How to Reduce Stress After a Long Nurse Shift
There’s a clear need for robust and effective techniques to reduce stress in the lives of every aspiring and current nurse. These 9 strategies can help with stress reduction after a long nursing shift.
A study of over 250 registered nurses in the US revealed that nearly all (98 percent) reported that their work is both mentally and physically demanding, and that nearly half (44 percent) are worried that their fatigue may harm patient outcomes. 63 percent reported nurse burnout.
Many have specifically cited frustrations with a lack of health benefits provided by employers, and there are clear correlative ties between lower patient satisfaction and nurse burnout. There’s room for improvement in hospitals, who could implement measures to help reduce turnover.
How to Reduce Nurse Stress
Such measures might include providing programs to help nurses deal with stress at work, increasing the nurse-to-patient ratio to limit some of the extreme pressure felt by nurses in the country’s busiest hospitals, and providing greater benefits and incentives matching other white-collar employees.
Ultimately, nursing is a very stressful job. There are plenty of ways to reduce stress from a nurse’s perspective, particularly after a very long shift. Having your own strategies for dealing with stress is critical to surviving in the nursing world.
Avoid Destructive Coping Mechanisms to Reduce Stress
While anything that can help reduce stress after a tough day at work might be welcomed, there are plenty of examples of destructive coping mechanisms that really aren’t conducive to a long-term productive career as a nurse. These include:
- Substance use and alcohol
- Poor eating habits (leading to poor health and eating disorders)
- Self-harm
- Destructive interpersonal relationships
- Toxic behavior or bullying at the workplace
- Aggression towards other
- Other similarly self-destructive behaviors
While some of these originate on impulse and others are more deliberate, all of them can feel good or liberating in the moment but lead to much more stress and trouble later down the road.
Developing effective means of coping is important not only to stay sane at work and avoid burnout, but as a preventative measure against unwanted or destructive behavior born out of workplace stress.
1. Ask for Advice
When you’re stuck in a rut and you’re feeling particularly tired and down after a really long shift, it helps to ask others who have gone through the same thing.
While you might get some unhelpful responses, like ‘suck it up’ or ‘get used to it’, there’s always the chance that you’ll strike gold with a truly helpful piece of advice, whether it’s something simple like learning how to powernap, or something more complex like a much better organizational system for your daily tasks.
2. Care for Yourself Physically
Being a nurse is highly demanding, both physically and mentally, and without proper care it’s quite easy to fall apart under a serious workload.
Keeping yourself fit for the job by maintaining a healthy weight and heartrate can help, but there are other ways to take care of yourself physically, such as investing in better shoes, buying better less restrictive scrubs or more comfortable lab coats, or addressing aches and pains professionally.
3. Try Breathing Techniques
The effects of a long deep breath are varied, but almost always positive. Teaching yourself how to pause and take a deep breath can stave off feelings of anxiety and panic, calm you down, and help you think more clearly.
We can’t be always on – it’s important to relax a little between shifts.
4. Quell Frustrations and Take Pause
Taking pause is about more than just regulating your heartrate – it’s also about regulating your frustrations. Nursing can be a tough job, and it’s at its toughest when mistakes are made, regardless of who made them. Patient outcomes may get worse and sometimes, the reality involves losing lives.
Rather than letting these unfortunate realities negatively impact your job, it’s sometimes more important to be in the moment and live through them after the shift is done. Know that there’s a time and place to let go and truly cope.
5. Talk About Your Stress
Talking can be very powerful. When we have no other outlet for our frustrations, sometimes just opening up to someone else in a rant-like fashion can do a lot to help us calm down and better cope with the facts.
It doesn’t have to be a therapist or a counselor, but there are times when professional help might be your best bet at finding peace after a particularly difficult time.
6. Utilize Your Creativity
Being creative helps tremendously with stress. Not only does it let you take your mind off work, but it’s a great way to work through emotions you might not be able to work through otherwise.
Whether your outlet is music, art, or dance, it’s important to embrace whatever medium satisfies you.
7. Prioritize Your Needs
Nurses are human, and humans have needs. One of the most important and oft-neglected needs for nurses is the need for sleep. While there might be times when good sleep just isn’t an option, you still need to prioritize it whenever you can afford to and get as much quality sleep as you can.
Food is important, too. A balanced nutrition of fresh foods is ideal, but rarely easy or affordable. Hack your diet with simple meal prep tricks, lots of filling foods, nutritious and affordable snacks, and a simple calorie tracker to help you stay fit and satisfied with your intake.
8. Ask Your Partner for Support
If you are in a committed relationship with someone you trust, then asking for their help and support can be a tremendous source of relief.
Even if it’s just a matter of handling most of the chores or doing the grocery shopping, every little bit off your plate helps to reduce stress.
9. Seek Comfort in the Spiritual
You don’t have to be particularly religious to make use of prayer. Even if you don’t belong to any faith, giving meditation or other forms of reflection a try could be beneficial.
Regardless of what you believe in, spiritual coping is a real way to deal with mounting pressure and stress at work.
The Bigger Picture: Staying Healthy
Coping strategies for the stress of nursing can be broken down into general categories:
- Situational control
- Preventative measures
- Seeking help from others
- Self-care
Situational control involves improving competencies and learning from past experiences, handling situations better and reducing stress by reducing poor outcomes. Preventative measures imply a similar strategy, but in a proactive sense rather than a reactive sense.
When simply being better at your job isn’t enough, it’s important to make time to seek advice and therapy. Learning from other people’s experiences is just as important as learning from one’s own mistakes and successes. Older or more experienced nurses are likely going to have practical advice to help you deal with stress, and while it might not always be applicable to you and your circumstances, it pays to listen.
This also goes for asking for professional help from a therapist or asking your partner for physical and emotional support and comfort, by taking on the housework, helping prepare meals, or otherwise lightening the mental load of dealing with life outside of nursing.
