Feeling the Burn and Bouncing Back
We have talked a lot about stress that COVID has added to our personal and professional lives. You’ve likely practiced some new and old ways of coping that allow you to bounce back and move forward despite it. But what about prolonged feelings of fatigue, questioning whether you can or should continue in your professional and personal roles? These are signs you might be feeling burned out. It’s a logical outcome of enduring the extra demands and stressors that COVID has brought to folks...
On Purpose
We usually choose activities and even careers that help us feel useful. COVID and other stressful things in the world have caused us to question how much purpose we actually have beyond just to “keep going.” It turns out having purpose is pretty important – for our mental and physical health and our overall well-being. The good news is, we can renew and find our purpose again with very little effort. Today, notice the ways you are helpful to others and stop to take that in. Expressing...
Hope and Loss go Together
Now that we see some hope on the horizon, deaths are lower, and COVID seems much more under control, why do we experience renewed sadness? You probably understood that working in senior care facilities meant you would experience the death of residents. We’ve talked about how even with this expectation, any death is a loss that has an impact. Any new loss is a trigger for grief as a normal reaction. Sometimes when we see progress and experience relief from loss and other stressors, it becomes...
All Kinds of Medicine
As a worker in senior care facilities, you are surrounded by medications and people who need them. You are also surrounded by medicine that doesn’t come in pill form: yourself. Whether you realize it or not, the warm greetings, personal cares, active listening and attentiveness that you provide is healing medicine. You have more of an impact than you realize on your residents, colleagues and certainly at home. Being a caregiver is important to you, or you wouldn’t be in your role. Resilience...
Good Enough Frame of Mind
During COVID-19, feeling less helpful or effective than usual has been a theme for many of us working in senior care facilities. The demands of our personal and professional lives often outweigh our time or energy. Also, we often feel we cannot complete all the helping tasks we would like or would be able to do under “normal” (e.g., Non-Covid) circumstances. The pandemic leaves us limited because we cannot complete tasks or engage in caring gestures in the ways we are used to: exchanging warm...
How Long Can We be Resilient?
You’re in good company if you’ve noticed some extra discouragement or frustration during a time when we have some glimmers of COVID-19 hope: vaccines have arrived and ben delivered, rates of death and hospitalization are down...so why do we feel so discouraged, tired or overwhelmed again? There are a number of things that are also happening that may make this time as difficult as any other throughout the pandemic: Despite vaccines, many restrictions remain; it may be some time prior to...
Hitting a COVID “Wall” …and Bouncing Back
You’ve likely heard of hitting “the wall” as a term used to describe the point when you feel you can’t keep going. COVID-19 has its own special (or not so special) “walls:” the kind when you feel more exhausted, irritable, tense than you thought was possible. At this time, “bouncing back” might seem impossible. The good news is, it’s not. For today, we want you to know that “the wall” is simply part of human responding to a prolonged disaster with uncertain ending. It has nothing to do with...
COVID’s 1st Birthday
Has anyone taken the time to commemorate the first case of COVID arriving in our country? Our state? Whether you realize it or not, you probably have. We commemorate traumatic events without knowing it at times: we get emotional out of “nowhere,” we feel tired, tense or even angry and easily overwhelmed even in jobs we typically feel good at. At this time-maybe more than ever—we may feel uncertain about how to manage all the ongoing challenges while we are coping with the aftermath of a year...
Facing Hostility with Compassion
We have lost a great deal during COVID-19. In addition, we have ongoing social unrest. This can have a negative impact on our health, well-being and resilience. We can also lose hope that kindness exists, which is a terrible feeling – especially for caregivers. It’s hard to remain hopeful when so much in the environment is full of anger. Luckily, we have some simple strategies to face this head on. Today try to repeat brief statements such as “May I be safe,” “May I be healthy and calm,” “May...
Controlling the “Out of Control” Feeling
COVID-19 has thrown everyone’s life into unknown territory. We have lost routines, rituals, celebrations and so many other things. This means we’ve also lost control, which turns out to be very important for our well-being. A sense of control or “autonomy” is good for our physical and mental health. Right now, that sense is at an all-time low for most of us. That’s the bad news. The good news is we can regain it with even the smallest adjustments to how we move through our days. To...