Psychosocial councelling service for students

Dealing with mental health issues in everyday university life - a guide for employees and students

Currently, 53% of students suffer from concentration disorders, 43% have sleeping problems, 34% suffer from depressive moods and 29% of students are procured by loneliness - according to the results of the TK Health Report 2023 "How are Germany's students doing?".

The individual experience of stress and the general level of tension have risen among both students and employees at universities - also due to (global) crises and increasing social uncertainties.

Accordingly, instructors, other employees and students at the HFD have more frequent contact with mentally and emotionally stressed individuals.

Employees and fellow students are often central reference persons for students and colleagues in everyday university life.

It is therefore very important that you take their observations of difficulties and abnormalities seriously in order to facilitate help.

But what warning signs need to be recognised? How seriously should depressive moods, exam nerves, procrastination and avoidance behaviour be taken? And when is it appropriate to take action? With this handout, we would like to encourage you to take insecure, "conspicuous" behaviour of others seriously and to trust yourself in two ways - on the one hand your perception, your "gut feeling", and on the other hand your ability to express your impression, approach students and colleagues and offer your help.

In order to gain a little more confidence in this field, which is uncertain for many, you will find information HERE on indicators by which you can recognise a possible need for help, as well as assistance and strategies for dealing with it.

As a general rule, it is better to ask too many questions than too few.

If you have any questions about individual points or specific situations, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Your psychosocial councelling service for students
psb@hs-fulda.de

Information and emergency card on mental health problems and emergency situations

Download the information and emergency card for EMPLOYEES and for STUDENTS.

...on psychological problems in everyday university life

With the publication of the handbook, we are offering online workshops on working with the handbook and dealing with mental health issues, initially aimed at EMPLOYEES.

An extension of the offer to STUDENTS is being planned. Please contact us if you are interested in a workshop for students on the handbook and on dealing with mental health issues in everyday university life.

The specialisation of the workshops is on understanding the handout and questions on practical implementation. A good condition for attendance is therefore to have read the handout in full.

Further information can be found in the latest news on the intranet.

Guideline(s) on time management and stress management

The guideline (s) on time management and stress management was published at Bielefeld University and offers brief and concise assistance

in identifying "time wasters",
setting priorities,
time planning and
setting and achieving (S.M.A.R.T.) goals

Recognising thoughts, feelings and needs and differentiating them biographically

A seemingly simple practice class to get to know your own thoughts and feelings in crisis, agonising, anxious situations with loving attention and to classify them in your own biography. It can help you to differentiate whether my feelings are in the 'here-and-now' or the 'there-and-then', whether they are old difficult experiences or current ones.
The step from feeling to need can be particularly difficult because it is often about needs that have not been adequately satisfied, which have been pushed into the background but still have an emotional impact. Simply try this out again and again lovingly and patiently.

Reflect on and transform stressful thoughts

Stressful thoughts arise from inner dialogues and often begin with phrases such as:

"I must / I must not / I should / One should ..."
"It must / It must not"
"Others must / Others must not"

These thoughts create inner conflicts and uncertainty, because I can never be 100% sure that they will (not) materialise.
The practice classcan help to identify and change stressful thoughts and associated beliefs, so-called inner imperatives.

Progressive muscle relaxation according to Jacobsen (PMR)

A Guide to PMR in a long and short version as an mp3 file can be downloaded from the Techniker Krankenkasse health insurance provider, among others. Other health insurance providers offer similar downloads. You can also find further instructions on PMR on many websites.

Heart coherence breathing

Stress, anxiety, sadness and anger change our heartbeat and our breathing.
The practice class for heart coherence breathing can help to calm the heartbeat and breathing if practised regularly and thus contribute to emotional calming in stressful and testing situations.
Take good care of yourself! If you are not feeling well mentally and/or physically during the exercise, stop practising and discuss the exercise with your doctor or therapist if necessary and feel free to contact the psychosocial councelling service.

Body scan

The body scan is a mindfulness exercise developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn to help you become more aware of your body and relax.
The link manages an mp3 file from the health insurance provider Techniker Krankenkasse. Other health insurance providers offer similar downloads. You can also find further instructions for the body scan on many other websites.

Meditation instructions

Pema Chödrön's meditation instructions are a simple guide to finding a good sitting position for meditation and practising letting thoughts arise. Taken from the book "When everything collapses" by Pema Chödrön.

Resource card

With the resource card can be used to collect individual resources for all kinds of topics, tasks and living conditions:

personal resources and competences,
social resources (relationships),
material resources and
infrastructural and institutional resources.

The aim of the collection is to realise what I already have, what I can draw on and who or what can support me - even or especially when I am not doing well, I don't trust myself, I undermine my self-worth, I fear that a project could "go down the drain" or or or or

Self-care - creating a good learning environment for myself

It's not always easy to find the necessary motivation for learning and to organise yourself.
Here you will find some tips that can help you to organise and structure your learning and your learning environment in a more inviting way.

Handout on time and self-management

The University of Cologne provides a helpful handout on time and self-management which we highly recommend if you find it difficult to get started or stay on track.

TOP 5 (+ X) of exam preparation

The video by our colleagues at RWTH Aachen University summarises 5 key points of exam preparation in a clear and concise way:

Collaboration

Compensation - breaks - relief
Emergency plan
Finding the right learning technique for me
a positive mood while studying

also very important: good time planning (see below)

prioritisation

In stressful times during university studies, when preparing for examinations and in other areas of life, it is particularly important to plan tasks and the time available for them well.
To do this, it is first important to prioritise. The Eisenhower matrix can help you with this. Priorities are awarded here according to importance and urgency. The file you can download here will help you to determine what you should prioritise first and which tasks you could dispense with.

Time planning

This set of three files can help you to plan studying for examinations, working on coursework, papers, etc. in a sensible and time-efficient way, especially if you have to prepare for several subjects, modules, examinations, etc.

File 1 (01-Arbeitsplan KW-Übersicht.xlsx) serves as an overview in which you can enter on which day which examination/assignment/task is due in 52 calendar weeks.
You use a different colour for each subject. Starting from the end date, you can now see how much time you have left in total to study for examinations, prepare assignments, etc.
The purpose of the table is to distribute the available time to the respective subjects based on the amount of learning / examination material to be processed and to plan in which calendar week you will study for which examinations / tasks.

File 2 (02-Vorlage_Mein_WochenKalender.xlsx) is used to break down the rough planning into individual weeks. It contains four identical spreadsheets, the first as a template to copy for further weekly planning in the file. Here you can enter for each day of the week for which subject/module, for which examination/submission you plan to study and for how long. You can also roughly enter the content to be learnt/prepared here.

File 3(03-ArbeitsplanTag.docx) is used to convert the weekly plan into detailed daily plans. Here you can enter the specific task or the content to be worked on (e.g. "read text YX", "to the dentist", lecture/seminar times), prioritise tasks and plan how much time the task is likely to take.

It is important to plan a time buffer for all of these steps:

up to several weeks in the rough plan, depending on the time available,

up to one day in the weekly plan and
up to several hours in the daily plan.

Experience has shown that not everything can be planned exactly; I need longer for one text and shorter for another, so it's good to have a buffer so that good planning doesn't quickly evaporate and I get stressed.

If you have planning difficulties, you can contact the psychosocial councelling service, the Self-Study Centre or the writing advice service.

Exam preparation and learning methods

Practice class: "My motivation plan " - questions about motivation, purpose and goal of my (examination, university studies, work) plan, personal competences, experiences, internal and external resources and visions that can help facilitate learning

Practice class: Interval learning or Pomodoro technique - Encouraging regular, structured, brain-friendly learning in short periods of time and tips on how to celebrate your own learning progress appropriately.
Practice class: Mental or cognitive maps - A meta-learning technique that can help you to organise complex contexts into your own structure, anchor them multisensory and thus retain them better and permanently and be able to recall them well in exam situations.

Academic writing & dealing with writer's block

"The Bremen writing coach for academic writing in university studies is an online guide that can support students in writing academic texts in university studies. It contains more than three hundred text modules with practical recommendations for all phases of an academic writing project: planning and preparation, literature research, material collection and evaluation, structuring, formulating and revising, through to proofreading and the external design of the text." (Description on the website of the University of Bremen)

Self-Study Centre and writing advice

You can get a lot of additional help and individual support with learning, learning techniques, academic work and writing from the employees in the Self-Study Centre and in the writing counselling - call or email and make an appointment.

Recognising inner needs - working with personality traits

Do you recognise this? You want to do what you have actually set out to do, fulfil your own and/or other people's expectations, but there is always a voice inside you that doesn't want to do exactly that? This voice keeps putting your need for rest, for relaxation, for variety, for creativity or, or, or at the top of your list of priorities and ahead of your "actual" plans.
You can imagine these voice(s) as parts of your personality. All people have different personality traits. There are several of them, which we perceive to varying degrees and it can be exciting to get to know them.
To find out the positive intentions of these and your other personality traits, to appreciate and utilise them, the following practice class can help you.

"Your problem is a solution" - 4 sides of a medal

Do you want to change something, tackle it, finalise it, finally "get your act together"? And have no idea what is actually stopping you? "Symptoms" such as procrastination, not being able to cope, repression, etc. usually have a function that prevents us from pursuing the changes that we think are sensible / attractive. This practice class can help you to find out more about your inner "forces of persistence/avoidance".

Dealing with feelings of guilt when procrastinating

Feelings of guilt are a type of negativity and pressure (e.g. self-reproach, guilty conscience) that strengthen our inner resistance, our "unwilling" personality traits. In other words, the greater the guilty conscience and self-reproach, the more difficult it is to get a grip on procrastination. Or have feelings of guilt and self-reproach ever helped you to actually tackle something and get it done? If so, they are a very exhausting form of motivation!
Basically, it's up to you how you assess what you have or haven't done. This practice class helps you to put less energy into your feelings of guilt and thus develop more strength for your tasks.

Presentation "How do I get rid of exam nerves?"

The presentation linked here is about

how stress and exam nerves arise,
the purpose of anxiety and stress,
what individual backgrounds they can have,
how exam nerves can manifest themselves physically, emotionally, cognitively and behaviourally,
which short-term measures are helpful.

Even though there are many similar symptoms in people with exam nerves , the backgrounds are usually very individual.
In a personal consultation, we can help you to shed light on the background and find a way of dealing with your anxiety.

Presentation "How do I get rid of exam nerves?"

The presentation linked here is about

how stress and exam nerves arise,
the purpose of anxiety and stress,
what individual backgrounds they can have,
how exam nerves can manifest themselves physically, emotionally, cognitively and behaviourally,
which short-term measures are helpful.

Even though there are many similar symptoms in people with exam nerves , the backgrounds are usually very individual.
In a personal consultation, we can help you to shed light on the background and find a way of dealing with your anxiety.

Psychosocial councelling service for students

Our counselling services

"Where you can talk, there is hope", Matt Haig

Arrange appointments

Your counsellors

Dr. Robin Mara Richter

Katja Ecker

Before the first consultation

Gruppenangebote

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Pigeons - Young self-help group for social anxiety

Active despite anxiety!