Self-Care: What It Is and How to Do It

No one is immune to occupational stress. For therapists, though, we have to balance our personal stress with the client’s stress at the same time. For example, if the caseload happens to include a lot of clients with post-traumatic stress, then the therapist can experience a form of second-hand traumatic stress, which is also connected to experiencing burnout1. Therapists will feel the effects of stress in their body, mood, sleep, focus, and concentration2. A therapist experiencing occupational stress can also experience depression, anxiety, workaholism, consistent clinical errors, and even suicidal thoughts among other experiences. Thankfully, self-care can protect us3.
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Self-care is doing anything that improves your health and well-being, things that help you feel physically and emotionally better4. For psychologists, it can help in experiencing less stress, which then creates more benefits in their personal and professional lives5,6 such as lower burnout7 and higher job satisfaction8. It’s so important that several professional organizations have made engaging in self-care an ethical obligation (American Counseling Association9, American Psychological Association10, American School Counseling Association11; National Association of Social Workers12).

Doing self-care protects us from the negative effects of stress. It lowers stress, which leads to “less emotional exhaustion, less depersonalization of clients, greater sense of personal accomplishment, and greater life satisfaction.” This pattern is true for at least the first five types of self-care4:

1. Professional Development (“seeking opportunities for professional growth and involvement in enjoyable professional activities”): Stay current in your professional knowledge and connect with your professional organization. Activities like this can help prevent depersonalizing your clients4.
2. Life Balance (“cultivating relationships and activities outside of work”): Have a life outside of work. This technique is related to lower emotional exhaustion, higher personal accomplishment, lower stress, and higher life satisfaction4. Having relationships outside of work is also crucially linked to having higher compassion satisfaction2.
3. Cognitive Awareness (“monitoring workplace stress and reactions”): Take care of your mental health. By monitoring and controlling your emotions, you can protect your sense of personal accomplishment4. Proactive mental health self-care can help you build professional support and encouragement13.
4. Daily Balance (“managing demands and structuring the workday”): Don’t take on too much4. Too many clinical hours are linked lower compassion satisfaction2.
5. Professional Support (“cultivating supportive relationships with colleagues”): Talk to your co-workers. To be fair, this type of self-care is often inconsistent. Sometimes it helps4,14,15, and sometimes it hurts4.
6. Spirituality and exercise are also types of self-care2.

It is important to remember 1) to practice a wide-variety of self-care techniques and 2) to do so on a daily basis4.

1)Using a wide-variety of self-care techniques is important. As self-care is designed to improve well-being, you need different types of self-care to address the different types of well-being (according to play therapists)15:

a. Physical Wellness: “sleep, diet or nutrition, exercise, medical health, and energy”

b. Spiritual Wellness: “faith-based activities, meditation, or a connectedness with the greater universe, including nature or astronomy”

c. Emotional Wellness: “desired feelings (i.e., calm or happy), the absence of undesirable feelings (i.e., not depressed or not anxious), and overall emotional stability”

d. Cognitive Wellness:” ideas that described thought processes as it related to wellness”

e. Interpersonal Wellness: “emphasis of being in, or the importance of, meaningful relationships. These relationships were outside of those in their work settings”

f. Professional Wellness: “practicing work boundaries, doing work well, having relationships with colleagues, and engaging in supervision”

2) We don’t have negative life outcomes (e.g., getting sick, feeling burnout, etc.) because of stress but because of the mismanagement of the stress16. In fact, we don’t get sick when we experience stress, but after we deal with the stressful event and start feeling calm. The longer we experience stress, the worse we get17. If stress is unchecked, it becomes distress, then impairment, then improper behavior18. Daily, consistent self-care while experiencing the stress helps us reduce the negative impacts.

The key thing to remember is that you cannot function properly if you don’t take care of yourself. By taking care of yourself in many different ways and as consistently as you can, you can be the best you that you can be. If you take care of other people, you can take better care of them if you take care of yourself.

For other short writings on this topic, feel check out this APA article and the others in my references.

1. Laverdière, Kealy, and Ogrodniczuk (2019); 2. Killian (2008), 3. APA, Well-Being; 4. Rupert and Dorociak (2019); 5. Wise and Barnett (2016); 6. Wise et al., (2012); 7. Rupert and Kent (2007); 8. Rupert (2004); 9. ACA (2014); 10. APA (2010); 11. ASCA (2016); 12. NASW (2008); 13. Evans and Villavisanis (1998); 14. Carroll, Gilroy, & Murra (1999); 15. Norcross and Guy (2007); 16. Meany-Walen et al. (2018); 17. Meyers and DeWall (2018);
18. APA, Colleague Assist