Working in aged care dementia care can be incredibly rewarding, but it can also be emotionally and physically demanding. As support workers, you play a vital role in providing compassionate care to individuals living with dementia. However, it's essential to remember that you, too, need care and support.
Understanding the Importance of Self-Care:
- Maintaining Resilience: Caring for individuals with dementia can be emotionally challenging. Self-care helps you build resilience and cope with the daily stresses and emotional demands of the job.
- Preventing Burnout: The risk of burnout is higher in roles that involve constant caregiving. Prioritising self-care reduces the risk of burnout and helps you sustain your passion and commitment to your work.
- Improved Job Performance: When you take care of yourself, you can perform your job more effectively. Your physical and emotional well-being directly impact the quality of care you provide to your residents.
Practical Self-Care Tips:
- Set Boundaries: Establish clear boundaries between work and personal life. Avoid excessive overtime or taking work-related stress home with you.
- Regular Breaks: Take your breaks seriously. Use this time to relax, recharge, and clear your mind. Even a short break can make a significant difference in your energy levels.
- Seek Support: Don't hesitate to reach out to colleagues or supervisors when you need assistance or emotional support. Sharing experiences and challenges can be therapeutic.
- Self-Reflect: Take time to reflect on your experiences and emotions. Journaling or talking to a therapist can help you process your feelings and find constructive ways to manage them.
- Physical Health: Prioritise your physical health through regular exercise, a balanced diet, and sufficient sleep. These factors directly impact your emotional well-being.
- Mindfulness and Relaxation: Practice mindfulness techniques or relaxation exercises to manage stress and anxiety. Deep breathing, meditation, or yoga can be effective tools.
- Maintain Hobbies: Continue doing activities you enjoy outside of work. Engaging in hobbies can provide a much-needed mental break and a sense of fulfillment.
- Know Your Limits: Recognise when you need a break or time off. It's okay to take a step back temporarily to recharge.
- Access Training and Education: Consider further training in dementia care and emotional intelligence. The more you understand the condition and your emotional responses, the better equipped you'll be to manage them.
- Celebrate Small Wins: Acknowledge your achievements and positive moments at work. Celebrating small victories can boost your morale and sense of purpose.
‘Importance of Self-Care Planning’ from the Black Dog Institute
Monitoring Stress Levels
As stress is a key feature of burnout and compassion fatigue, monitoring your own stress levels on a regular basis should be part of your professional practice. Remember that workers may not notice that they are stressed until things escalate or unavoidable symptoms occur, so it’s important that you develop strategies for identifying signs of stress before they become more serious. It is easy to forget that workers, just like their clients, are also facing various stressors in life (e.g., financial stress, relationship issues, grief and loss). Hence, you must be aware of stressors in your life that could impact on your stress level at work. You can then take actions to address increases in stress, whether through self-care; adjusting your workload or work practices as appropriate; or getting additional support from a manager, supervisor, or other professional.
The following consists of the stress components of the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS), which is used by some workers to assess indications that problematic levels of stress, anxiety, or distress may be present. Since regularly assessing your own stress and distress levels should be part of your regular practice, using this or another relevant inventory to help your reflection may be worthwhile. You may like to try it now.
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Please read each statement and circle a number 0, 1, 2 or 3 which indicates how much the statement applied to you over the past week. There are no right or wrong answers. Do not spend too much time on any statement. The rating scale is as follows: 0 Never – did not apply to me at all |
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| I found it hard to wind down. | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| I tended to over-react to situations. | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| I felt that I was using a lot of nervous energy. | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| I found myself getting agitated. | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| I found it difficult to relax. | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| I was intolerant of anything that kept me from getting on with what I was doing. | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| I felt that I was rather touchy. | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| (Adapted from Black Dog Institute, n.d.) | ||||
Having circled a number for each item, selected numbers are added, providing a stress ‘score’. The general guidelines for assessing stress scores on this scale are normal (0-7), mild (8-9), moderate (10-12), severe (13-16), and extremely severe (17+).
The extract of DASS is included here simply as an example of a tool that workers could use in personal reflection to monitor stress levels. Whilst it is also commonly used with clients, specialist training is required to use the DASS in practice. Whatever process you use to monitor your stress levels, it is important that we all address elevated stress scores (particularly those in the moderate range and over if using a tool such as the one above), including through self-care strategies and supervision or personal counselling.
Reflecting on your own role within your team could have a significant impact on how your team members approach you and how they receive your input and feedback. Your behaviours have a direct impact on individual team members and, potentially, team objectives.
Practising self-reflection, and becoming self-aware could benefit your engagement with your team and influence the team’s effectiveness.
You could address issues constructively by writing down actions you can take, based on self-reflection results, and reporting back to the team to show how these can help reach common goals or exchanging feedback within the team to identify how certain behaviours are impacting the team.
The team self-reflection process can be difficult, so it will be important to stay focused on positive changes to support team success.
Your own role and the way you behave in a team can affect other team members as well as the team’s ability to achieve its goals. For example, if a person is often rude and abrupt, this behaviour may mean that other team members do not approach them for ideas or advice. This can cause communication breakdown between team members, which will, in turn, prevent the team from achieving its goals.
Reflection
Think about your own role and behaviour within a team in your workplace
In what ways, both positively and negatively, do you influence:
Other team members?
The effectiveness of the team in achieving its goals?
Being aware of your feelings while supporting a person is important. You may have been supporting a person for a while and you will experience feelings of loss if their dementia progresses or as they face challenges. It is important for you to recognise these feelings and find a way of dealing with them – for example, by talking to your supervisor or other colleagues or writing a journal.
The iceberg model (Fundamentals of Palliative Care, 2023) is a good way to describe your wellness. Your current state of wellness is just the tip of the iceberg. Think of an iceberg with a top layer and three more layers underneath, see the following image for more detail.
- State of Health and Wellness Layer - This is was people around you observe.
- Lifestyle and Behaviour Layer - This is what you eat, how you use or exercise your body, how you relax and how you keep yourself safe from hazards.
- Psychological and Motivational Layer - This is what moves you to lead the lifestyle that you do.
- Spiritual, Your Being and Meaning Layer - This is where your real meaning of life and your place in the universe sits. Depending on your religion and culture, your spirituality may very well penetrate through all the levels of the iceberg.
You can choose your own wellbeing. Whether that is increased energy, greater enthusiasm, an enhanced sense of wellbeing or a greater sense of joy. The choice is yours. All of these layers work together to make you the person you are. One aspect can affect all of the others. For example, when feeling emotional or stressed you can get a headache. You need to be able to recognise signs of stress.
If you know your whole self, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, you will be able to recognise if any one of these parts is out of balance.
Your whole self includes:
Your tangible structure and five senses which enable you to touch, see, hear, smell and taste the world around you.
Your range of emotions from fear and anger to love and joy.
Your knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, your analytical self.
Your relationship with yourself, your creativity, your life purpose, and your relationship with a higher power.
In summary, supporting workers' wellbeing is crucial for their performance, job satisfaction, mental and physical health, and overall work-life balance.
By investing in worker wellbeing, organizations can create a positive and supportive work environment, leading to higher productivity, higher employee engagement, and all-round success.
Further Reading
Read ‘Mental Health Foundation’s Wellbeing Tips for Healthcare Workers’, then identify 10 tips YOU can use to stay well.
