Workshop “Mental and physical health during corona”
On Friday, April 29th 2022 took place the fourth workshop of the YVL program organized by the German participants of the Young Verified Leaders program, around the following theme: “Mental and physical health during corona”.
The facilitators consisting of Julia, Hannes, Süleyman und Mirjam led the international participants through the workshop with the support of Adeline.
The content was about mental and physical problematic issues we had during the corona lockdown. In small groups we discussed about cognition and feelings during this lonely time. Furthermore, it was also very important to us to talk about resilience (building mental strength). Besides that, we collected opportunities, strategies, and tips for all the involved countries of the workshop how to handle a potential next physical or mental health crisis.
The workshop started with a discussion in breakout rooms where the members needed to talk about their feelings and recognitions at the begin of corona. During the session, the groups needed to collect keywords and add them to an „answergarden“ which is also known as a word-cloud. The cloud was shown afterwards and discussed in the plenum.
The next part of the workshop dealt with presentations and theoretical information about physical and mental health. Süleyman was informing the members about physical health and gave some tipps and tricks for physical well-being during a lockdown.
After that Mirjam presented concrete consequences of the lockdown situation. For the interactive design of the workshop, the participants were asked to answer an anonymous online survey about their feelings during corona in which the answers were immediately displayed as bar graphs.
Hannes continued with a mental health experiment. He took the YVL-participants on a hypnotic journey in which he made the feelings of anxiety disease obvious and approachable for everybody. Subsequently he showed a statistic about increased numbers of anxiety disease during the corona-lockdown.
To get back into a good mood, Julia explained the 7 pillars of resilience:
Optimism, acceptance, solution orientation, giving up the victim role, taking responsibility, network orientation and planning for the future.
In order to digest the theory, a 10 minute relaxation break was taken afterwards.
The last part of the workshop targeted the following objective: In small groups, the participants needed to find and collect some information, strategies and tips for a potential next phyical or mental crisis. For example, websites or helplines for each participating country (Tunisia, Algeria and Germany), workout videos or just tips for feeling better were collected. All the information was added to a „Padlet“, a digital pinboard which is also accessible after the workshop so the participants can always have a look at it if required.
This report was written by Mirjam, one of the facilitators of the workshop.
