Self-Care: A Luxury or Necessity?

By Elena Padrón, Summer 2010

Self-care is rarely explicitly included in the academic curriculum, and therefore psychology trainees are likely to have less training, knowledge, and experience in managing their own self-care than that of their clients. Students may feel that they don’t have the time to attend to their self-care due to the demands of graduate school. However, work following graduation brings a larger client load, additional responsibilities, and less external support for mentorship.

Psychologists are more likely to blur boundaries with clients and display impaired objectivity when they suffer from burnout. Furthermore, most psychologists agree that the strength and quality of the therapeutic relationship are of great importance for the effectiveness of psychotherapy outcomes. Hence, self-care is a necessary life-long skill for the professional competence of psychologists. Below are some recommendations for students:

Schedule self-care regularly in your calendar. External demands constantly push you to give more; only you can push yourself to step back and repair. I recommend at least 20 minutes daily, and at least half a day or an entire day each weekend.

Say “no” to guilt. Make working during self-care time non-negotiable. Otherwise, you will neither rest nor work efficiently. A self denied of care will only “speak up” after burnout has been reached, which only adds more delays in work, make-up assignments, and missed deadlines, and therefore compounds stress and guilt.

Work and schedule preventatively. Many events (such as class presentations, major paper assignments, final exams, prelims, proposal orals/dissertation defense, the CPPR, etc.) are scheduled in advance. Allow yourself additional time for those tasks during the weeks before they are occur (which also means rescheduling other areas), and try to break the task into smaller goals that can be addressed more easily throughout the weeks leading up to them.

Find out what relaxes you when you are hyperactivated. For some students, it will be yoga, massage, and some quiet time. For other students it might be going to a concert, exercising, or reading a good book. Some are relaxed by silence, while others find silence anxiety-provoking. Find out if you need to slow down or expend extra energy in order to manage your hyperactivation.

Monitor your sleep, appetite, weight, irritability, attention, concentration and mood. These are great cues for detecting the need for self-care before reaching burnout. Also, listen to your friends’ feedback when they tell you that you look tired or seem to be having a hard time. Sometimes our loved ones see us more clearly when all of our resources are concentrated on attending to environmental demands.

Apply self-care strategies that match your current needs.
Stress due to carrying a heavy emotional load from your clients will be aided by focusing supervision time addressing countertransference and learning skills that can appropriately contain the emotion in session. Relaxation time and/or your personal psychotherapist could be good resources as well.

Stress due to personal relationships will require problem-solving with, and getting social support from, your loved ones, friends, and/or personal psychotherapist. Work might serve as a temporary distraction, but schedule work in shorter bouts of time. Remember that depleted emotional resources limit attention, concentration, and ability to learn new information.

Stress due to difficulty in meeting academic demands will likely require additional meetings with faculty advisors and mentors, getting peer support, seeking help from coaches or editors, and relaxation time in order to reduce avoidance due to feeling inefficacious. Revise your schedule and attach higher temporary priority to areas of difficulty, and relatively lower priority to areas of competence.

Stress due to burnout will likely require a change in environment in order to distance yourself from the source of stress. Spending time outdoors or going on a day-long or weekend trip with friends could help. Vent with peers who understand what you are going through. Look at your schedule to prioritize short-term tasks, eliminate unnecessary tasks that you have volunteered for or that can be completed by someone else, and negotiate expectations and deadlines with faculty and supervisors.

In conclusion, remember that crisis-oriented self-care doesn’t serve the preventative purpose of supporting students’ mental health in the long run, and ends up being much less efficient. Now is the time to start developing self-care skills.