{"id":484,"date":"2017-02-20T09:00:55","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T08:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.exeter.ac.uk\/doctoralcollege\/?p=484"},"modified":"2017-02-20T09:00:55","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T08:00:55","slug":"484","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/doctoralcollege\/2017\/02\/20\/484\/","title":{"rendered":"The First Doctoral College Wellbeing Week!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello! And a very warm welcome to the first Doctoral College Wellbeing Week for PGRs and ECRs.<\/p>\n

Wellbeing Week was born because\u00a0we recognise that research is stressful. Some of that stress is useful, as it provides us with the energy and motivation needed to continue working, and working at our best. However, not all stress is ‘useful’ stress. And there are all sorts of other wellbeing issues associated with working in a research environment. These can range from not leading a healthy lifestyle \u2013 working too late, not eating right \u2013 to more serious mental health issues.<\/p>\n

The purpose of Wellbeing Week is to give you the space to thing about YOU \u2013 to do a little health check about how you\u2019re feeling and how you\u2019re coping. Hopefully you\u2019ve seen our mindful colouring sheets and self-care postcards popping up around campus. These are to encourage you to do small things to take care of yourself. This week, we\u2019ll also be running some bigger things to help you do this \u2013 from wellbeing workshops and exercise classes to research talks on some of the cutting edge work happening in this area at Exeter. The best thing about this is that\u2019s all exclusively for PGRs and ECRs, and absolutely free! We have events running at Streatham, St. Luke\u2019s and Penryn so do take a look at the Doctoral College website<\/a>\u00a0for information about whats happening.<\/p>\n

We \u00a0know\u00a0that a fair proportion of our students are not campus based, so we\u2019re running an online campaign too. It\u2019s in two parts \u2013 the first is our twitter campaign, where we want to challenge you\u00a0to take a break, go outside and have a 5 minute walk. When you complete your walk, either tweet us using #DCWellbeing or visit our wellbeing week website to register your walk. For every register, we will donate \u00a31 to the charity Mind. We’ll be announcing at the end of the week how much money we’ve raised!<\/p>\n

The second part of our online campaign is an online wall<\/a>, on a password protected area of the website, where you can anonymously share your experiences of being a PGR or ECR at Exeter. This is an opportunity for you to share how you feel studying and\/or working at Exeter, and what the key wellbeing issues are for you.<\/p>\n

In line with this, we thought we\u2019d kick off Wellbeing Week by sharing some resources which we\u00a0find really useful. You can find all these, and more, on our ELE page<\/a>.<\/p>\n

These\u00a0blog posts really helpful in thinking about the up and downs, and general stresses of being a researcher:<\/strong><\/p>\n