Mind-body practices to support Content Moderator wellbeing

Speaker 1

Hello and welcome to this webinar on mind body practices to support the work that you do in content moderation to help reduce stress. My name is Dr Pamela Lennon. I’m a health psychologist and well-being consultant at Zevo Health and I’m interested in mind body techniques in the work of stress and trauma.

So some of the topics we’ll quickly cover today in this short webinar is a look at the different types of stress are unique in content moderation work and some of the impacts and challenges that that may cause as well.

We will look at some somatic awareness techniques, what that’s about and how it might be useful in your work and then we will come to some very useful somatic exercises for you to try and a little bit at the end then about how to support moderator resilience and what are the factors relating to that.

So just before we get started as a disclaimer and just to take all these little subtle movements very gently as much as is comfortable and also if any difficult emotions arise just to pause and maybe try a different technique or if it gets quite difficult for you maybe to make contact with your well-being team or your EAP to discuss further.

So to get started we’re going to start our first technique which is a grounding technique and if you would like to take a seat in your chair and keep your spine straight and what you need to do is to feel your feet on the ground to press them into the ground and maybe close your eyes if that feels good as well and just to feel the contact of your feet and maybe any of your stresses or worries or concerns to feel them flowing into the ground as well.

Speaker 2

just to breathe.

Speaker 1

and also to take notice of any sounds or your awareness of anything in your room. We can often, when we’re stressed, get caught up in in our heads and not be physically aware of what our nervous systems are perceiving unconsciously as well, so this is a good technique to just check in. See if we notice any tension anywhere, maybe tired, maybe hungry.

A lot of these sensations we tend to ignore as well. Another technique is maybe to just touch the table in front of you, just to feel that.

Speaker 2

gently come back.

Speaker 1

And notice how that might feel for you. Did it build any increasing anxiety or did it feel a bit relaxing? And you found awareness about how you may be feeling that you weren’t really registering before that. So now to just have a really quick look at the different types of stressors unique to content moderation. And first, the obvious one is exposure to content.

And it can have an impact on, you know, great shock or shame, guilt or disgust from reviewing content, which over time can build into anxiety or depression, vicarious trauma and burnout. Often the content can be monotonous and boring as well to get through. And it can also impact our world view as well from the type of content.

Also, there is the workload demand, high performance expectations that can make our nervous systems more hypervigilant, increase our levels of stress, which of course has physical health impacts as well. On the operational side, there may often be shift work. You know, you may have to work the graveyard shift, which is quite unsociable and increase sense of isolation as well.

And often in trust and safety work, it can have a hierarchical structure. It can be quite linear. So often content moderators have a lot of responsibility, but not enough control as well, which can be impactful. And finally, another aspect is a managing policy to maybe ethical dilemmas that if policy decisions don’t align with your own personal values, it can be quite difficult.

And then the expectation to be constantly on top of changes in policy as well. So now to talk a bit about stress and trauma. So stress is a reaction to pressure or threat that may or may not be real. However, trauma is a bit more extreme and it can be intense levels of shock, acute or chronic. However, the purpose of it is to protect us. Our body is trying to protect us from harm.

So both affect the body physiologically and can create adverse reactions, such as tension in the gut, nervous system activation or muscle tension. However, we can calm the mind through soothing the nervous system and releasing emotion and be able to find little islands of peace and safety and bring back to baseline when we’re feeling stress or affected by content.

So now a little bit about somatic awareness. So our nervous system is usually in three different types of states. Now ventral vagal is where we’re calm, we’re chilled, we’re connected, we’re feeling safe, we’re feeling social.

If you can think of it as a time maybe where you’re relaxing on a beach in the sun or reading your favorite book while fire or watching your favorite film all cozy, that’s when you’re in ventral vagal. And it’s important particularly in content moderation work to try and find opportunities for a ventral vagal as much as possible.

Then there’s this sympathetic activation where we’re stressed, we’re anxious, we’re mobilized if you can think of when you’re, a time you might be stuck in traffic and late for work or have a really tight deadline and you’re not getting there as fast as you can, that’s sympathetic activation.

Speaker 1

And then at the bottom there’s dorsal vagal which is kind of a collapse and immobilization, low energy and disconnected where we feel we’re so disappointed, we can’t get out of bed, maybe we experience burnout or a breakup in a relationship.

And if you can think of a time where you just had that shut down, your body’s trying to protect itself and it doesn’t want to go out in the world and socialize as well. So these are good to know when we come into these practices and maybe to check where you might be at the moment.

Here is another nervous system map where at the bottom we have our ventral vagal, maybe when we’re meditating, when you feel grounded, when we’re content, we’re happy. And as we become activated and aroused, we can get into the fight or flight mode of fear and panic or anger and irritation.

But if we become more activated, we kind of shut down into dorsal vagal and we can have dissociation and feelings of numbness psychologically and physically in part of the body as well or depression or shame as well. So we want to find ways of deactivation to bring us from dorsal vagal through sympathetic and into ventral vagal as much as we can. So now let’s try some somatic exercise.

Firstly, we will try some vagal breath work and the purpose of this is to try and bring us into more ventral when we’re experiencing stress or we’re experiencing shutdown as well. Research suggests that it works by stimulating the cranial nerve which activates our chilled parasympathetic nervous system. So now we’re going to try a few different techniques.

We’d like to sit in the chair and we’re going to start off with butter breath. Butter breath is simply breathing from the lower abdomen, from the lower belly and breathing from here can be really helpful. I find it quite useful as well in terms of stress or a sense of threat or any sense of trauma that might come up or triggering. It’s really helpful to try and breathe from this space.

Now of course, if any of this breath work you find a bit activating in terms of anxiety or triggering, just to leave this one and maybe try some of the other movement techniques that might be better for you.

But to start off with, it’s basically inhaling from below your belly button and I know it’s quite difficult to do but even the attempt of trying to breathe through it activates the parasympathetic. So let’s go to have patience. So if you want to breathe in to our lower belly, extending, pushing out the belly as we inhale and then exhale.

Speaker 2

pushing it in. Inhale and exhale.

Speaker 1

We’re going to add a little bit onto this, so we’re going to inhale for five seconds and hold and then exhale for six seconds, just a longer exhale. So inhale.

Speaker 2

hold, exhale, pushing in the tummy, inhale, exhale, we’ll try one more, inhale, and exhale.

Speaker 1

to open your eyes. So just try and notice how you might feel in any way different after doing that breath. Maybe the room feels a little brighter because you’ve activated the parasympathetic nervous system. Maybe you feel a little lighter, a little bit more relaxed, the shoulders have dropped a bit. Of course, it is also possible with increased awareness to feel a little bit more activated as well.

And it might mean it’ll take a bit more work to kind of work on that lower belly breath and to feel a bit more safe with these brows. So now just different types of down-regulation stress tools that you can choose to use are very different types and maybe some will work and so you’ll feel a bit more uncomfortable with.

So the first one grounding exercises we did at the start and the purpose is to anchor into the present moment because in the present moment is where we have awareness of what’s really going on for us and gives us the opportunity to change that and to work on that as well which is quite important in somatic work.

So examples are as we did pressing the feet into the ground feeling supported or running cold water over your hands can be quite soothing if you find your panic levels are elevating a bit as well it brings you back to your body.

Breath work as we’ve just done or touching objects maybe your desks or desk or something that you might have around your desk as well or even pressing into your hands as well can bring it back to another technique.

There’s also body scanning technique which is about focusing on sensations in the body and what they’re trying to tell us and when we focus in on pain or emotion as long as it’s not too intense it can actually release that pain and that emotion by paying attention to the awareness of these sensations as well.

It can help us identify areas of tension and bring in awareness to them if you find your shoulders oh they’re actually hunched up as I’ve been working all day to bring awareness to them and try to bring them down and relax them so that that’s that knock-on effect and psychologically as well.

There are also mindful movement techniques which we’ll come to in a bit and this is about intentional movement and it has a profound effect on our physiological body and on our psychological well-being.

Examples that you may want to try or have tried is mindful walking maybe walking in a park or at nature, paying attention to your breath as it rises and falls and to any emotions that might be coming up or sensations in the body.

It’s just about really being present and maybe looking at the birds and the trees and you know taking yourself out of your mind a little bit as well and somatic shaking technique which we’ll come to also and then there’s another skill which is resourcing which can even be so helpful in even in complex trauma as well as hoist and I think these are really helpful for anyone really and they help create a safer space in the mind when needed and we will look at some of these resourcing techniques such as ventral anchors and glimmers.

Speaker 1

Another example is just you know hanging around your favourite people or your favourite to listen to your favourite song or your favourite scent anything that again brings you back to a ventral nervous system. So now the next technique is a mindful movement technique called somatic shaking and it’s good to do it as much as you feel comfortable and as much as your body wants to release and shake.

You can try it very gently sitting in the chair or you can do a standing shaking which I will demonstrate for you now to really let go of any tension and it’s about allowing your body to return to safety in times of stress and release energy when you feel that perception of threat or stress as well and it’s a great exercise I use it a lot myself you know at the end of the day at work or after a meeting, after a therapy session, after a stressful moment just really kind of bring you back to the centre and it was discovered by observing how animals in the wild after being chased they do that shaking as well because it resets their nervous system and there’s no right or wrong way to do this it’s just to do as much as you feel comfortable with and as much as you want to do as well so now we’ll try the technique.

Standing straight feet firmly on the ground you just start by shaking your knees from the ground just gently bending your knees to what feels comfortable and then bringing it off into the shoulders you can have as much fun with this as you want, as much as you want to release. Shake out the wrists, shoulders, whatever feels good, stretch out the neck.

Relax your jaw, relax your face, shake out as much as you want. For as long as you want you can shake out the legs, shake out the arms,

Speaker 2

I’ll take you off now.

Speaker 1

You can use this at any time, maybe on your own rather than in the office. You know, whenever you feel tension or stress and then slowly. Stop and notice how you’re feeling afterwards. Feel more relaxed, kind of tingling sensations in your nervous system. Loosen up. That’s a very practical tool to use during your day, just to relax and wind and release tension and emotion.

So some other somatic techniques that you can use maybe at your desk or after work, some examples here, is just the practice of clenching your jaw just to, you know, become aware of your mouth and see if you’re clenching your teeth and to relax your jaw and to breathe and relax as much as you can.

Or you can practice dropping the shoulders down and back while moving the neck and side to side to release any tightness or stiffness that may be there. Another technique is to shake out your hands and close your fist, stretching your fingers. You can bring it into the shoulders or the legs, arms, anything that makes you feel good that you’re shaking off any tension or stress as well.

Another technique is eye rolling and it combines the left and right hemispheres of the brain, which can be really good if you have tunnel vision, you’re focusing on, you know, a workload or you want to shift from kind of high stress reactivity as well. And that can be helpful with traumatic content as well to shift from that perspective.

And it’s basically just following your eye from the left to the right, kind of really concentrating on that for a couple of minutes as well. It can be really helpful. Another technique is stacking and unfurling of the spine, just like the fur in there in the picture. So if you want to practice this, just if you just relax your spine.

Speaker 2

forward.

Speaker 1

And then as you inhale, just gently put me right vertebrae, stack up your spine so it’s really straight. And notice how you feel here. Feel quite strong and alert and energised, which can be really helpful if you’re in dorsal vagal as well. And then to relax down into it, you can try that a couple of times and see if that works for you as well.

And also in somatic work, hip stretches are very important because we tend to carry a lot of stress and emotion in our hips as well. So there’s many resources online, we can demo hip stretches and they’re great for maybe if you’re at your desk all day or working from home, just after work to do a couple of hip stretches as well.

Another type of resourcing or safety and soothing techniques, and the first one here is the butterfly hug, which may seem unusual to be doing, but it sends signals and cues to the nervous system of safety as well. So whether you just want to rub them from your shoulders to try doing that to your elbows, maybe holding in at the elbows as well, it’s quite soothing.

Another technique that might work as well is just rubbing your thymes here. If any content becomes stressful, you need to relax a little. It can be a really good technique as well. And to talk about two other types of techniques as well, glimmers, you may have heard of them, they’re essentially the opposite to triggers. So they’re a good resource if you find you’re being triggered quite a bit as well.

Under experiences or interactions, micro moments, they’re always fleeting and very short of safety, enjoying connection or peace, maybe while you’re worked as on coming in the window or seeing a bird outside or an animal, anything that you can think of really can be a glimmer of seeing a rainbow, watching snowfall.

And it’s an experience of safety and peace for that moment in time and that feeling that everything is OK and it really helps us through some tough times as well. So can you think of any times that you’ve experienced a glimmer or anything like that? And if you do, going forward as well, just to stop and appreciate them and kind of let them filter in into the body as well.

And finally, another technique is trying to find ventral vagal anchors. And these can be people or pets, you know, if you’ve a cat or a dog and petting them is often brings a sense of safety as well. Or maybe around your desk, you’d like to have some touchstones like seashells or stones or even having a necklace as well. That brings you that sense of warmth and safety.

And maybe think about how you could even bring more of these into your work environment or, you know, maybe take notice of your work environment as well. And is it full of stacked paperwork or, you know, do you want to maybe have more pictures or more candles or plants or anything like that?

Because these are things we perceive unconsciously, but because we’re often busy, we don’t pay much attention to. So finally, just a few final comments at the end of this training as well. Factors that are important in terms of content and moderate resilience is to know that resilience is can often be beyond the individual as well.

Speaker 1

There are, you know, work factors, systemic influences that all have an impact on your well-being as well. There can be what are called psychosocial stressors.

And it’s important to have, you know, a work culture that’s supportive of your well-being, good management support, leadership priority of well-being, having a really supportive team, being able to bring in humor into your team as well, whatever works as a resource.

And finally, some factors that are shown to support resilience and post-traumatic growth as well is, you know, finding meaning and sense of purpose in your work, which I’m sure a lot of you do as well because of the importance of the work that you do.

It’s just to remember that as well that helps and to make time for self-care, whatever that is, and an opportunity for reflection and therapy just to create that self-awareness. So thank you so much for joining today.

I hope there is something, a little piece of knowledge or awareness or some skills you can bring into your daily work to help you with the amazing work that you do in content moderation as well. But thank you so much and hope to see you again.