Self-Care for Nurses: 6 Tips to Maintain Your Mental Health

You cannot get into the nursing profession thinking it is a walk in the park. You must realize that it is a demanding, taxing, and physically exhausting career. You will witness death and trauma but must maintain calm and display compassion and empathy in the face of adverse situations.

The pain and suffering you witness daily take a toll on your mind; thus, you need to care for your mental health. Failure to address your mental health issues, such as stress, anxiety, etc., increase their intensity and result in burnout.

Nurse burnout is becoming a recurring problem in healthcare. According to the 2021 Hospital IQ survey, 90% of the nurses are considering leaving the profession in the next year. 71% percent of them with more than 15 years of experience think about quitting as soon as they get the chance.

So many professional and experienced nurses leaving the profession will be a hard blow to an already nurse-scarce healthcare system. Therefore, nurses must prioritize their mental health if they intend to stay in this profession. Here are some mental health maintenance tips for them.

1 - Re-kindle their desire for learning and curiosity

Re-kindling their desire to learn and know more about their profession is one of the ways nurses can beat stress. Engage your mind in doing productive things such as getting new training, attending professional seminars, or enrolling in a nursing degree program. This way, you divert your mind from focusing only on the stressful aspects of your life. Curiosity stimulates the rewards centers of the brain, and a curious mind can provoke a dopamine boost.

If you are a nurse passionate about learning, keep these benefits of higher learning in mind. Don’t waste your time procrastinating and get into one of the high-quality hybrid accelerated BSN programs you can find. These programs combine knowledge and clinical skills and help you learn more about your profession. Simultaneously, you will temper stress by stimulating your reward centers and becoming less reactive to environmental stressors. A study also states that gaining new knowledge also reduces your feeling of uncertainty. Hence, you feel less fearful about your predicament.

2 - Be gracious about what you have

When you experience stress, you first forget what you have and how blessed you are. It is because your mind is too focused on things that bother you. As a result, it is easier to get carried away with the feeling of helplessness and deprivation. The more you ignore your blessing, the lesser your ability to combat stress. Therefore, start showing gratitude for what you have got.

When you are thankful for your blessings, you appreciate people, things, and events around you and acknowledge how they affect your life positively. Once showing gratitude becomes your second nature, you will see positive changes happening around you.

You will feel good about yourself, your abilities, what you do for others, and how it affects their and their loved one’s life. Make a 'gratitude journal' and write about things you feel thankful for daily. You will see that you might not have anything to write at the beginning, but as time passes, you will get a lot to mention in your journal.

3 - Get ample sleep

One of the biggest problems nurses mention about their profession is that they rarely find time to rest. While there is no denying this claim, it is also true that getting enough rest is indispensable for nurses if they want to concentrate on their job and not make costly mistakes. Their mistakes can reduce patient satisfaction and result in adverse patient outcomes.

Lack of sleep impacts your mental health and makes you restless, irritated, and unhappy with your work. It also affects your ability to think critically, make critical decisions in difficult situations (accident emergencies), take the initiative, and receive and process information.

Therefore, with time you have to understand how you can sneak up a short nap, some thirty minutes of rest, sleep, and so on. Even taking a few minutes out for rest will help increase your focus and improve your mental health.

4 - Disconnect for some time

Nurses work with people all day. They communicate with patients, families, doctors, administration, etc. When at home, they have families and other responsibilities to dispense. But it is also true that for their sanity and mental health, they need some time with themselves away from everyone.

You must spend some time alone by disconnecting from everyone and everything. You can put on your walking shoes and hit the jogging track for at least thirty minutes daily. Don’t forget to leave your phone behind. And if you have it for emergency contact, turn off your notifications and mute your WhatsApp. During this time, reflect on what you have done during the day.

5 - Engage in mindful meditation

Mindful meditation is one of the ways to improve your mental health. It is a state of being aware of your present environment. When you experience mindful meditation, you focus on your present without reminiscing about the past or fretting about the future.

This activity makes you realize that what happens tomorrow must not be your concern today. Instead, your focus should be on how you live and what you achieve today. Regularly practicing mindfulness helps you fight stress and improve your health. It increases your empathy and overall attention span and reduces distractions and burnout.

6 - Forgive yourself

Nurses know that theirs is a high-responsibility profession. But being humans making mistakes is also possible. If something unintentionally affected one of your patients, you must understand that it was not deliberate.

Often you are more rigid with yourself than you can manage. You regularly remind yourself about the wrongs you might have committed, though not deliberately.

Mistakes are part of your profession; the only thing you can do is to make an effort not to make any mistakes. After putting in your sincere efforts, you must leave the rest to fate.

When you don’t forgive yourself for your mistakes, you have pent-up grief and guilt and unresolved anger inside you that requires some outlet to get out. When these feelings find no exit, they contribute to self-shaming and impact your mental health.

Conclusion

Responding to your mental health problems is as important as maintaining your physical health. Including ways to improve mental health is essential for all nurses. Similar to their daily dose of stress, they have to care for their mental and emotional health every day.

Whether practicing mindful meditation, exercising, writing a journal, or zoning out, mental health maintenance measures should be part of your life.