World Let’s Stop Shouting Awareness Day

A Yorkshire based creative counselling start-up Watoto Play are launching their new campaign
World ‘Let’s Stop Shouting’ with a nationally focused Awareness Day, which will launch on
Saturday 6th November 2021.

The World Lets Stop Shouting Awareness day’s focus is to open the conversation about the impact
of aggressive and angry communication on our relationships and physical and mental health.
Shouting, as a form of verbal abuse, can often be a trigger for more violent crimes. A recent study
by London School of Economics found that in the UK, the level of violent crimes committed
decreased during the first national lockdown, but that the levels increased significantly – by around
30%, when the restrictions were lifted.

Founder of Watoto Play and leading the awareness day for World Let’s Stop Shouting, Yasmin
Shaheen-Zaffar said “This awareness day is incredibly important especially as we start to come to
terms with the mental health costs of the pandemic and lockdown. I really believe assertive
communication is the key to building better relationships and living a calmer, less stressful lifestyle.”

Let’s face it no one likes being shouted at and really most of us don’t like shouting either or losing
control. So really we want to open up the conversation about shouting. It causes us stress, can make us feel frightened, resentful or anxious and the cause often get’s buried in the shouting. We don’t move forward as nothing gets sorted. In fact we stay stuck. Our World Lets Stop Shouting Awareness day has 3 main aims:

1 Raise awareness – without shame or blame around the impact shouting has on our relationships
but also our physical health and wellbeing – for both the shouter and shoutee.

2. We advocate passionate and difficult conversations in the spirit of growth, learning, democracy,
exploration of ideas and healthy debate, without resulting in shouting, verbal abuse, aggression or
violence. We want to talk about ways to help us manage those uncomfortable feelings we feel in
our body when we hear something that triggers us or we don’t agree with.

3. To promote non-violent communication by sharing resources and strategies for de-escalation
techniques which can help both the shouter and shoutee (person being shouted at) build stronger
relationships.

Our ‘Let’s Stop Shouting’ campaign is about embracing our similarities and differences and
increasing awareness of the human in us. It will offer tools and strategies to help take the heat out
of tense, frustrating situations and support those wanting to build stronger, healthier, calmer
relationships with family, friends, or in the workplace.

Yasmin adds “You can support our awareness day by downloading graphics to use on your social
media posts, using our Lets Stop Shouting Awareness Day Filters on Instagram and Facebook and
using our hashtags #itstartswithashout21 #letstopshouting21 #mentalhealthmatters.

If you use social media – you could write posts about shouting, verbal abuse, aggression,
communication and how it effects you. Just simply talking about it & opening up the conversation
around shouting helps raise awareness and that’s when change starts to take place. For example
what type of shouting is there? Of course there’s happy shouting, danger stop type of shouting but
then there’s angry, verbal abuse type of shouting. That’s the type of shouting we mean. The
unhelpful type.

What does it feel like to be shouted at? What does it feel like to be the shouter? How does this
impact your health? How does it effect your relationships? What else can you do? These are all
questions that can help us to raise awareness.

We have our digital breathe balls to download from our website – which you can keep on your
phone or tablet. This is a calming breathing exercise you can use to de-escalate tense situations or
just to take a moment when you are feeling stressed out. They are available in different colours – as
colour can have a huge impact on our mood and emotions. I really hope we can open up this
important topic – because effective communication is the key to getting our needs met and
meeting the needs of others without aggression, abuse or violence.

The initiative is being supported by The Creative Counsellors Community, with Events, Retreats &
Training Lead, Gaynor Rimmer adding ‘We are delighted to support and raise awareness for the
‘World Let’s Stop Shouting’ campaign. We see this being beneficial not just for the counselling
community, but importantly, it will enable this mental health topic to be raised nationally’.

You can follow the campaign on social media by using the hashtags:

#itstartswithashout21
#letstopshouting21
#mentalhealthmatters

Website: www.letstopshouting.com
Inspiration behind the awareness day: https://letstopshouting.com/our-inspiration/
Long Version & Multicoloured version of breathe ball video here
Graphics for media & social media posts: https://letstopshouting.com/downloads/
Media Contact: Yasmin Shaheen-Zaffar: yasmin@watotoplay.com