How to Manage Your Emotional Wellbeing

When working as a medical professional, it’s important to be aware of the tremendous weight that can sometimes rest on your shoulders. This stress may make it difficult to manage your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing – but it’s incredibly important to do so.

It can be difficult to bear the burden of other people’s wellbeing, and the stress we put our healthcare providers through is one of the reasons why physicians, nurses, and medical assistants face some of the worst stress issues in the job’s market.

However, more than just a burden, these issues can present themselves as risk to a medical professional’s personal wellbeing, as well as their performance (and concurrently, the wellbeing of others).

We are all responsible for our own health and must do what we can to preserve or improve it. While many factors are beyond our immediate control – from the hours we work to the circumstances we face at work – we must all do our utmost to learn how to better cope with our stress, manage our emotional wellbeing, and regulate our mental health.

You Don’t Have to be Mentally Ill to Pursue Mental Wellness

Sadly, there’s something of a stigma against taking proper steps to ensure mental wellbeing. We generally assume that when someone has to take the time to take care of their own mental welfare, they’re somehow sick to begin with. We need to move away from that notion and recognize that the need for better emotional regulation and mental awareness is universally critical, and not just important for a struggling minority of people.

This stigma against seeking help – especially professional help – is especially strong within the medical community, ironically. Physicians feel discouraged from seeking out mental healthcare options, as they feel doing so will jeopardize their position and leave them in a vulnerable place, career-wise – even potentially costing them their job.

While that is an issue in and of itself, it highlights the need to help those in the medical community improve their own coping skills, and ensure that they work on maintaining and improving their emotional wellbeing. This helps to:

• Fight back against cases of burgeoning anxiety, undiagnosed depression, or grief-related conditions
• Deal with the long-term mental (as well as subsequent physical) consequences of having a high-stress job.

1. Build and Manage a Strong Support Network

The first and most important step towards better wellbeing is a stronger support system. A support system is composed of friends and family – loved ones who we can turn to for emotional and physical support. Whether that’s a couple of friends to rely on for a good night out, or a family with healthy communication skills and a supportive environment.

As much as we learn to rely on ourselves, it’s critical never to push oneself to the point of isolation. We each need one another in difficult times.

2. Observe Good Sleep Hygiene

Sleep is criminally underrated, and we seem to have made it a habit to brag to one another about how little of it we seem to ‘need’.

However, if sleep research has made anything clear, it’s that:

• Most of us don’t get enough sleep
• Those of us who haven’t gotten enough sleep are terribly unaware of just how much worse our performance is when even a little tired

3. Take the Time to Exercise

It’s often not realistic to expect a hard-working medical professional to get enough rest, do good work, eat a healthy diet, and still find the time to exercise.

However, we need to set our expectations a little lower when we talk about exercise – not everyone needs to train for a marathon, and a simple five-minute workout done daily can have a tremendous effect on the mind and body in the long-term.

4. Speak to Management About Your Work-Life Balance

Sometimes it’s important to address the elephant in the room. There’s only so much you can do for your own wellbeing if you’re being bombarded with work you can’t handle, and it isn’t a good idea to stay silent about it.

Not only will it have an effect on your own life but overworked medical professionals in turn have a higher chance of endangering others.

5. Start Setting Goals

It’s often too easy to fall into a routine, especially when your schedule becomes extremely busy. You struggle to get from one day to the next, constantly in a rush to manage your daily tasks and fulfill your responsibilities.

But living like that can have a serious impact on our mental health. It’s important to try and set goals for yourself. They serve as reminders that as time passes, you continue to grow, often in more ways than one.

6. Strive to Learn Something New

We should never stop learning.

Not only is learning a reward in and of itself, but it can lead to great things – new friendships, interesting hobbies, undiscovered talents, and fulfilling aspects of ourselves that we might never have discovered otherwise.

7. Change Your Routine

As the days blend together, try to find little ways to break up the monotony.

Listen to a completely new genre of music. Try a different coffee order. Take a different route to work. Spend your weekend doing something you’ve never done before.

Mental and Emotional Wellbeing is Necessary

Mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing go hand-in-hand. Our ability to cope with stress affects how stress, in turn, imprints upon us over the years. High-stress lives deal with greater instances of heart disease and hypertension, as well as poorer lifestyle choices as a result of poor coping skills. Physicians and nurses alike are prone to struggling with sleeping problems, and poor diets.

Despite having a very physically active line of work, many are overweight. All of this puts further stress on the body as well as the mind. It can create a vicious cycle wherein each negative step in the wrong direction concurrently affects us on every level, and in turn, causes us to spiral further down an unhealthy path.

Pursuing mental and emotional wellbeing is not a luxury, but arguably a basic necessity in a high-stress line of work. It is preventative care against the long-term effects of constant overwhelming stress and the effects that can have on a person, from the physical to the mental.

In Conclusion

Stress is an important part of growth, but managing your mental and emotional wellbeing is important as well. It’s through adversity that we dig deeper within ourselves and discover our resolve. There’s a fine line where a healthy amount of challenge becomes far too much, and it simply begins to wear us down.

Healthcare professionals need to adopt better ways to cope with stress while working with their employers for proper compensation and better working hours, whenever possible. When doctors and nurses take care of themselves, they in turn improve their ability to take care of their patients.