile. Students will definitely benefit from being equipped with brain science to help them get to the root of how the brain works, how humans think, and how the human mind often sabotages goal attainment. The higher education sector now has to take the bull by the horn and redesign students' experience by bringing emotional and social education to its heart, making them foundational to the university experience as academic education. Counseling is the most consistently offered intervention with many positive results, but the fact is that the capacity of one-to-one counseling services to offer support to large numbers of students is limited and may not be appropriate as a first-line intervention. Alternative approaches and methods of delivery must therefore be introduced. The fact is that despite the increased demand for counseling services, research has shown that only a third of students with mental health distress seek formal help from counseling in the UK. The fact is that they are more likely to seek help from their friends and family than from formal services. So equipping them with the knowledge initially is so important and will go a long way as well. Emotional intelligence is basically a socio-emotional skill that can help you to understand yourself and those around you in a healthy way. Those who have a lesser understanding of emotions and how they expressed can experience difficulty connecting and relating to other people, and they can struggle significantly with regulating their own internal emotions as well. Many of the students and adults that I train and meet in my role as a neuroleadership trainer believe that their ability in different situations are set from when they were young or from when they were born, exactly what Carol Drake describes as having a fixed mindset. This type of mindset is very limiting and in a weird way keeps people stuck. There's also a real danger for young people who are constantly focusing on their emotions without adequate clarity and knowledge of how to manage their emotions, developing an emotional spiral that would generate a ruminative process out of control, which in turn would maintain rather than relieve their negative mood. Emotional intelligence proposes a new perspective in the study of emotions to provide useful information about how to solve daily problems. In fact, the intelligent use of our emotions is essential for one's physical and psychological adaptation. The higher a person's emotional intelligence, the more likely it is that they are able to understand and use coping skills that improve not only their relationships with others but their own mental health as well. This is why I'm very passionate about helping people, adults, young people, everyone literally understand the way their thoughts, feelings, and behavior are connected to one another. So that you understand how you can literally rewire your brain and eliminate the limitations that you have in your behavior, even habits and thoughts, and build resilience, confidence, embrace challenges as opportunities, and manage stress effectively. The ultimate goal is that our young people, these students, become effective leaders, that they flourish and they achieve high performance. And this can be done by equipping them with skills to be emotionally intelligent. Thank you once again for tuning in, and I hope you found this really useful. Now, before we finish today, have you subscribed to this podcast? If you haven't, please make sure that you click that subscribe button wherever you listen to this podcast. Because once you subscribe, you will not miss an episode. I would really appreciate as well if you could leave a review or even a comment or a suggestion about any topic that you want. Finally, I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. And the next episode has actually come from a request from so many people to do something in relation about managing your emotions after the breakup of a relationship. So it's going to be really interesting. So subscribe so you don't miss that episode when it's released. So I wish you a fantastic week and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Bye for now.