This year, prioritize yourself

January 1, 2023

Note: with the holiday break coming up next week, we're jumping ahead and posting a little early. Happy holidays to all, whichever you celebrate!

We’ve all probably said it at some point in our careers: this year, I’m going to make myself a priority. For 2023, it’s time to make it a reality.

With the protracted period of pandemic-related change, uncertainty, and physical, emotional and financial turmoil of the past few years, workplace-related stress and burnout are at epidemic levels across industries and demographics.

For those of us in the so-called care industries – healthcare, veterinary medicine, emergency response, social work, counseling and education, among others – ours have always been hard fields to have boundaries in. People are drawn to our career areas to make a difference. There’s always one more case to see, situation to resolve, or call to make before the end of the day; the ‘what if’ of helping one more person can be a compelling reason to stay at work just a little bit later.

It’s this capacity for care and empathy, ironically, that places nurses, doctors, veterinarians, educators, and other care specialists among those professionals with the highest rates of burnout, compassion fatigue and depression.

In our office, we have a saying: before we can help others, we have to help ourselves. Before we can provide empathy to others, we must have compassion for ourselves. If we are burnt out, stressed, and exhausted, we don’t have the mental, emotional, or physical capacity for the skills-intensive work our patients, clients and teams rely upon.

That’s why true self-care – attending to our emotional, spiritual, and physical needs on an ongoing basis, not just a day of Netflixing on the couch every weekend or occasional spa day – is so important. True self-care includes self-compassion, treating ourselves with the kindness, patience, and understanding we would offer a close friend or family member who is suffering.

As we move into the new year, we owe it to ourselves, our families, clients, patients, teams and staff to prioritize work-life balance, boundary-setting, and self-care. The work will always be there. It should be our first priority to make sure we’re at our best to do it…and that means making patient #1 yourself.

So how can we do this? How can we carve out the time to care for ourselves without compromising the care we offer others?

Shift our perspectives

There’s an old adage: you can’t pour from an empty cup. It’s important to fill our own cups first. That means putting our care and needs first in order to ensure we have the energy to properly care for others.

It can be hard for caregivers to say ‘no’. Prioritizing ourselves can seem selfish when there are patients suffering, clients relying on us, and when our colleagues are struggling as much as we are. However, if we are exhausted, chronically stressed, and depleted, we can’t offer the energy, focus, and empathy they deserve.

Self-care and self-compassion are ultimately selfless – not selfish acts – when they allow us the bandwidth to better attend to the needs of others.

Identify our needs

Once we shift those perspectives and recognize the necessity of prioritizing ourselves, we have to figure out what we need.

In the care-giving fields, as good as we are at supporting the needs of others, we often have difficulty recognizing our own needs. Thinking of your own physical and emotional requirements, ask yourself:

• How much space (emotional or physical) and solitude do I need to recharge?
• What genuinely refreshes and nourishes me when I’m depleted? What gives me energy?
• What drains me? Is it the physical aspects of my work, or the emotional ones?
• When do I feel at my best? At my worst?

Once we’ve answered these questions, we can begin setting boundaries around our responses by making time to prioritize those things that refresh and recharge us and contribute to our wellness.

Make small changes

Even when we know something needs to change and we identify what we need to do, sticking with it can be tough. That’s because we often approach self-care as an all-or-nothing endeavor. When we reach our limits, we think a radical overhaul is the remedy – and then, because we haven’t the time for such a shake-up of our routines, we give up.

Alternately, we think we can ‘bank’ our self-care, hoping the benefits of that once-a-month long weekend or day of pampering can make a difference in our stress levels – all while doing nothing in the day-to-day to address those stressors.

Self-care is a marathon, not a sprint. Not only are tiny changes implemented in our daily routine easier to make and sustain, their effects are cumulative.

That means the simple shifts in routine or outlook can make enduring differences.

So what does sustainable, effective self-care look like? That depends on what you’ve identified as your needs. It might look like carving out half an hour daily to exercise, decompress with a book, or write in a journal. However, it also might be as simple as:

• carving out ten minutes in the morning to meditate
• queuing up your favorite podcast or an audiobook for the commute to work rather than listening to newsradio
• taking five minutes to make and pack a healthy lunch every day
• flipping through images or memories that bring you joy or gratitude instead of scrolling through social media or news that feed your anxiety
• Putting aside your phone or turning off the tv a little earlier each evening in favor of a little more sleep 

In the end, self-care is all about compassion: don’t our clients deserve us at our best, and don’t we deserve to be at our best? Don’t our families and teams deserve it? When we can begin treating ourselves with the same priority and care we dedicate to our clients, patients, teams and families, we all benefit.