Physical resilience
Cannon (2018) states that to promote greater capacity to cope with stress we need to include exercise and relaxation into weekly lifestyle routines. Exercise has positive stress-busting effects, as we shall see in Chapter 4, and relaxation allows for recuperation. Chatterjee (2018, p 152) observes that engaging in exercise should be straightforward, pointing out that ‘the world is your gym’. All too often, people are locked into a view of exercise that emerged with the keep-fit craze of the 1980s and that sits engagement in exercise outside of usual day-to-day life and as something set apart to be done in special clothes in special places. This immediately places obstacles in the way of people and leads to inaction. ‘I need a gym membership’, ‘I need to book a class’, ‘I need the latest training shoes.’ This is not the case. Physical exercise needs to be a part of routine life. Simple changes have big effects. In Chapter 4, we’ll talk about the significant benefits of a 20-minute lunchtime walk.
The other part of physical resilience is nutrition. From Hippocrates in ancient Greece, who reportedly felt food was medicine, to Gillian McKeith, nutritionist and TV show host in the 1990s, we have been told that we are what we eat! Increasingly this is being shown to be true, with very recent research supporting the idea that the gut biome – the bacteria in our gut – plays an important role in moderating mood. Enders (2015) even goes as far as to suggest that our construction of our idea of ‘self’ is determined by the brain drawing on information and feelings from every part of the body including the gut. This brings the impact of physical ‘feelings’ into the creation of self – you are what you feel as a consequence of what you eat. We will explore some of this in Chapter 3.
Practical resilience
We work in a complex environment full of information that needs to be controlled so that we know what to do with it. We inhabit a working world where the idea of ever being ‘caught up’ is probably unrealistic and which therefore demands we know what there is to do so that we can figure out what it is we should do next. We also need to control those uncompleted tasks. We need systems that support us in the ‘doing’ and ‘remembering’ as there’s too much to handle in our brain alone. Allen (2015) says that we cannot ‘plan’ and ‘do’ at the same time. We need a space to take stock followed by a period of activity. Heylighen and Vidal (2007) note that by unburdening memory into a trusted system that prompts you to take action, anxiety, and therefore stress, can be reduced. Taking a consistent approach to figure out what there is to do and then to plan doing it can indeed create the sense of ‘flow’ that Csikszentmihalyi (2002) considers as being essential for control, focus and well-being. This is in contrast to the world that we can all inhabit at times of information overload that leads to confusion and anxiety that in turn leads to procrastination that in turn leads to more anxiety (Heylighen and Vidal, 2007). This is a self-fuelling loop that saps our psychological capacity to ‘do’. We need a plan. A good day starts the previous day, a good week, the previous week, and a good month, the previous month. In Chapter 7 we’ll explore this.
What is self-care?
It is not by chance that we find ourselves at this time in human history talking about and being interested in well-being. Advances in neuroscience, together with psychology’s increasing interest in the positive aspects of mental health, rather than solely the negative, have led to increased research into the relationship between physical and mental health and well-being (Webb, 2017). The importance of maintaining practitioner well-being cannot be overestimated, as stress, as we have seen, can lead to a lack of interest or empathy with the service user’s position – compassion fatigue, burnout, self-doubt and interpersonal conflict in the workplace (Adams et al, 2006; Graham and Shier, 2014). Social work regulators demand of their registrants an understanding of maintenance of health and well-being, the ability to manage the physical and emotional impact of practice and identify and apply strategies to build professional resilience. This surely has to be undertaken within a partnership between the employer and the employee?
There is an important relationship between environmental, organisational and individual factors when considering the well-being of social work practitioners and exploring how they self-care to enhance resilience (Antonopoulou et al, 2017). Resilience, well-being promoted through self-care, and the activities engaged in to promote these things are personally defined (Graham and Shier, 2014) and initiated but there also needs to be a person-centred approach to supporting people in the workplace. Organisational change may be required to create the appropriate environment. This has been demonstrated in companies which have a keen focus on productivity and includes such things as opportunities for exercise, meditation and even naps (Levitin, 2015). As in social work practice, the voice of the individual needs to be the starting point.
Self-care is ‘the practice of activities that individuals initiate and perform on their own behalf to maintain life, health, and well-being’ (Grafton and Coyne, 2012, p 17). Such activities need to be driven by internal motivation. Self-care is firstly about attending to ourselves. By attending to ourselves we create inner order. Secondly, we need to attend to the things that are in our sphere of responsibility. These will be things that need planning and organising and then doing. By attending to these things, we create order in our sphere of responsibility. Finally, we can decide what we let into our sphere of responsibility from the chaos outside of it. Where we can’t control some of the chaos infiltrating our order, we need to develop a mind like water (Allen, 2015). When a rock is thrown into a perfectly still pond it creates ripples. Eventually the pond ‘controls’ the ripples as the stone settles on the bottom of the pond and the pond becomes perfectly still again. This is what we are trying to achieve in our lives. When something is thrown at us, we take it and order it, returning to a calm state after a period of activity to get it under control. Jordan Peterson puts it more beautifully:
When things break down, what has been ignored rushes in. When things are no longer specified, with precision, the walls crumble, and chaos makes its presence known. When we’ve been careless, and let things slide, what we have refused to attend to gathers itself up, adopts a serpentine form, and strikes – often at the worst possible moment.
(Peterson, 2018, p 266)
Self-care is engaging in a combination of activities that promote our well-being, give us a sense of order and control and give us the psychological and physical capacity to respond positively to life. The chapters of this book will help us explore the important elements that define our self-care canon.
Reflective