When I first went into nursing approximately 17 years ago, I was a single mom with 2 children at home.  Trying to find the balance of being in nursing school, working as a Certified Nursing Assistant, being a mom and the sole provider, while keeping the “real me” in the process was extremely hard.

I would be getting ready for work, while monitoring my kids out the window at the bus stop, only to see that my 13 year old daughter had enough of my 10 year old son, and next thing I know she punched him in the nose and he landed in the ditch.  Now, I have become a referee as well.  As nurses, we tend to always put others’ needs before our own, and trying to find the balance between taking care of ourselves and self-preservation sometimes is not as easy as some people want to make it sound.

What do I do?

Early on when I first started nursing, I found that a great cartoon character “Superman” had the best remedy for this dilemma, and to this day I teach that remedy to first-year nursing students. The remedy is: When I walk through the hospital doors to go to work, I mentally picture in my mind changing personas from mom, sister, and daughter to the nursing role. This way I can be present in the moment, and it is also a great way to express self-care both personally and professionally. I also learned over my 17 years that taking a ceramics class, going with co-workers to paint night, or even a night of nothing but Netflix binging seems to help me decompress and calm the inside and recharge my energy.

I also have 3-5 key friends that are my go-to peeps when I start getting any hints that I am letting myself go into the spiral of too much to do and not enough time, or they see the look of stress on my face that it is time for a friendly intervention. Honesty from these close friends helped me to be honest with myself in regards to my degree of self-care.  They help me take my sunglasses off, and take away my crayons that I tend to use to make my world look good when it is really overwhelming.  What behaviors or things do you do to help ensure that you are meeting your self-care needs?  Who is your support system, because we all know we cannot participate in this world alone and still remain sane?

Over the last 4 years, I completed my Bachelors and Masters in Nursing Education, dealt with my mom having a hemorrhagic stroke and needing to be placed in long term care, dealing with a beautiful daughter that has PTSD, teaching part- time and working full time, getting engaged, 3 beautiful grandbabies arriving into this world, and (dare I say?) going through the word menopause. What I am attempting to share is the word balance. Balance plays such a huge role in self-care. How do you take care of others if you are not taking care of yourself both personally and professionally? Prioritizing what you do helps with the balance.

One area from the list of my life responsibilities and challenges that created such a challenge for a while, was the insomnia from menopause. Anyone else in menopause and have those crazy bouts of insomnia?  I have been the queen of insomnia! I always say that my 17 year old and I spent quality time at its highest level in the coolest way. I was determined that I was not going to be cleaning my house when I couldn’t sleep, so we did the next most productive thing.  When I couldn’t sleep, I would wake her up at one in the morning, and we would go to a fast-food store and order a hot fudge sundae and then drive around different neighborhoods, placing bets on who would be up with their lights on in their house.  My daughter won a majority of the time!   I was deemed by all high schoolers as the coolest mom ever!   That was until I could not fit in my size 14 pants anymore, and I was yawning more than the patients I cared for, then the light bulb came on that this adventure at 1am might not be the best idea.  I finally figured out that a nice Epsom salt bath and a book was a lot better self-care than the previously-mentioned remedy of driving around.

What Do Others Do?

I was reading a blog on line about self-care, and this author was listing tips from healthcare experts on what others should do, so I thought it would be awesome to share (Writer: Emma Lockhart from activebeat.com May 1^st 2017):

1. 20 minutes a day of “ me” time calms stress and creates balance
2. The investment of self-care will help relationships, goals, and overall health
3. Unplug electronic devices and get outdoors to help recharge
4. Try and stay around positive people, stress is just as contagious as a cold
5. Smile a lot to help create positivity
6. Intimate relationships with a spouse or significant other helps decrease stress.
7. Cardio workouts help to relieve stress and depression
8. Get quality sleep that will help with your focus and productivity
9. Cursing can calm stress and bolster confidence
10. Live in the present to decrease stress and have a quality of life

Wrap- up

To wrap up this discussion on self-care, we must realize that if we are not taking care of ourselves, the negative effects will ripple into our work life, and personal life to include all relationships. So if we think about the discussion of menopause, we can see that you can gain weight due to a hot fudge sundae that you eat at 1am in the morning, which then causes your waist line to increase, which then leads to a lowering of your self-esteem because you do not feel attractive or healthy, which then can lead to depression and anxiety, which then causes you to be less productive in your personal life, and less confident in your work life.

The moral of this article is to not drive and eat ice-cream at 1am when you have insomnia! (Ok so maybe that is not quite the whole moral of the story.) Actually the real moral of the story is that we cannot take care of others until we start taking care of ourselves, because honestly we will not be giving our full potential to create the best possible outcome for those we care for.