Nurses: Is it Burnout or "Burn-In"?

(This work is also published on http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Lori_Daniell where you can enjoy a bunch of my articles)!  One is more smarty pants than the next.  Let the good times roll!

Any nurse can tell you how difficult it is, even under the best of circumstances and having a light patient load with safe acuities that there are many factors in a traditional healthcare setting which are catalysts to all of those horribly toxic and mind numbing issues which cause burnout. Just for fun, I’ll name some. I bet you can quite easily develop a repetitive motion neck injury by nodding your head in agreement, so don your brace now.

Bad attitudes from staff, unrealistic patient and family expectations, lack of quality managerial support, weak leadership, poor communication, increased documentation, blurred responsibilities, decreased quality time with your patients, robotic routines, insubordination, having to tolerate cliques in your work environment, bullies, mandatory committee involvement and wearing your multitudes of hats such as clinician, magician, psychotherapist, pastor and master coordinator extraordinaire…..alright, enough! Please do not click the X right now. I know that this can really help you and create a new and refreshing manner of thinking about your career.

Really!

Here is a disclaimer, though. Sometimes people for whatever reason choose to stay stuck in their lusciously mucky misery and not want to address these issues and here are the reasons why. When we enter a process whereby we really begin to explore the ways to improve our lives, often this entails having to address personal and deeply resonating self attributes: the good, the bad and the horrible. This energetically and automatically leads to having to “own” or be responsible for our perceptions, actions and correlating behaviors. When we claim ownership for our own behaviors, there is no one to blame, no excuse to whine and the table turns inward.

When we are responsible for ourselves, there is no more external finger pointing or blaming the admittedly broken system. By fixing ourselves and our perceptions of the challenges which the traditional healthcare setting are marinated in, we not only can affect the quality of our own lives, but by virtue of the laws of attraction, we can alter the dysfunctional behaviors of our peers, our unit, our entire place of work, our profession!

No, this is not magical thinking in the manner it seems. There are no wands, nor are there packets of happy dust or LSD for you to sprinkle in your co-workers coffee when they aren’t looking. This technique if you will is magical in that it is so simple, yet so effective and powerful. You know how laughter is contagious? That is pure energy! When you look inward with determination and the promise of living a life filled with joy, enjoying your work again and healing your patients from a place of compassion instead of a place of dread and duty, your environment will have no choice to be responding in kind. This is pure energy! You contagious Happy Camper Nurse, You! With this guidance, you can begin to heal our profession, one nurse at a time!

Earlier I described all of the real and lousy things that create such a dire work environment. If you notice, they are all issues which happen “to” us in any given shift. Where is our control? No matter how we try, how much we cry, how many times we threaten to quit, how many times we actually do quit only to find another job position with the same issues, just different faces, this stuff still happens extrinsically, or outside of ourselves.

Here is why these circumstances occur, based on my clients feedback and years of research. We “burnout”. If we move the focus away from outside ourselves and focus inward, we will realize that it is our perception which will enhance our lives, and all of the marvelous correlating perks that go along with it that we do indeed have control over will be ours to enjoy. No, I am not suggesting that you lie down, die and take it. I am suggesting that you accept what you can control, and that is your beautiful and amazing self.

When we enter a situation at work where burnout is rampant, and we try and try to just get through our day without attempting to adjust our perceptions of this mess, there are reasons for that. This may be getting really deep, yet issues such as self worth, self esteem, unresolved childhood or karmic (or both) traumas which lead us to be called to heal others. This lot consistently looks outside them for its definition of self, therefore blames people, environments and circumstances when dissatisfaction occurs.

This is what I refer to as the “burn in” aspect of burnout. The issue becomes not how miserable our work environment is (external/burnout), but how we choose to perceive and react to our work environment. When this is unaddressed for whatever reason, this is what I refer to as (internal/burn-in).

By virtue of the very definition of nursing, combined with our profession’s dynamic challenges, I honestly feel that it is fair to say that burnout, or external magnets for ulcers will always be a part of our equation. Yet, you have heard you call to heal others, and you worked hard to become a nurse.

Get your big girl and boy Pull-Ups on and let’s address why we are burned in.

There are two keys which open the door to your Kingdom of contagious joy and happiness in the profession of nursing, or in all healing professions, for that matter: Your Self Love and correlating healthy boundaries. You love and care about yourself enough to not allow the unaddressed and dysfunctional energies of others into your being. Period. We cannot necessarily choose our work environments, but we can indeed choose to determine how we will allow it to affect our wellbeing.

When we with intention deliberately stand firm in who we are and project this awareness in our carriage and responses to situations, practically anything can come your way and you will remain poised and focused. On the flipside, when our energies are scattered and we lack purpose, when we are emotionally and physically fatigued from a wicked morning and you have 6 more hours to go, you are a veritable sponge and soak up your surrounding negativities. When you enter your shift with an innate knowing that you will do your very best and embrace boundaries, with practice you will be blown away with the positive and grateful comments that you receive! Now hang on, I am not suggesting that you tell your manager that you won’t perform a task because you are engaging in Self love and boundary work. There are still some things in your role which you will have to continue to do, yet this is a great exercise in tolerance and accepting what your accountabilities are while embracing the concepts which I have outlined. In this instance, you would choose to not allow your manager’s authoritarian or rude tone to be a perpetuation of negative energy, yet you will still perform the task because it is within your role to do so.

Are you up for the challenge? Let’s heal our profession, one healer at a time.  http://www.nurseyourspirit.com/

Happy Pondering!

How do these quotes resonate with your authentic healer archetpye?

Feeling Groovy

It is not necessary to deny another's reality

in order to affirm your own.

~Anne Wilson Schaef

The drop grows happy by losing itself in the river.

~Mirza Ghalib

The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white.

Neither need you do anything but be yourself.

    

~Lao-Tzu

I CAN is 100 times more important than IQ.” — unknown

I was always looking outside myself

for strength and confidence,

but it comes from within.

It is there all the time.

~Anna Freud

Truly it is in the darkness that one finds the light,

so when we are in sorrow,

then this light is nearest of all to us.

~Meister Eckhart

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe,

deserve your love and affection.

~The Buddha

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light not our darkness that frightens us.

~Marianne Williamson

"Just Relax"

Alrighty then nurse person, so you cry on your way to work, fantasize about moving to a mountain top with a shaved head while cradling a book titled "How to Obtain Enlightenment in Three Days", and are enjoying your 5th diagnosed bladder infection in the last 6 months. Being an avid supporter of probiotics you realize if you eat one more lousy spoonful of yogurt you will quite simply toss cookies, and just the idea of slathering this refrigerated dairy food complete with fruit chunks onto your urethra is actually enjoyable at this point. Enter reality. As you take your morning report and begin your rounds, one of your patients replies to your luke warm "good morning" by threatening to choke you if you don't medicate them for their pain. 7:34 AM, but look at the bright side. You only have 11 and half hours to go.

You aren’t sure how to accurately describe the zone you just entered, but for some reason, thanks to some form of grace, you are in your car, ready to escape the madness. The minutes turned into hours, the hours melted into some sort of inexplicable space in time. The blisters on your heels are oozing and raw. As always, there is a nagging sense that you forgot to report something, or that something will go wrong as a result of something that you did or didn’t do. You fleetingly consider returning to the unit to make sure that you dotted "T"s and crossed your "I"s. (Yes, I realize that this was reversed, but you are delirious). There is a quickening in your step as you struggle with the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. You limp aimlessly toward your vehicle. You’d run if you could.

You manage to start the ignition of your car and peel off your shoes and socks that tell the story of the angst and pain that you have witnessed and endured. As you operate your motor vehicle, the trees that pass you by turn into looming shadows which tell stories of the promise of darkness. A song comes on the radio that eventually becomes a part of a dream which you will never remember. In your driveway you realize that you do not recall the drive home.

A probably well meaning yet horribly ignorant family member tells you how lousy you look and possibly asks you what’s for dinner. Your forehead becomes intimately close with your kitchen counter, and you may even at this point wonder how many bashings it would take in order for you to lose consciousness and at the same time, you cannot possibly endure any more pain. As you weep, the good intentioned sap has an epiphany. The words uttered out of their mouth actually sound something like this: “Just relax”!

Your exhausted mind bends and twists in an attempt to comprehend. Did this person just tell me to…relax?

Oh, ok.

How on earth can a professional healthcare provider such as a nurse just relax? What that statement actually indicated was that the well meaning idiot cannot deal with how your stress affects them, or is simply at a loss to fully comprehend exactly what it is that a nurse endures during a work shift. Join the club you think, because neither can you. I mean, it’s not that you haven’t dabbled in aromatherapy, enjoyed some retail therapy or possibly enjoyed a cocktail or ten with your comrades. Did those actions create a period of time when you felt relaxed? Possibly. Yet they were all temporary escapes.

These things are simply fugacious bleeps in time. Look at the trends. They are all extrinsically obtained environmental actions. You may as well have put a Dora the Explorer bandage on a cavernous, extravagating abdominal wound. A 0.009 cc of the blood will be absorbed into Dora, yet the goal is to stop the bleeding. Even more imperative is to determine the cause of the bleeding in the first place.

Nurse focused, integrated transpersonal counseling creates an environment where you will cycle back intrinsically to determine root causes for your authentically personal energetic attraction to healing others. By coming to terms with, and embracing these issues, you will cycle forward with fresh perspectives, learn healthy boundaries and enjoy your profession again. You will heal yourself and others from a place of compassion, despite non-compassionate healthcare work environments, learn how to achieve an incredible work-personal life balance and get that bounce back in your step.

Nurse Your Spirit, LLC based in Tucson, Arizona is a counseling practice devoted to you, the nursing professional. We pride ourselves on offering professional, affordable and rewarding methods of counseling such as individual sessions, meditation workshops, spontaneous pragmatic intuitive sessions and community events.

Nurse Your Spirit, LLC’s goal is to raise awareness and demolish the stigma that the individual nurse as well as the collective consciousness of the nursing profession largely subscribes to, which is that nurses do not need counseling. This is highly detrimental, however completely reasonable in the manner in which this notion is derived, as the very definition of nursing includes being an expert in the diagnosis of the human response to various conditions. After all, we are fixers of humans. We ourselves are human. Therefore we can fix ourselves.

Guess what my friends? You cannot do this alone. If you realize that you are apathetic or experiencing anxiety and dread when you even think about going to work, you need to be carefully and professionally guided back to your authentic joy.

Nurse Your Spirit, LLC not only offers face to face counseling in Arizona, but also offers telephonic and Skype sessions nationally.

Care to be contagious? What you learn about yourself will be magnetic, and those fortunate enough to be in your company will respond in kind.

At Nurse Your Spirit, LLC, we know that “Peaceful and cohesive healers create a peaceful and Cohesive Planet”.

Wounded Healer? Embrace Your Inner Buddha!

(This image is courtesy of lotuseaters.net)

Helping people feel better causes the compassionate heart to quicken it's beat.  True "Buddha Compassion", meaning being able to give completely without the expectation of anything in return, be it a thank you, or even the simple acknowledgement of your act, is the purest form of giving.  Giving from a pure and tender place in your Self which knows only real love.  An example of this kind of compassionate giving include acts that require no thought, such as grabbing someone out of harm's way. 

When you were energetically guided to be a healer, what was your trigger?  Are you able to recall the moment or circumstance which rang your internal bell, your calling to assist others in need?  The reason I ask is simple.  The answers you give are very telling.

On varying levels, healers subconsciously are led to healing others as a path to simultansously healing themselves.  While one may consciously be driven by strong Nightingalesque convictions, in our existence is housed both a place of Spirit as well as a place of ego.  This condition, also known as being human, creates opportunities in order to make us feel good about ourselves.  While the Spirit aspect of ourselves only knows true "Buddha Compassion", the ego only knows "feed me, nurture me, acknowledge me, stroke me, value me".

The Wounded Healer Archetype in healers is often the driving force, and the desire is lodged in the very DNA strands of the healer. (This gives us cause to believe that karmic fulfillment leads to lifetime choice wtih leads to a number of learning experiences through untoward circumstances and traumas, but that's another blog entry).  Healers are led to opportunities to help others, as during this time, the ego is fed, nurtured, acknowledged, stroked and valued.

Burnout, especially in nurses can occur as there is a clash between the ego and the Spirit.  The Spirit screams to give with compassion and be unattached to the results!  The ego beckons for a sense of self worth and self love extrinsically, or from outside of the Self, enter, the patient.  When the healer provides care to the ill or infirmed, often times it is thankless.  The ego rebels furiously!  Reactions escalate.  We tire.  We burn out.

How can we neutralize the burnout?  By adjusting the scales of your Ego/Spirit center.  When you are upset that your good deeds have gone unnoticed, take pause and have a talk with your Self.  Your Higher Self.  Ask your Spirit to guide you, demand that your ego take a back seat. 

Be confident and love yourself enough to give from your Spirit.  Carve out a little mecca for Buddha right in the center.  Your self healing is a beautiful process, your wounds are present as a gift of darkness, so that you may see the true light of your Being.

Love yourself enough to Nurse Your Spirit.

Nurse Campy Fancy Pants

Alright.  I get it.  I know.  Of course there are male nurses (Hi Dave!!), but this post makes total fun of female nurses who think they look really cool in scrubs.  Oh come on!  You know it as well as I do.  I sometimes think that the reason "they" became nurses, other than a karmic fulfillment or the need to be needed, for example, is that they actually like the way they look and feel in their scrubs.  Campy, foot loose and freaking fancy free in their well worn cotton. 

Ohh if only that fabric could talk, it could tell a gazillion stories about what has been splattered/sprayed/spilled/leaked/expelled/projected/ejected/squirted/spouted and spurted onto and into the very micro fibers of...those scrubs, into the cellular memory of this holy garment. Seriously, these are more than just duds one wears to work.

 

Behold the reverence.  

These leg coverings that reach to one's ankles with draw string waists are a living and walking testimony to the experiences of their hard core seasoned wearer.  They tell an incredible story, with the right attitude and accessories, of course. (More on this later).

I call these chicks Nurse Campy Fancy Pants. For now, I will refer to them as NCFP's.

Usually, in higher acuity settings such as NICU, ICU. CCU, OR, ER, Etc., the scrubs are less pretty, if you ask me.  That's how I have perceived it for the last couple of decades, anyway.  No flowers, hardly a Looney Toons Cartoon scrub to be found.  Betty Boop?  Fuggetaboutit. We are talking industrial quality- distressed - militant street-wear, the road warrior's identifier clothing.  Nothing cute about it.  This is serious, and everyone in the NCFP's vicinity will perceive it as such. 

You have your hard core cobalt blue that fades into a soft sky color, and the bright green that over a few hundred launderings  have literally "stood" witness to life, death and beyond, which then morphs into the standard tile color of the bathroom in a 1945 sanitarium. 

Not to mention the texture..WOW!  Soft..molded to the body, worn.  I'm talking practically see- through in all the "high friction areas".

Seriously, we all know what it's like to wear a new crisp pair of scrub pants.  I am sure any "normal sized" woman has experienced chafing, especially if the pants were not washed before wearing.  (Coincidentally, there is a DSM-IV code for this condition which is referred to as PDWUWSS - Premature Desire to Wear Un-Washed Scrubs Syndrome). 

Anyway, one day, NCFP wakes up, throws her hair in a bun and slips on her favorite bottoms.  Slips.  She develops a bounce in her hard core nurse campy fancy pants (NCFP) step, completes her hygeine and grooming regime, climbs in the car, and proceeds to her shift.  In terms of accessorizing, in her ears are a pair of twinkly sparkly silver dingle dangle earrings which she enjoys as a part of her whole look.  Ohhhhh!!!  She cannot wait til later.  The shoes, the revered clogs are worn.  They perfectly caress her pounding and striding tootsies like a glove and add a bit of personality to her step, as they slightly "clog" on the floor.  Did you know that?  High heels make a clicky sound, and clogs make a cloggy sound.  Get it straight.

Suddenly, it happens.  Her hair, while the majority of it remains loosely in the bun atop her pretty little fancy campy dome, begins to softly whisp from the top and the sides, a clear indication, a medal of valor, really, which sigh..gives ultimate permission to have the 'tude.  Later hath arrived.

The slipping on of the pants clearly is the reward of many intense shifts and act as the indication that, well, they are finally as well worn as she is.  The dingle dangle sparkles at the ends of her delicate lobes are the perfect juxtaposition, the perfect comparison, the perfect compliment to the whisp situation while the campy fancy pants are soft, so soft, so used, so experienced, and perfectly cover the planks that are supported by the clogging of the clog.  Herein lies, her story.  The story which is titled, "I am a Nurse.  A Nurse Campy Fancy Pants", Nurse.  Even this nurse should  Nurse Their Spirit!

Counseling for the Broken Nurse: What a Concept

Nurses are the givers and fixers, the healers and nurturers, the "go to" people.  We are the stronghold of traditional healthcare in our society.  We are the implementers of orders, the stop gap, the patient advocate.

We are the glue that keeps our shift together.  We are the care plan developers, the care coordinators, the documentors.  We are the IV starters, the medication administrators, the assessors.  We are code runners, the presence which soothes, the toe-taggers.  We are the clean up crew, the punching bag, the center of the patient's experience.  We are the bearers of bad news, the clergy, the teacher, the psychologist.  We are the ambulators, the lower extremity elevators, and safety monitors.

We are punched, hit, spat upon and subject ourselves to increasingly toxic body fluids and surroundings.  We do all this and more in a shift, and then go back for more.  We are accountable to our facility, their bottom lines, our patients. 

We become jaded.

We experience difficulty with communication, harrassment and feel underappreciated for what we do.  We encounter increasingly alarming amounts of responsibility to satisfy payor sources.  Sometimes, we don't sit down for 13 hours.  Hardly ever do we eat lunch.

We are so tired.

Our co - workers are strong and weak, experienced and green behind their ears, bitchy and soft, everyone experiencing their own phase in their career, everyone giving off and absorbing the energies of others.

We burn out.

We begin to respond to others and to circumstances through a veil of self protection.  We cry on the way to work, we cry during our shift, we cry on the way home.  We feel completely misunderstood.  We question why we "did this" to begin with, encourage nursing students to quit while they are ahead and experience panic and dread.

We are broken.

What access do you have in your facility to address nurse burnout?  Have you ever contacted your Employee Assistance Program (EAP) who then referred you to someone who half heartedly commiserated with the difficult profession that nursing is, and then they informed you to "learn how to relax"? 

Why, for the sake of all that is mighty and good would you place a 2x2 on the gaping wounds of your soul? 

Once identified, nurse burnout is entirely treatable.  Not only is nurse burnout treatable, but during your healing process, you will be able to cycle back to your past, revisit trends, then cycle forward with fresh and bountiful new perspectives.  You will actually experience joy and balance in your life.

Counseling is imperative, as it will not only save your profession, it can enhance your life, change your perceptions of your surroundings, and energetically beautify the lives of those whom are fortunate to be in your company. 

Please.  The time is now to Nurse Your Spirit.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is an outward act with enormously beautiful outcomes for yourself.  When one forgives, one energetically and automatically is given permission to detach from the negative circumstance. 

It may take a while to get to the point of forgiveness.  When we realize that holding on to the anger, shame and sadness associated with being wronged is no longer serving us a purpose, we let it go, let it fly into the ethers.

How, you may ask, is holding on to such dark feelings serving us a purpose?  Why do some people choose to stay stuck in the vortex of negativity? 

Very basically, when blame is placed on others, it provides a self serving platform on which we do not have to be responsible for ourselves, our actions, our feelings, our behaviors.  We justify our jadedness for the sake of not wanting to grow, or more likely, not feeling worthy enough to grow.  "The reason I am so miserable is because you made me feel that way.  I sort of like it this way, though, because when I am angry with you, it prevents me from having to deal with other things".

Truth be told, no one can "make" you feel any way.  You choose to feel how you feel.  Not a huge newsflash, yet it bears reiteration. 

Forgiveness can be truly frightening.  We can fear the unknown, we can fear the self accountability which is created by taking the wrong do-er off the hook. 

While this is difficult, as we tend to believe that the less we have to be responsible for makes for an easy breezy life, there is amazing self worth that occurs.  Self worth is Self love.  Self love is the energetic creation of healthy boundaries.

Forgiveness is empowering.

Have you forgiven someone today?