Written by: Jen Barnes, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Putting everyone and everything before yourself may be the worst way to offer compassionate, quality care for your patients. In fact, putting everyone and everything else first may be the worst practice advice to follow. Look, I get why you would think that ‒ I've been there too. We've been taught for a long time that it is the mark of a caring person to put everyone else before ourselves. This message is reinforced in our workplaces. But that's like using your cell phone without ever charging it and wondering why it doesn't work the same when your battery dies.
And if you continue putting everyone and everything before yourself, which is probably what you've been doing, you could continue to stay stuck feeling dead to the world ‒ so tired you have no energy for anything else ‒ for months, maybe even years.
So what do we do when our cell phone battery dies or is getting low? We charge it. And, it works best when we charge it daily.
How do you do that for yourself?
You start with step one which is to release stuck stress from your body. When we are constantly stressed, we end up chronically in our fight/flight response or shutdown response (or vacillating between the two). Through these responses, as a way to protect us our body floods us with chemicals and hormones. But the thing is, since the stress we face is rarely life-threatening the energy our body gathers to fight or flee doesn't get used. Instead, it gets stuck and builds up in the body. This is a big piece of why you likely feel so awful. So to feel better, we need to release it.
Then, we need to focus on how to regulate our nervous system so we can cope with the ups and downs of life ‒ including our work ‒ without living from our protective responses. Building resilience isn't about being able to handle more and more stress or being able to always be calm and peaceful. It's about being able to encounter stressful situations, or even be submerged in them, notice the messages from our nervous system about our inner experience, and then apply tools specific to our experience to help us return to a state of flow, a state of calm.
Another essential piece is to address the underlying stressors ‒ those things causing or contributing to our stress ‒ so that we aren't constantly triggered into our protective responses by the outside world. When we do this, it is important to recognize that there are some stressors outside of our control that require unique tools to be addressed effectively. For those stressors within our control, we can apply intentional problem solving, celebrate small wins, and/or practice compassionate boundaries to reduce or completely remove these types of stressors.
Lastly, we want to make sure we know how to follow through. That is, we want to learn an effective way to help us do these things that will help us feel better instead of just adding to our long list of things we "should do".
So often in our culture of "just do it" we rely on willpower to get ourselves to do things that would help us. It doesn't take an expert to see this is ineffective at best and harmful at worst given the shame we can experience when we can't get ourselves to be consistent. If you don't believe me, take a look at the packed-full gyms in January versus the emptying gyms in March. It's not that the people who stop going are bad or lazy, it's that they don't have an effective strategy to follow through on the things they want to do that will help them feel better.
Building resilience in healthcare is no different. Often we know some of the things that would help us, and even recommend them to our patients. Yet bringing them into our own life can be an entirely different story, but it doesn't have to be when we combine our motivational tendency with the laws of behavior change.
So let me ask you, do you want to continue putting everyone and everything else before yourself and continue to feel drained and less compassionate towards your patients and loved ones?
Or are you ready to focus on caring for yourself so you can feel good in your body, enjoy your life, and offer high-quality, compassionate care?
If you're ready to make a change and start feeling the best you've likely felt in years, then click the link below to join the Priority Notification List for my in-depth program The Resilient Nurse™ showing you exactly how to do this, step by step, so you can feel better in your body, take back your life, and maybe even enjoy nursing again!
The underlying focus throughout will be how to get yourself to follow through on using the tools and doing the things you know you need, including a special section dedicated to learning a super effective process for getting yourself to do stuff. Click the link below and I will see you there!
Jen Barnes, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Jen Barnes is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker in private practice in Minneapolis, MN. She specializes in complex trauma, PTSD, stress, and grief. The daughter and sister of nurses she has a passion for empowering nurses to build resilience. She has worked with nurses 1:1 hoping to expand her reaching to a broader audience. In 2021 she completed the Dare to Lead certificate program in order to more effectively address organizational challenges in healthcare. Most recently she spoke at the American Association of Critical Care Nurses’s 2022 NTI conference on Building Resilience in Nursing.
