When you think about this question, think about the things that you use to self-care that might be positive (for example, going for a walk) and negative (for example, drinking alcohol). Make two columns.
Think about the positive and negative impact on your well-being of the things in both columns.
the key elements of self-care
There are three key elements to self-care that influence our resilience and productivity. They are sleep, exercise and nutrition. All have a chapter in the book. Sleep is deliberately at the bottom of the triangle (see diagram on page 149) as it is the foundation that all self-care starts from. In order to engage in these self-care elements, we need to ‘be organised’. This being organised stretches across our whole lives, including the things we get paid to do, the things we do but don’t get paid for and our recuperation. We need to think of all of these elements holistically as they all impact on each other. When we are tired, we are less likely to be motivated to exercise. When we have an afternoon slump we reach for sugary snacks. When we eat badly, or late at night, we don’t sleep well. If we aren’t organised, we feel stressed and our body reacts by producing cortisol and adrenaline. If we don’t exercise, we don’t ‘burn’ these chemicals up that were produced to prepare us for ‘fight or flight’. If we don’t sleep well, we can’t muster the energy to make plans and be organised. And on it goes in a co-dependent cycle. We need to break negative cycles and produce positive ones. We need to understand that what we eat, how we sleep, the exercise we take and being organised all have the potential to prepare us for productive lives lived to the full. Peterson puts it eloquently when he says ‘the body, with its various parts, needs to function like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue’ (Peterson, 2018, p 18).
Having ‘agency’ is having a sense that you are causing, through deliberate action, the things that go on around you. This gives you a sense of control. It is the opposite to feeling helpless. Even if you do feel helpless in some areas there are still things you can have agency over (Hanson, 2018). When your options are very limited, look for the little things you can do, and focus on the feeling of agency regarding them. Build on that. But start to build. I hope in this book we will give you actionable things so you feel you can have some agency over the work you do and the care you take of yourself. That’s what we want to achieve. There is a ‘healthy worker effect’ whereby people who are more robust stay in stressful jobs for longer (Grant and Kinman, 2014, p 21). Social work, as a consequence of its person-facing nature, is stressful. You didn’t study and qualify to be in this profession just to let the job take so much from you that you leave it. We want to help you create a robust and resilient ‘you’ so that you can enjoy the things you get paid to do, enjoy the things you do just because you love doing them, and delight in the things you do to rest and recharge.
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