Counsellor's Corner
October
Hello, my name is Lindsey Arnason and I am the school counsellor at SouthPointe. I can be reached at lindsey.arnason@eips.ca.
As we enter Thanksgiving weekend whether it is a holiday your family participates in or not, I would like to encourage you and your family to take time to express your gratitude together. Expressing gratitude improves our ability to cope with stress and improves our overall mood. When we engage in gratitude daily it has a huge positive impact on our mental health and well-being. Often during times of uncertainty (such as covid) we can unintentionally forget to take the time to be grateful for what we have and what we still have control of. One thing we do have control over is taking time to pause and search for snippets of time in our day when we can express and/or experience gratitude. For example, you could take time to thank someone else for something they do, or personally acknowledge and experience something we are grateful for (could be as simple as a good hair day!). How will you include gratitude into your family routines? On the drive home from school? While you eat dinner? Maybe you will have a jar on your kitchen counter where family members can drop a slip of paper in with something they are grateful for and then read the papers together. Perhaps you will start a gratitude journal as a family. This way you can document the things you are grateful for and look back together and read about the great experiences you have had. Whatever it might be, I look forward to hearing what families are doing to intentionally express and experience gratitude.