We were delighted to be one of the 5 Agencies delivering at Crucial Crew this November to 32 Primary Schools. A total of 1,600 Children & Staff involved in a Multi-Agency Safety Programme at Belle Vue Army Reserve Centre.

‘Crucial Crew’ run by Child Safety Media, is a multi-agency child safety event and is specifically aimed at Year 6 children as they transition to secondary school.  It’s generally accepted that children start to become more independent at this age and are often expected to cope increasingly on their own. Crucial Crew provides an interactive way of teaching children to become more aware of personal safety & regulation, learn how to react to dangerous situations, practice safety skills within a controlled environment and gain knowledge that can be carried into the wider community and everyday lives.

Other agencies consisted of Greater Manchester Police; British Transport Police; Talk, Listen, Change; & Change Grow Live.

TGBY Delivery:

Our room followed on from the children experiencing a mobile phone robbery as part of the GMP room experience. It was important for us to regulate the children as quickly as possible to enable a fast release of anxious emotions and to give a practical experience of how to keep a whole group safe and not re-trigger anyone in the room.

Each group entered a room explicitly defined as a “Safe Room“. Pupils verbally repeated the statement “This is a safe room.”

The permitted activities were intentionally restricted to the topic of yawning.

No other topics were introduced.
No meditation, tapping, breathwork, hypnosis, or relaxation techniques were used.
Crucially, children were also never asked to yawn.

32 Primary schools, 1,600 pupils & staff engaged in timed session averaging 15 minutes at the most for a complete session including a “Yawnathon,” averaging 5-7 minutes, where we asked the children to tally their own yawns if they did them, and we counted them at the end of each session. Behavioural observations showed marked group settling, and multiple agencies independently reported unusually calm pupil states in comparision to previous years, following the sessions.

Live4Energy Training College took our data to see if our presentation on Yawning would stimulate contagious yawning, within the defined non-triggering “Safe Room“. Their full report will be available soon for us to view but for now we know that 1,600 children & staff (not counting the yawns outside the timed perimeter of which there were many), produced 15,351 yawns across 10 days without any meditation, yoga, therapy, tapping, or other stimuli, just with each other in a room with permission to yawn if they wished.

We were even asked what we had done to the room to produce so much instant yawning. The answer: “we just gave permission“, for this room to be “A Safe Room” and 4 simple guidelines as to what we will allow in that room for the next 15 minutes together.

In addition to yawn counts, Live4Energy Training College took vitality readings of the room we were in which were recorded before the first session began and at the end of the day. On the days they had help more readings were able to be taken for each group. Wyrdoscope/REG field data was also collected on environmental coherence.

The main observation is the total inclusivity of the work we do. Everyone can yawn (if they feel safe). Therefore, everyone can relate instantly to our conversations around boredom, apathy and exhaustion. Changing these emotions quickly to hope, creativity and possibility is where we excel and make changes FAST to regulating groups of children or adults.

Conclusion: Our Findings Fit the Global Pattern

Our Crucial Crew results replicate — in children — patterns previously seen in:

• meditation halls
• healing groups
• synchronized singing
• prayer gatherings
• focused intention events
• emotionally unified public moments

We have demonstrated that:

Contagious yawning is not trivial.
It is a social–physiological coherence mechanism capable of shifting group state, behaviour, and environment. More social research will be completed of course, as we continue to delve into our own social research with Live4Energy Training College through more Yawnathons. It is clear we bring something entirely new, fun, a little bit wyrd (yes, that’s spelt right); and doesn’t require you to learn a new skill to:.

A child-centred, innocence-based, non-triggering gateway into coherence.
A reproducible model for schools, councils, and wellbeing programmes.
A bridge between physiology, energy science, and consciousness research — grounded in real data.

Why not book your own experience on our 20 minute coherence resets online on Wednesdays. £5 a session or pay upfront for the whole year. We are looking for Partnerships and Sponsors. Would that be you?

In the meantime, those yawns you’ve sneaked out reading this have contributed to our creating a contagious yawn of relief around the globe campaign. Why not download our tally sheets and play books and add your yawns to our growing number!

What shall we aim for our yawn count to be by the end of 2026 and will you help us to get there?

Check out the fun we had below!