Tips to bust stress on shift

Want to bust work stress to the curb to thrive at work as you deserve?

Let’s skip the fluff and go straight to the actionable quick tips that you can implement immediately.

Quick Tip 1: STRETCH

 This stress buster is amazing as you stretch out sore muscles from walking up and down the ward, while simultaneously giving your mind a rest too. Use the tearoom (if empty) or a store room. Just find a space and get stretching. Even one MINUTE will help. Aim to do this a couple of times a shift. Try to move all your joints. Arch your back. Shrug your shoulders. Stretch your arms above your head. Make claws with your hands, flex your ankles and toes.

Quick Tip 2: Deep Breaths

 I don’t think I need to convince you of the benefits of breathwork. We all know them. Take a few deep breaths with your eyes closed or open. Inhale through the nose, feeling your chest expand. Then exhale through your mouth. Repeat.

Doing this will stop and centre you like no one's business. If you don’t think you have time to do this during your shift, then double the time you are doing it. Because these are the shifts you need this the most! 

Quick Tip 3: Relax muscles

I love this as it gets you focused on your body internally instead of letting the stress of the shift grab you and take you to places you don’t want to go!

Slowly relax all the muscle groups in your body. Start with your feet and end with your head. First, tense the muscles for about 8 seconds. Then relax them, and feel the tension melt away.

There you go! Three quick tips to help you bust work stress while on shift.   I have tried all 3 myself, and they all work amazingly well. Now, go forth and implement!

Stress in Nursing

Let us not beat around the bush. As some of you may know, I am a nursing burnout expert. I help people like you to prevent burnout and thrive in your career as nurses. 

Today, I will begin sharing with you the specific stresses in nursing. The experience of burnout in nursing is directly correlated to maladaptive responses to stress. 

This week I’m looking at stress in nursing in general.

 More importantly, today I will be helping you to make a solid decision of whether you want to start now to give yourself your best chance to love nursing or not. To show you how to stop dreading work and how to change your thinking about leaving nursing altogether. 

The thing is, everyone knows about stress in nursing. But not everyone is intentional about preventing it or healing themselves. That’s the truth!

I know of so many people who are interested in stress in nursing but only slightly interested in making some real changes in their lives to prevent it.  They have tried but they never get anywhere because they do not dig deep enough to truly understand why reducing stress in nursing is so important.

After working for over a decade as a nurse and witnessing/experiencing a lot of  stress in nursing, I have distilled the main reasons why nurses are stressed at work. 

The main 3 are:

-Emotional overload (dealing with and seeing distressing things at work).

-Physical overload (shift work is physically hard manual work).

-Workload (think no ratios and very acute patients!) and being undervalued (no recognition from your boss for example) close behind. 

What about you? 

Do any of these reasons resonate with you?

 Based on this I want you to be honest and clear with yourself about how you are managing your work stress. This will help you get clear on what you can do, to ensure you love your work and thrive in your career. 

I want you to be really clear on the ways in which you are trying to prevent work stress. Let us not talk about superficial reasons. I want you to dig deep to truly figure out a way that works for you and you alone! 

 If you realize that finding ways, that include shift recovery and other self care habits, may be something you are interested in?

 I’m here to walk this journey with you! DM me on insta and email me at beth@autonomic.com.au to discuss more. 

But for now think about what is your personal WAY of preventing and treating your work stress. Perhaps you will need a few different methods. 

 Also have a think about what life would be like for you if you were able to better manage work stress. 

I truly don't think that it's a coincidence that you are here reading this. This is a sign- take it!

Shift Recovery implementation

As I have mentioned before the magic of shift recovery comes from actually being intentional and knowing and focusing on the pump up and the cool down.

So here are my most favourite things to try to implement. Modify them to suit you. Change them if you know they won’t work for you. This comes from my experience and evidence. You do you Boo. 

Pre Shift Pump Up:

1. Wake up just a little before you have to wake up. I know minutes are precious but so are you and so is what you can get from these minutes. Consider going to bed those 10-15 mins earlier to allow yourself the time. Or if you are on an arvo or night shift don’t get lost in having too much time that you forget to do them. Schedule it! Use these extra minutes to complete certain tasks as below.

2. Read or listen to something that uplifts you and inspires you. This could be a one-pager. Read one page of your book, listen to a podcast as you do your hair. Fill your brain with good.  

3. Get moving. Now this could also just be one minute. Start a timer and stretch in your bathroom. A couple of yoga poses. Get the blood moving.

4. Music music music. Music feeds the soul. Find your songs and let them lift you. 

Post shift:

Pause outside the ward and breathe. Breathe out what you didn’t need from the shift. Shake it off in the eternal words of Tay Tay. 

Write down or at least list to yourself 3 things that you did great that shift. 

Schedule time to complete an activity which is about leisure. No housework. The evidence here is solid. Housework will deplete you further. I'm not saying live in filth. But I’m saying to prioritise time not doing domestic chores. You are welcome. Permission granted. 

Try a few visualization techniques to see what works for you. Some literally picture setting down baggage. Others picture being washed like they're in a shower. Others imagine that they are breathing out black, negative energy and breathing in white, healing energy.

But what I do after each shift or what I recommend is not as important as what you do after each shift. Brainstorm now 1-2 things you can do immediately after your shift and also 1-2 things that you will do after each shift which is just for you. Start small and build up. Let me know what activities you have chosen via email or on my socials.

One last very important step is to schedule them. It seems simple but it does work.

Put a recurring reminder in your phone, or your calendar. Something to remind you to do it which you have to tick off or you have to dismiss the reminder. 

This reminder will slowly change your habits. 

What next?

 Pop a post up to inspire others to do shift recovery and tag me so I can see your shift recovery in action!

The Phoenix Protocol is a membership for nurses seeking guidance with life skills to cope on shift and off shift. The membership involves monthly masterclass videos, worksheets and much more. 

Click here to join our mailing list for when the doors are opened again.

Post Shift

So you have a shift. It can be great or it can be brutal. Or it can just be a shift. What do you do next? 

A proactive and intentional post-shift practice is going to change your life. Have you ever heard of a maladaptive response to stress? In a nutshell, a maladaptive response is a response to something which increases the stress instead of decreasing it. This response can happen without you being aware. Therefore having a proactive approach to your post-shift recovery can be helpful.

At the end of my shifts I always do these tasks:

• Before I leave the unit I write on a post-it 3 things- something I learnt, something I loved and something I achieved (on a Friday I read them to show me what I have have achieved that week)
• Listen to a song from my playlist (I use music to start and end a shift)
• Back when I was burnt out, I would stop outside the ward doors and pause and imagine letting the shift go like you would set down a suitcase. (I don’t do this so much in my new role as it’s not so heavy on my soul)
• Sit outside (1 min minimum but much longer if I can) and feel the breeze or sun on my face. No phone. Just being. 

At home after my shift, I always ensure I have a moment of true leisure planned. It is easy to get swept up into household tasks or doing things for everyone else. BUT research tells us that shift recovery is severely decreased by completing household chores. Yes, we all need to keep our homes clean and tidy BUT you also NEED to look after yourself first.

 I also journal. Every day. Sometimes free text, sometimes bullet. But every day I unburden my mind of stuff to leave space for the next day. I love journaling and could talk about the benefits of it all day, but I'll save that for another day. 

What next?

Next week we will look at the actual implementation of pre-shift pump up and post-shift recovery. 

The Phoenix Protocol is a membership for nurses seeking guidance with life skills to cope on shift and off shift. The membership involves monthly masterclass videos, worksheets and much more. 

Click here to join our mailing list for when the doors are opened again.

Shift Recovery

So those two little words seem simple enough, don't they? But from my experience and from my observations of many nurses this is something that we just aren’t doing. Or if people do have some shift recovery behaviours then they aren’t done properly or with intention. 

I found some research on shift recovery by accident a few years ago. I had set myself a challenge to read 25 articles on nursing burnout/compassion fatigue for 6 months. I wanted to immerse myself in what I was going through and as an evidence-based loving nurse, I turned to the research. When I read this article, I felt something click in my brain. It felt like it was a concept I had been waiting to find and I knew I had a new very fine feather in my cap. However the research is old and sporadic but it is tried and tested by me. Experience and evidence- the perfect combination. 

In a nutshell shift recovery is the actions you take to recover from one shift before starting another. It includes how work-related fatigue and mental loads are managed to prevent maladaptive behaviours on mental and physical health outcomes. 

Do you do anything specific to get yourself mentally ready for a shift? Do you have any intentional post-shift activities to help ‘cleanse’ you of some of the potential burdens from work? 

The keyword here is ‘intentional’. To me, the behaviour needs to be planned and specific to create that mental switch off to allow true recharge to occur.

In the coming weeks, we will look at what pre-shift recovery is, what post-shift recovery is and also how to implement these into your life. 

So I hear you asking; why was it that no attention was paid to how we coped with nursing when we were not nursing? 

This is the question of my nursing career, my friends. I have discovered that many skills (like shift recovery)  just aren’t taught in our education so The Phoenix Protocol works to bridge that gap for nurses.  

The Phoenix Protocol is a membership for nurses seeking guidance with life skills to cope on shift and off shift. The membership involves monthly masterclass videos, worksheets and much more. 

Click here to join our mailing list for when the doors are opened again.