I'm feeling suicidal / I'm worried about someone who might be suicidal.
The Occupational Health team provides confidential advice for keeping healthy at work.
Our Spectrum Life Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) gives wellbeing support 24/7, 365 days a year.
If you can't find what you're looking for here or in our Index, please email us.
Mindfulness sessions for colleagues
Mindfulness is a simple and powerful practice of training our attention. It involves learning to pay attention to what is happening in the ‘here and now’ (i.e. sensations, thoughts, and emotions) in a non-judgemental way. It can be helpful because it can interrupt the habit of getting lost in thoughts, mostly about the future or past, which often generates more stress on top of the real pressures of everyday life.
Mindfulness offers not only a way of reducing stress and preventing low mood, it also holds potential to improve the way we live, helping us to thrive and be resilient at work and in our broader lives.
To enhance staff wellbeing and reduce stress, it is necessary to both reduce the underlying workplace drivers that cause stress in the first place and equip individuals with skills to manage their own resilience. Mindfulness approaches are one proven way to help individuals build wellbeing and manage stress to achieve the latter. They introduce people to a model of how their own patterns of thinking and responding can be used to maximise resilience and thriving and reduce workplace stress, and train individuals to use mindfulness techniques to build effective patterns of thought and behaviour.
- The University of Exeter Chaplaincy hosts a secular drop-in online mindful meditation every Thursday at 12:00- 12:30 and Kellie Gilmore runs a staff and students’ meditation class every Wednesday at 18:00- 19:00 6pm in Seminar F (Treetops) Falmouth University campus. Visit the Groups and Networks page and search ‘meditation’ to find out more about both of these groups.
- Our EAP, Spectrum Life’s Be Calm series offers online meditation sessions for a range of topics, including sleep, stress, anxiety and performance. You can sign up using your exeter.ac.uk email address and the org code: UoEWell.
- Janssen et al (2018) Effects of mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction on employees mental health: A systematic review. PLOS One.
- Bartlett et al (2019) A systematic review and meta-analysis of workplace mindfulness training randomized controlled trials. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.
- Lomas et al (2018) Mindfulness-based interventions in the workplace: An inclusive systematic review and meta-analysis of their impact upon wellbeing. The Journal of Positive Psychology.