Many of us are running on empty and on autopilot, neglecting our health. We are challenged by severe time constraints and great expectations to do more with less, resulting in strained tolerances, shortened and divided attention spans, and sudden injury, illness, or crisis that halt us in our tracks. THERE IS A BETTER WAY. Effective self-care is about recognizing our values, beliefs, influences, perspectives, and motivations that drive our behaviors and shape our outcomes. This book highlights the challenges faced in our healthcare system and offers insights and resources to support living a healthier and happier life. It is a guide for healthcare professionals, patients, caregivers, and organizations. It proposes that we explore how we define, manage, deliver, experience, and MODEL care. It calls for a paradigm shift to a more engaged, transparent, and collaborative model that has an emphasis on self-care.

"In this health and wellness guide, self-care means choosing behaviors to counter emotional and physical stress, from exercise and nutritious eating to self-centering practices. To live a life of meaningful contribution as a nurse to your patients, colleagues, and others, you may need to make changes in your own life first. This integrated self-care guide, by three nurse coaches with extensive expertise, is organized by six self-care pathways. Numerous detailed examples, guidelines, tips, techniques, and insights are included about each pathway to help you to assess and guide your self-care journey."--Provided by publisher.

You have a choice. There is a path out of pain, anxiety, burnout, and the feeling of complete overwhelm. This book is your invitation to choose that path. “Patel shares how to tap into subtle energy shifts through simple yet powerful practices that you can do on yourself.”—Goop When Kelsey Patel was struck by searing back pain in her twenties while working on Capitol Hill, she had no idea that repressed emotions could manifest as debilitating anxiety and physical pain. What healed her was empowering herself to choose how she lived her life. In Burning Bright, her first book, Kelsey shares the self-care techniques that helped get her body, health, and emotions back into alignment: Reiki, emotional freedom technique, meditation, yoga, and more. Now a spiritual coach, Reiki master, and wellness expert, Kelsey has helped thousands struggling with burnout and anxiety. This book is filled with stories, hard-won wisdom, profound empathy, and the secrets to reexamining thoughts and breaking negative patterns. You will learn how to: • practice Reiki on yourself, without a master; • interrupt anxiety cycles with tapping, breathwork, and journaling; • perform simple rituals that can boring you peace in any situation; • ground yourself and get back into your physical body; • release emotional and physical blocks so that your energy can flow freely; • establish a solid foundation of self-worth and self-care. As you use these techniques to align with your priorities, you’ll watch your authentic life unfold—a life of harmony, fulfillment, purpose, and joy. Burnout makes you feel like there is always more, more, more to do, but the truth is, you are enough right now without any more doing. Learn how to feel this truth because it’s time for you to start burning bright.

Practicing nurse and New York Times columnist Theresa Brown invites us to experience not just a day in the life of a nurse but all the life that happens in just one day on a busy teaching hospital’s cancer ward. In the span of twelve hours, lives can be lost, life-altering treatment decisions made, and dreams fulfilled or irrevocably stolen. Unfolding in real time--under the watchful eyes of this dedicated professional and insightful chronicler of events--The Shift gives an unprecedented view into the individual struggles as well as the larger truths about medicine in this country. By shift’s end, we have witnessed something profound about hope and humanity.

Self-care is critical for effective and ethical counseling practice and this inspirational book offers diverse, realistic perspectives on how to achieve work–life balance and personal wellness from graduate school through retirement. In addition to the authors’ unique perspectives as professionals at different stages of their careers, guest contributors—ranging from graduate students, to new professionals, to seasoned counselors—share their experiences and thoughts about self-care, including what challenges them most. Both personal and conversational in tone, this book will help you to create your own practical self-care action plan through reflection on important issues, such as managing stress, establishing personal and professional boundaries, enhancing relationships, and finding meaning in life. "Counselors face the obstacle of remembering to care for themselves while focusing on caring for others. In Counselor Self-Care, Drs. Gerald Corey, Michelle Muratori, Jude Austin, and Julius Austin lead 52 contributing authors in a book rich with living events and defining moments. Multiple stressors are described and met with multiple solutions. There is so much great content here that can be embraced by those who do the noble work of being present for others." —Tom Skovholt, PhD, LP, Professor, University of Minnesota; Author of The Resilient Practitioner: Burnout and Compassion Fatigue Prevention and Self-Care Strategies for the Helping Professions, 3rd Edition "Self-care is often discussed in counselor training and supervision, but not in its full scope. Counselor Self-Care provides breadth and depth by addressing the many facets of self-care. The authors combine personal narratives and anecdotes from experienced mental health professionals with self-assessment questions and self-care improvement strategies. The level of vulnerability and insight from the authors, and those who share their stories, is informative and rare to find. Assign this book as reading for yourself, your students, and your supervisees to motivate nurturing of the self." —Philip Clarke, PhD, Associate Professor, Wake Forest University *Requests for digital versions from ACA can be found on www.wiley.com *To request print copies, please visit the ACA https://imis.counseling.org/store/detail *Reproduction requests for material from books published by ACA should be directed to [email protected]

"Nurses play a vital role in improving the safety and quality of patient car -- not only in the hospital or ambulatory treatment facility, but also of community-based care and the care performed by family members. Nurses need know what proven techniques and interventions they can use to enhance patient outcomes. To address this need, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), with additional funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has prepared this comprehensive, 1,400-page, handbook for nurses on patient safety and quality -- Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses. (AHRQ Publication No. 08-0043)." - online AHRQ blurb, http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/nurseshdbk/

Rev. ed. of: Nursing: human science and human care / Jean Watson. c1999.

Care giving professionals are notoriously poor at looking after themselves; they give part of themselves everyday, see people at their lowest and most vulnerable. As well as being exposed to the physical trauma, they deal with acute psychological distress on a daily basis; their own and of others. Learning to still follow your dreams and have personal goals, many just put their life on a back burner and let others take over. This is a dangerous trait, as it leads to unhappiness, stress, discontentment and burnout. Many great people are leaving all areas of caring, because they feel they are running on empty. Giving excuses and blame for this to others, will not change anything. Take charge of your life, your choices and your outcomes. This to a carer will sound selfish, but in reality; what is going to happen to your patients when you are absent minded, make mistakes, get upset or angry, when you burnout and are no longer able to care for yourself, or them. Looking after yourself is not a luxury - it is a necessity, being resilient, knowing your boundaries and learning to say no, are fundamental for your wellbeing and for your patients. Learn how to off load self sabotaging thoughts, beliefs and habits. Choose what internal and external baggage you carry with you. Dump outdated thoughts, replace them with a more positive, protective and proactive outlook, to achieve better outcomes. Caring for the wellbeing of others is a fundamental part of you, but learning to care about yourself seems to take a lot of work. Seeing your needs, wants and desires as equal to everyone else, is a must. By keep giving small pieces of yourself to everyone else, when do you have time, energy or inclination to give to yourself? Compassion Fatigue is not acknowledge in the Northern Hemisphere, but the feeling of running on empty is undoubtedly known to all professions, volunteers and home carers. It is a silent killer, a demon that will take you emotionally, psychologically and physically to exhaustion. There are ways for you to feel better, to learn to love yourself and to live the life you desire and deserve, as well as giving to others. You have to take control and get rid of outdated thoughts, beliefs and habits. To be not just the best professional you can be, but the best person for you and for others.

Do you often daydream and muse on how wonderful it would be for someone to regularly be attending to YOUR needs? Do you spend a large part of each day helping others to feel better? This book may challenge your old patterns of thinking but following Brockman’s Primary Directive to take care of yourself first, your life will start to transform and your health and well-being will begin to shift in a healing direction. Howard Brockman, LCSW has written his second book, this time emphasizing the importance of self-care for the legions of people supporting and taking care of others. While there are books that have been written about the challenges to professionals such as social workers, nurses and psychologists to becoming burned out, Brockman’s book is written also for the millions of untrained non-professionals who are being recruited daily to care for their elderly parents. Do you fit into either of these categories? He describes the many influences that lead to compassion fatigue and becoming “infected” by the feelings of others. This is all about how unconscious empathy can take sensitive caregivers down a never-ending spiral to adrenal fatigue and depression. In Chapter 2, “Characteristics of High-Intensity Relaters,” Brockman describes the primary personality of those helpers whose currency is relationship and who easily fall prey to subtle energetic influences that erode their vital force. Externally referencing to others’ needs first tends to be one of their traits. Chapter 6, “Prevent Self-Sabotage,” is filled with practical ways to stay focused and positive while overcoming old, repetitive and negative inner chatter. Confronting your tyrannizing inner critic is never easy—Brockman tells you how. He identifies different types of “energy drainers” that use our energy to enliven themselves and deplete ours. He does a good job explaining how to create secure and persistent energetic boundaries with difficult and demanding people and other disruptive environments. This is perhaps the most important theme woven throughout the book, for the helper personality tends to not know how to say NO to requests from others. Learning how to establish reliable energetic boundaries is incredibly important for protecting against the interpersonal hazard he refers to as psychotoxic contamination that can become cumulative over time and generate serious long-term health consequences. Dark and heavy energy can settle into and invade the body to wreak havoc with one’s health and emotional stability. The good news is that you can effectively create these boundaries and more importantly, learn how to sustain them amidst the ongoing demands of the people you are helping. He spends a chapter on how to use specific energy psychology techniques for emergency self-care, providing fascinating case examples to illustrate how to prevent post-traumatic stress from building up to become PTSD. Brockman spends some time explaining the importance of optimizing your self-care by managing your chi, and how plants, the natural world and flower essences can support helpers to maintain their inner balance and overall harmony. In Chapter 11, “Making It Happen From Within,” you will discover well-described and powerful imagery techniques for manifesting positive self-care outcomes for yourself. Brockman then teaches you how to connect to and work with your inner guides for reliable personal and professional guidance. The power of a caregiver’s presence is highlighted in the concluding chapter, discussing how “being the blessing” actually creates collective coherence in the immediate caregiver’s environment and thus positively affects those who are being cared for. For readers who would like to measure and determine the degree of their own present health and well-being, there are two self-assessment checklists for high-intensity relaters in Appendix 2 that can also be downloaded from his website, www.DynamicEnergeticHealing.com.