Are you like most nurses, filling your days with taking care of everyone else but yourself? That may seem heroic, but putting yourself last ultimately leads to a dip in on-the-job productivity and career burnout. But when you take care of your own needs first, not only do you benefit, and so do your coworkers and patients.
Is there a secret formula to boosting your health and happiness? Fortunately, there is no secret. It’s simple, though not easy, to make yourself a priority in your own life.
By attending to your own self-care, you’re more likely to head off the symptoms of overload which can cut your nursing career short. But where do you start, when there are so many components of a happy, healthy life?
Self-care is easier to establish if you know what’s most important to you at this particular point in time. You may want to focus on a major life activity—eating, exercise, sleep, or relationships—because they seem like obvious drivers of well-being. Improvements in any of those important areas can certainly yield major benefits, but they’re usually tough to crack.
Even if you highly prioritize self-care, it’s difficult to say “No” to that big slice of cheesecake, fit in workouts, or turn in for bed on-time. Especially when your schedule is already jam-packed, your shifts are long, or you work nights.
Why not try another tactic? Consider setting a self-care habit in motion by starting with baby steps toward your ultimate goals. Improvements don’t have to start in your “hot zones” either. Like dominoes, a shift in one habit or routine will cascade down to every other area of your life.
Here are two powerful ideas to spark your thinking:
1. You Need a Budget.
Who even uses a budget anymore? It sounds so old-school, like playing music on 8-track tapes and paying with paper checks at the supermarket. But sitting down to crunch the numbers, and getting a grip on your income and outgo, can be an effective stress-reliever. Your financial situation may remain the same, but seeing the actual facts can stop the free-floating anxiety that’s fueled by imagination.
Your budgeting system doesn’t have to be fancy, either—just use a notebook and pencil to note and track your household expenses and income. Some people like to allocate cash to specific purchases, using an envelope system popularized by Dave Ramsey. One envelope for cafeteria lunch money, another for…
And don’t forget to plan for seasonal outlays (holiday gifts or taxes) and emergencies. That way if you need to replace a dental crown, you’ll have a buffer fund to cover it, and won’t panic as much.
There are also many apps out there for budgeting, including the grand-daddy, You Need a Budget (YNAB).
2. Do a Digital Detox.
Are you always texting, Skyping, Tweeting, Facebooking, or otherwise deep in your digital stream? That’s the case for many “social media natives” and even for their oldest colleagues.
Even if you’re following social media guidelines for nurses in your workplace, you may find that digital is a distraction, always in the back of your mind, ringing, buzzing, or vibrating to get your attention. You could get relief from all sorts of social media ills, from text neck to FOMO, by choosing a set time to disable it, for hours or days.
Some people like to set aside long weekends to go away on formal retreats, like the ones offered by Digital Detox while others simply reduce everyday use. Digital refers to all smartphones and computers (sometimes TV’s too), so resolving to stay away from electronics and screens after 8:00pm could be enough to calm your down, and make it easier to get to sleep at a decent hour.
Oh, but wait, what if you ditched your alarm clock? There are all kinds of new devices for improving your sleep hygiene that you may want to check out. One example is the Philips Wake-Up Light Alarm Clock with Sunrise Simulation, which costs less than $50. The light on this clock slowly gets brighter over a 30-minute span, to gently awaken and welcome you to the new day.
It’s important for you (and your patients) that you engage in self-care every single day. So resolve to take a baby step toward making yourself a priority in your own life.
Being a nurse, it’s often challenging to have a work-life balance. Everyone wants a balanced life because it’s good for their physical and mental health, their relationships with family and colleagues, and their work performance, but how can you actually achieve a work-life balance?
I always tell my nursing students how important time management is. More often than not, we’re too busy trying to keep up with our daily activities and workload, but good time management can help you achieve more in a shorter period of time and with less effort, and help you make better decisions. As a result, you will have more free time and more success, which in turn leads to lower stress and frustration.
Here are some useful steps to help you manage your time effectively and achieve a work-life balance:
Identify your priorities and values between home and work. Always work on the most urgent and important goals and tasks first. Readjust the demands of work and home as much as possible.
Assess how you currently spend your time. Keep a time log for a week and look for activities which you should set limits and boundaries on your time—both at home and at work.
Make yourself a priority by practicing good self-care, and take care of yourself in a holistic way—taking into account both physical and mental health.
Improve your nutrition by having a healthy breakfast, taking a break for lunch or healthy snacks, and spending time with family for dinner.
Integrate exercise into your day. Enroll in a yoga, Pilates, or mindfulness meditation class or other relaxation activity that can help you reduce stress.
Improve your sleep health by making your bedroom as inviting as possible.
Learn to say “NO.” Sometimes you need to let someone know that you are not available to take on a new request or attend another meeting.
Take time to reflect on the positive parts of your day and life.
Make time for the things you love. Have a good time trying out other areas of well-being.
Identify workplace and personal challenges that create stress, and develop an action plan for addressing or coping with them.
Acknowledge losses and give yourself permission to grieve.
Seek support from your families, friends, and colleagues in areas that seem to be the most challenging. Consider using your organization’s employee benefit program, peer associations, and support groups for assistance.
Have fun and enjoy a balance of your work and personal life!
Nursing might be a predominately female-staffed profession, but all nurses, male and female, still struggle with the same work-life conflicts. Whatever point they are in life – raising young children, coping with the needs of aging parents, just starting a career, or even facing retirement – there are always challenges.
Luckily, nursing generally allows the kind of flexibility and career growth that has long made nursing attractive to anyone trying to balance raising a family with work. Nurses who are men typically want the same benefits that attract women to a nursing career, and as dads, they face many of the same challenges.
What do dads want from work? And what can workplaces offer that will help them in their careers and at home?
Dads, it seems, want the flexibility to be home after the birth of a child or to participate fully in their children’s lives without fear of impacting their careers negatively. And although some American workplaces are stepping up to offer great maternity leave or flex-time benefits for women, they are lagging in offering the same benefits to men.
According to The New Dad: Take Your Leave, a recently released study by the Boston College Center for Work & Family, working dads want workplaces that give them flexibility and career advancement and that recognize their increasingly active role in the day-to-day family activities. Ninety-five percent of dads surveyed reported flexibility as important to being able to balance their work and family demands.
New dads are finding a definite uptick in organizations offering both maternity and paternity leave (sometimes under an umbrella of parental leave), and men are trying to balance the demands of their careers with the demands of their families. Luckily for male nurses who are dads, many health care organizations recognize this important shift in an employee’s life and do offer some kind of paternity leave. But there are still many companies that don’t offer any leave at all or, if they do, it’s frequently unpaid.
While nearly all of the dads surveyed believe paid paternity leave is essential, they don’t always want to take it right after the baby is born. In fact, according to The New Dad study, 76 percent of dads surveyed would actually prefer to not take all of their leave right after the birth of a child. By taking the leave later (for example, once the mom’s maternity leave ended), dads can help make the mom’s transition back to work smoother and can often help extend the the time before parents need to look into care options.
With nearly 75 percent of fathers reporting they want to spend more time with their kids, flexibility is important to working families. The shifts in many nursing jobs allow that flexibility already, but as more men enter the profession paternity leave might become more of a hot-button topic.
