Natalie May

Self care is not a magical elixir. It alone will not fix the problems that create stress in your life as a new or veteran nurse; however, a self-care practice can help you to develop the necessary tools to find creative solutions to problems, to enjoy and rely on the camaraderie of your team, and ultimately to flourish in a meaningful and exciting career.Everything in this book is grounded in research and the expertise of psychologists, therapists, social workers, physicians, and other smart people, especially your fellow nurses. As your guides on this journey, we know a lot, but we don't know everything. We do, however, know a great idea when we hear it, and we've listened to nurses share their ideas about what is helpful and their experiences with making many of these ideas work for them. We have participated in resilience retreats with our nursing colleagues Jonathan Bartels, Esther Golda Lozano Otis, and Hannah Crosby, and we love their approach: They offer their students a "menu" of options, let them experience each one, and send them on their way. They trust that each student will connect with the practices that resonate or fit into their lifestyle. They also understand full well that your needs evolve over time. What works for you today may not work for you in three years. Your self-care journey will take some effort on your part, and this book aspires to guide you along the way. We designed this book with the real-life nurses we know and love in mind. We asked ourselves, When and where will a nurse have time to read this? Will it fit in a backpack? We've written the entire book in small, bite-sized doses. Read a few pages on the bus or during a break. You don't even have to start at the beginning. We need all the gifts you bring to the nursing profession. Your patients need you. Your colleagues need you, and especially new nurses need you as they enter the profession. There are a lot of people at stake in your becoming the best nurse you can possibly be. Nursing affords you routine interactions that change the lives of your patients, strengthens the resolve of your colleagues, and ripples beyond your immediate circle to surprising places. Your gifts are beyond measure. When you're empowered to take deliberate steps toward your own well-being and that of others, everyone flourishes.

We have prepared this Self-Care for New and Student Nurses Instructor's Guide to assist you in class preparation and to offer our thoughts and experience in teaching much of this material. The instructor's guide content parallels the activities in the Self-Care for New and Student Nurses workbook, providing you with a menu of classroom activities and assignments. That said, we encourage you to rely on your own experience, creativity, and local resources to make this course as valuable as possible to your students.Depending on the year or level of student, some topics may merit more focus than others. For example, fourth-year BSN students might want to take a deep dive into Chapter 17, "Healthy Work Environment: How to Choose One for Your First Job." If, by some chance, you are teaching in the middle of a global pandemic, you may want to spend more time with Chapter 10, "Self-Care and Systemic Change: What You Need to Know." We hope that in every chapter you will share your expertise, experiences, and wisdom with your students. Most of all, we hope you enjoy the self-care discovery process together and that your study of self-care is valuable for student and teacher alike.

Self-care is not selfish. Nurses should be entitled, in fact expected, to care for themselves with the same creativity and compassion that they use to care for others.Nurses don't flourish simply by fostering the well-being of others. The nursing profession is inherently meaningful in that we care for patients and families during their most vulnerable moments. But meaningful work has its limits. A major thread throughout this book is that we don't want to be "the naked person offering someone their coat."Self-care is about the mind as much as it is about the body.Self-care is a lifelong practice, and it is best to begin the practice early, before facing the stressors of a hospital or other clinical setting. In general, student nurses face significantly more stress than their peers, increasing the importance and value of self-care practices during nursing school.Individual self-care practices do not let organizations off the hook. The importance of a healthy work environment cannot be overstated, and in this book, we offer help in selecting a healthy workplace and encourage readers to advocate for themselves and others.Building a Self-Care Tool KitThis workbook will provide opportunities for you, the student nurse or new graduate nurse, to explore self-care behaviors that will help you deal with the big and small stressors you will encounter in your life or that you are encountering now. Our hope for you is that you will wholeheartedly "jump in" and explore both the practices outlined in this book and others that you encounter in this journey. Self-care has become an exciting field of study and practice, especially during the time of COVID-19 and other stressors that affect those of us who work in healthcare. There are so many resources to explore, and we have designed this workbook to encourage you to take advantage of as many of them as you can. We encourage you to build your own self-care tool kit. Just like a carpentry tool kit or any tool kit, it will contain important items to help you be the best nurse (or carpenter) possible. The tools are essential to getting the job done. This self-care tool kit, instead of hammers, screw drivers, and tape measures, will be a collection of a strategies, behaviors, and mindsets that will help you flourish in nursing.To that end, we hope that you will try many of the practices shared here. Some will resonate with you immediately. Some will fit your lifestyle. Some will need modifying to suit your preferences. (Don't like writing down a gratitude list with paper and pen? Take photographs or use social media instead.) Some will just be completely wrong for you. Some might be intriguing to you, but maybe you'll decide to hold off and try them again in a few months or years. Explore practices on your own. If you are in a classroom or group setting, take advantage of your collective wisdom, and shareyour explorations with each other.We cannot emphasize this enough: These practices take practice So much of self-care is mental work, even more than the physical work of caring for your body. Our human brains are blessed with neuroplasticity, or the capacity to change. Just as you can build muscle tissue and train yourself in aphysical skill such as bowling, roller skating, or playing the tuba, you can train your brain to react in new ways to stress and the challenges of your chosen profession. When you have completed the readings in the textbook and the exercises in this workbook, we anticipate that you will have your own collection of self-care tools that you can practice regularly and rely on when you face challenges in your career and life. This self-care tool kit will help you build resilience to overcome a range of adversities, from daily annoyances, to ongoing stressors, to sudden loss or change.

Self-care. Well-being. Resilience. Happiness. Self-compassion. These are among today's self-help buzzwords. There are countless books, articles, and podcasts on these topics, and many of them are essential resources for anyone seeking solid footing in the world today. Self-care remains an imperative for nurses and other healthcare professionals as burnout, high attrition rates, emotional fatigue, and moral distress loom large over us, especially in the age of COVID-19. The people who so compassionately care for others are in dire need of care themselves.Self-care practices are important because we need you. We need all the gifts that you bring to the nursing profession. Your future patients need you. Your future colleagues need you. We need you to become the best nurse you can possibly be so that you can support other young nurses as they, too, enter this profession. Nursing will afford you daily interactions that will change the lives of your patients, strengthen the resolve of your colleagues, and ripple beyond your immediate circle to surprising places. The gifts that you bring are beyond measure.Imagine for a moment a patient who is a young mother. Perhaps she is facing her health challenges while trying to be strong for her children and partner. The kindness, wisdom, and support that you bring to your interactions with her will have a downstream impact on her children and family. Even her children's children. Think about yourself or your nursing school peers who, when asked why they wanted to become a nurse, tell a story about growing up and seeing a nurse who cared for them or a loved one during a health crisis. So many nurses are nurses because they experienced the compassion of someone like you when they were in need. These nurses' compassion may have started you on your own journey to nursing, even though they may never know the impact they had on you. That is one of the superpowers of nursing: the impact you have on others. You will matter in ways big and small, in ways that the universe may never even be able to reveal to you.But here is the hard, honest truth: while you have chosen one of the most noble professions, you have also chosen one of the most difficult. In your career, you will face challenges big and small, whether it is a problematic coworker, the death of a favorite patient, or a global pandemic. You will have bad days or weeks when you ask yourself why you didn't choose a less demanding path in life. You will experience exhaustion, frustration, and grief. You will balance not only your nursing responsibilities, but also your commitments to your family and community. But as you question your life choices and wonder how you can take one more step forward, that voice inside you will whisper, "You are a nurse." Our goal in writing this book is that you never have to betray that voice. No matter what comes your way, you will have the strength, skills, and resilience to keep moving forward. But let us be clear: we do not want you to move forward at the expense of yourself or your well-being. We want you to move forward with wisdom and clarity of purpose by using every resource you can muster. We hope that what is contained in this book will become a valuable resource throughout the early years of your career, and even beyond.We welcome you on this journey, and we hope you welcome the opportunity to explore the concept of self-care, what it means, what works best for you, and how it can help you flourish in good times and help you grow in difficult ones. We are especially grateful, and humbled, that we can do it with you.

Self-care. Well-being. Resilience. Happiness. Self-compassion. These are among today's self-help buzzwords. There are countless books, articles, and podcasts on these topics, and many of them are essential resources for anyone seeking solid footing in the world today. Self-care remains an imperative for nurses and other healthcare professionals as burnout, high attrition rates, emotional fatigue, and moral distress loom large over us, especially in the age of COVID-19. The people who so compassionately care for others are in dire need of care themselves.Self-care practices are important because we need you. We need all the gifts that you bring to the nursing profession. Your future patients need you. Your future colleagues need you. We need you to become the best nurse you can possibly be so that you can support other young nurses as they, too, enter this profession. Nursing will afford you daily interactions that will change the lives of your patients, strengthen the resolve of your colleagues, and ripple beyond your immediate circle to surprising places. The gifts that you bring are beyond measure.Imagine for a moment a patient who is a young mother. Perhaps she is facing her health challenges while trying to be strong for her children and partner. The kindness, wisdom, and support that you bring to your interactions with her will have a downstream impact on her children and family. Even her children's children. Think about yourself or your nursing school peers who, when asked why they wanted to become a nurse, tell a story about growing up and seeing a nurse who cared for them or a loved one during a health crisis. So many nurses are nurses because they experienced the compassion of someone like you when they were in need. These nurses' compassion may have started you on your own journey to nursing, even though they may never know the impact they had on you. That is one of the superpowers of nursing: the impact you have on others. You will matter in ways big and small, in ways that the universe may never even be able to reveal to you.But here is the hard, honest truth: while you have chosen one of the most noble professions, you have also chosen one of the most difficult. In your career, you will face challenges big and small, whether it is a problematic coworker, the death of a favorite patient, or a global pandemic. You will have bad days or weeks when you ask yourself why you didn't choose a less demanding path in life. You will experience exhaustion, frustration, and grief. You will balance not only your nursing responsibilities, but also your commitments to your family and community. But as you question your life choices and wonder how you can take one more step forward, that voice inside you will whisper, "You are a nurse." Our goal in writing this book is that you never have to betray that voice. No matter what comes your way, you will have the strength, skills, and resilience to keep moving forward. But let us be clear: we do not want you to move forward at the expense of yourself or your well-being. We want you to move forward with wisdom and clarity of purpose by using every resource you can muster. We hope that what is contained in this book will become a valuable resource throughout the early years of your career, and even beyond.We welcome you on this journey, and we hope you welcome the opportunity to explore the concept of self-care, what it means, what works best for you, and how it can help you flourish in good times and help you grow in difficult ones. We are especially grateful, and humbled, that we can do it with you.

We all know the saying, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” but is that really true? After all, for some people, traumatic experiences ultimately lead to genuinely debilitating outcomes. For others, though, adversity does seem to lead to “post-traumatic growth,” where individuals move through suffering and find their lives changed in positive ways. Why does this growth happen for some people and not others? How exactly does it happen? Can the positive results be purposefully replicated? These are the central questions of a new study conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Virginia. They share their findings, practical advice, and inspiring stories in their new book Choosing Wisdom and the companion PBS documentary of the same name. Based on interviews with two distinct populations-medical patients coping with chronic pain and physicians dealing with having been involved in serious medical errors-Choosing Wisdom delves into how average people respond to adversity, how they change, and what factors help or hinder positive change. Through these interviews, the authors chart each person’s journey, and though the circumstances of each case may be unique, the commonalities are remarkable. By paying careful attention to the journeys of these exemplars, this cutting-edge research will shed new light on how we can grow, change, and develop wisdom through adversity. It is a welcome source of inspiration for those facing a difficult journey and those seeking to aid them along the way.