IMPA Tech hosts chat on anxiety and mental health

04/09/2024

How to deal with anxiety? What should you do when you feel anxious? To try to answer these questions, IMPA Tech’s Psychopedagogical Support Center (NAP) held a chat with psychologist and lecturer Andréa Lucena. The meeting took place after classes on Wednesday (4), in the main room of Porto Maravalley.

The talk sought to educate and raise awareness among students about anxiety and to provide tools and resources for dealing with these challenges in an effective and healthy way. Andréa opened the conversation by defining the symptoms of anxiety and the particularities of stress factors, which are found in different situations in the contemporary world.

“Anxiety is an emotion, it’s fear of the future, excessive worry. How do you feel? This is something you should think about often,” she warned. The psychologist showed that anxiety can be caused by genetic, environmental or biological factors. She also demonstrated the existential crises that can plague young people, such as the breakdown of personal and academic expectations.

For student Henrique Assis, the initiative was necessary. “Mental health in Brazil is practically a stigma. We don’t talk about it much and we can’t find information that is accessible and available to everyone,” he said.

According to 2023 data from the WHO (World Health Organization), Brazil is the country with the highest number of anxious people, 9.3% of the population, more than 18 million Brazilians. Of this number, 31.6% are young people between the ages of 18 and 24. For the psychologist, this is due to the moment of life faced during youth. “It’s the age of pressure, of choice, of the certainty that you need to be on the right path. If you’re in doubt, stop and think. We have our whole lives to achieve our goals,” she said.

Student Gabriely Rocha thought the topics covered were relevant, especially given the area of study chosen by the undergraduates. “In addition to our age group, which favors high levels of anxiety, there’s also doing science, which is, like it or not, exploring new, uncertain, insecure paths… This is also reflected in our lives. I think that opening up a dialog about anxiety is always very important,” she said.

NAP coordinator Cristina Ramos believes that the meeting is an opportunity for self-care and understanding of our body and mind. And she reinforces: “we need to be connected to ourselves”.

At the end of his talk with the students, Lucena discussed strategies and techniques for dealing with anxiety, such as identifying emotional triggers and developing a personal action plan to control symptoms.

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