Interview
Anxiety and stress
with Ms. Anita
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Emily Lomander
Lopez
13 November 2018
For my project about anxiety and stress, I considered interviewing Ms. Anita,
the Wellbeing Coordinator, to ask her a few questions about my topic :
C an you introduce yourself and what you do at BFIS?
a. So I am the Wellbeing Coordinator for the whole school so that goes from
nursery right way through to IB, and so part of that role is building and
implementing the wellbeing curriculum. So we have a program now in
middle and high school, we touch in with little droplets of wellbeing issues
within the elementary school, and then with our early childhood, we have like
mini little sessions with the little ones.
W hat is your view on stress and anxiety?
a. Okay, so... Here is something that many young people have to deal with.
Right? And, how do we find those tools, within ourselves, so that we can deal
with it? So my role here is to provide those opportunities for students to have
like a kind of toolkit, so that when they have something challenging in their
life, or when they feel those sensations of stress and anxiety, they have a
toolkit of things they can do to deal with it better. Which is why we are doing
the .b course, the mindfulness course that's part of that.
H ow big of a social issue is stress and anxiety for teenagers?
a. I think i is big, from what I see and what I hear, and you know listening to
you guys and observing, being among. And you know, this is my area of
expertise and just seeing the effects that social media has on you guys. You
know that could be stressful. The pace, exams, homelife, relationships,
friends, all of this stuff. Right?
W hat are some of the common mistakes which people, in general, do to cause
stress and anxiety?
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Unintentional
a. So the unintentional stuff is what happens is that we get carried away in our
worries and our thoughts, the type of thought that can distract you. In the
mindfulness course, we talk about your thoughts being like traffic on a road.
And sometimes we get taken away on a worry bus, it takes us away, and we
get stuck on it. And we just keep perpetuating that worry, and those negative
thoughts just keep coming around again and again, right? And when we do
that for a long period of time, we can get exhausted, it can deplete our energy,
and it can actually affect our immune system and our health, both physical
and emotional health. So that's the unintentional one where we are not aware
that we are doing that sometimes.