Risk Of Succumbing To Real Time Pressure

  • So why is Real Time Pressure so important to keep track of when you’re a seafarer? What is the single biggest limitation that you have because you’re a seafarer that you don’t have anywhere else? “YOUR AT SEA!”
  • So, what can you do about something on land? NOTHING! This might sound harsh but it’s the truth. Imagine what its like to work on the ISS (International Space Station)… They have families to, and if something happens “back on earth” they can’t do anything about it either.
  • And what is the symptom that this can lead to? “FEELING POWERLESS!”
  • Remember to keep track of your emotions and control them, don’t let them control YOU!

How Real Time Pressure Has Changed

  • As mentioned, Real Time pressure is due to the rise in advancing technology and access to the internet. It’s often overlooked by many crews as insignificant, but it can sometimes have a very big effect on a persons Mental Health.
  • Internet, in people’s minds has almost become a requirement. And people are constantly demanding more internet because perhaps its slow, they cant watch TV, their social media wont work, ect… if you step back for a second and ask yourself… what would I be missing out on if I didn’t have access to the news, social media, INTERNET?
  • Exercise: write down a list of as many things you wouldn’t be able to do if you didn’t have access to the internet. From that list you are only allowed to choose 3 which you can have access to daily. Which would you choose? Do you choose the things you like to have for pleasure, or do you choose the things you need to have? (NEED vs WANT).
    • Ex: Watching Moview, Talking with familly, Social Media etc…

How To Avoid Other People’s Emotions From Affecting Yours

  • With everything we’ve learnt so far in this module, here are 4 easy exercises you can do to help you recognise stress in yourself, others and to not let other people’s moods affect you.
    • Consider how you think about your emotions
    • Stop for a second, take a deep breath and ask yourself what are you feeling right now?
    • Remind yourself that your emotions can affect others too.
    • Remember that their pain is not your pain but be considerate and help if you feel something is wrong.

Knowing Your Crew

  • Knowing your crew is mostly a requirement by someone of higher rank/authority. Not because you need someone to tell you what to do, but because having someone that is face to face with their crew every single day means that they are the first to spot any changes in a person and the first to take action. This is where knowing each person to a personal level has the greatest effect on being able to spot stress and anxiety symptoms in a person.
  • What can you do to improve this for yourself? Get to know more people, if you’re the type of person that keeps to themselves most of the time, then try and get out your comfort zone. Have a conversation with someone. It might be awkward, but unless you start somewhere, this will always be the case.

Recognising Stress And Anxiety In Others

  • Knowing the symptoms is obviously a benefit to knowing weather someone else is stressed or anxious, but this isn’t always necessary. The term ‘Jumping Atoms’ can sometimes be used to describe when one’s feelings or emotions are transferred across to another person. This doesn’t always mean that you were required to be face to face with that person because the emations can be passed along more than one person. Detecting this change in emotion due to ‘Jumping atoms’ is a very powerful tool to recognising stress and/or anxiety in other people.
  • The downside to this is that before you can properly recognise symptoms in another person, you need to be able to recognise them in yourself first.
  • The benefit of this is that once you are capable of recognising symptoms in yourself, you can start to understand and see the symptoms in other people, even if you don’t know that person to a personal level.
  • To summarise. Detecting the signs of stress and/or anxiety in other people is only effective if you can already detect the symptoms in yourself first, have a very good understanding of symptoms or by knowing that person at a personal level.

Recognising Stress And Anxiety In Yourself

  • Now that you have completed the exercise from the last slide you should already have a much better awareness of your own levels of stress and what causes them.
  • Recognition of stress in yourself is all about practice, such as: Drills, Training, Discussing shipboard potential problems with colleagues, Reading industry related news articles etc… Daily exercises can also be very helpful such as the one from the previous slide. The goal is to eventually be able to pickup on symptoms straight away and ask yourself why your feeling this way. Even better is the ability to know when you are going to feel a certain way before it happens. For example: You’ve just been told that your going to clean the deck which is a task you don’t particularly like. You know that you can often associate yourself with a ‘loss in sense of humor’ and/or ‘Anger’. Therefore, what can you do to change these symptoms into something positive? Ultimately this is up to you as a person to figure out what works for YOU!

What Is Real Time Pressure?

  • Real time pressure is a factor that has become an issue due to the evolution of technology. What do I mean by this?
  • Years ago, if there was an accident on board, for example, “Jim hurt his leg”, you would send a letter to your family or friends to inform them of the situation. By the time the letter arrives to the recipient… well actually Jim is OK now.
  • Things like the news, social media and the people around you are constantly feeding you with information that could trigger real time pressure at work, that’s why its important to stay focused.

 I know you would have heard this before, but… when its time to work, its time to work with no distractions.

Who Can Help YOU?

  • In this module where going to look at some of the options you have to help yourself or to help others. This will be for more extreme cases where you have fallen in to one of the traps that leads to serious Mental Health issues as a seafarer.
  • Remember that Ultimately, only YOU can change yourself and only YOU can do something about it. No matter what people have said to try and help you, YOU must make the change, make the decision and take action.

What Can YOU Do?

  • Making life at sea enjoyable isn’t that hard to do, you just need to put some effort in to it. Obviously there are restrictions to how enjoyable it can be since you are out at sea and there is only so much you can do. One thing to always remember is the positive side of things, what are the good things that you have on board? Ex: Amazing views every day, etc.
  • During this module we will be taking a look at some daily activities that you can do by yourself or with your crew that can drastically improve your life at sea and make it more enjoyable.

EXERCISE:

  • Take 10 minutes to list as many benefits of being out at sea that you can think of that you don’t have on land, for example; Amazing views! “We will make use of this list later on!” If you have not been to sea before, then make a list of the things you would be looking forward to if you where going to be out at sea.

Introduction – Physical Wellbeing

  • This module of the course isn’t designed to teach you how to get fit, how to get sleep or how to eat healthy. However, what it will teach you is the importance of getting exercise, getting sleep and eating healthy, some of the scientific reasons for needing to do so and why this can affect your mental health and wellbeing at sea.