SHINE
What is it?
SHINE is a 6 session group which is aimed at helping young people aged 12-17, learn about anxiety, and find out about helpful coping strategies that you can use when you feel anxious.
SHINE teaches techniques from cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) – a psychological therapy that focuses on the relationships between thoughts (cognitions), behaviours and feelings. CBT is proven to be effective for reducing anxiety.
You sign up to Shine by clicking the ‘BOOK NOW’ button. Following this you will be sent instructions on the timings of the next group on how to access the group.
Shine is for adolescents who are interested in learning positive ways to cope with anxiety.
What does the course involve?
The Course
The group facilitators will present information about stress and anxiety, alongside a Powerpoint presentation, interactive polls, video and audio clips. You can participate as much or as little as you like. If you would prefer not to speak during the group, that is ok. It is fine for you to just be there and listen.
The Workbook
You will be sent a workbook that goes alongside the group, which has spaces for you to write about your experiences and practice some of the strategies that we will discuss. This workbook is for you to keep, and you do not need to show anyone what you write in it. You will need the workbook during the group sessions.
Parent/Carer Information
In addition to our 6 week group for young people, we are now offering a one-off parent information session for the parents/ carers of those young people to attend prior to the group starting. We understand that it can be difficult for young people to come along to a group about anxiety management, and we know that parents can play a key role in supporting their child to attend and to use the information they learn from the group.
With this in mind, we have created a parent session that will look at how you can support your child to attend our group, and will also give a flavour of how the group works in practice. This is voluntary. However, we would strongly encourage parents to attend if they are able to. These parent sessions will be delivered online the week prior to the group commencing.
Practicing at Home
Each week, we will give you some activities to go away and try. These give you an opportunity to practice the strategies mentioned in the group sessions. We are always happy to hear how you have got on with these and if you have found anything tricky, but you do not have to share this if you don’t want to.
Course Content
Parent Information Sessions
An online information session for parents/ carers of young people attending the group to discuss supporting their child to attend, supporting with the content of the group and information about other resources for parents of anxious teens. A link to the online platform will be sent in an email prior to the group starting.
What is anxiety, and do I have it?
Introduction: This session explores what anxiety is, why we have anxiety and its purpose in our body. This session also explores how shine will help you break out of anxiety cycles that are unhelpful.
Anxiety Cycles
This session helps you to explore the role of anxiety and what keeps it going. Anxiety can be broken down into thoughts, physical sensations and behaviours and starting to notice this can make them feel less overwhelming. The session helps you to explore your own anxiety cycle.
How to Relax
This session looks at the body’s reaction to anxiety: The role of physical sensations and ways to begin feeling more comfortable with these physical sensations using relaxation are discussed and practiced.
Standing up to worries
This session looks at why some of our current behaviours mean we can avoid things that cause anxiety. This avoidance may provide relief in the short term but tends to make things worse in the long term. The session looks at how some of the behaviours we do when we feel strong emotions can become unhelpful and how taking a different action can help.
Understanding anxious thoughts
This session explores how our thoughts can impact how we view situations in our everyday lives things. We discuss the types of different thoughts which may increase your anxiety, we also try and get you to try and identify different types of thoughts.
Reducing anxious thoughts
Following on from the previous session we look at how to cope with anxious thoughts, learn how to interrupt anxious thoughts and we introduce the skill of mindfulness.
