Sophrology in social work education: exploring an innovative mind-body method to support student wellbeing and resilience.

The social work profession experiences elevated stress and burnout rates, yet self-care and resilience building remain underdeveloped areas in professional training (Collins, 2023; Lamb & Peterson Dealey, 2024). This paper explores the integration of Sophrology, a structured mind-body practice, into social work education to promote students’ self-awareness, emotion regulation and wellbeing. Drawing from two of the authors’ lived experiences and a small pilot project, the paper reports on three workshops delivered to social work students in England. The findings suggest improvements in participants’ perceived ability to manage wellbeing, emotions and readiness for practice post-workshop. Qualitative feedback highlighted the accessibility and practicality of the techniques, their ease of use in daily life and their relevance to professional practice. While limited in scale, these findings suggest Sophrology’s potential as an innovative, cost-effective approach to enhance wellbeing and resilience among social work students. The authors recommend further research to evaluate its effectiveness on a larger scale