Essay Sample on Self-Care for Social Workers

Introduction

Looking after oneself is a critical part of living a healthy and happy life. Self-care is an activity done deliberately to take care of our mental, emotional and physical health (Alkema, Linton, & Davies, 2008). It helps to brighten once mood, relieve stress related to burnout and maintain professionalism. The intervention helps social workers to identify their needs for their spiritual, physical and mental self. Though social workers are trained to take care of themselves as they take care of others, they often forget to counsel themselves. They forget to pay heed to the very signs and symptoms of the dangers of which they go out to warn others. They overlook taking care of themselves and end up falling victim to the same problems their patient face. Self-care is primarily believed to help combat work-related stress, even being referred to as an "essential underpinning to sustaining a healthy workforce (Alkema, Linton, & Davies, 2008)." Therefore, self care is a personal matter, and each approach is different based on once professional and personal commitments. This paper is a Self-Care Starter Kit that defines, identify and analyze information about self care for social workers and self care techniques in my field of placement, and personal and employment life.

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My Dream in Social Work Position

The area within which I would like to work professionally is addictive behaviors. My dream in a social work position is to become a counselor. This is because I love working with people who are undergoing difficult situations in their life. I feel that being a counselor would allow me to interact directly with the affected people in the society. I have associated directly with cases of addiction in my family. Addiction is troubling, and it can negatively impact people's lives. For this reason, becoming a social worker provides me with the necessary tools to meaningfully change the live of people. I will only achieve this by help people ease their mental, physical, and psychological burden.

I also believe in the potential that lies within each one of us. I think that most problems can be easily solved if only all of us were involved in looking for a solution. It saddens me to see some of us trapped in the abuse of drugs and wasting away when we could all be working towards making our world a better place.

Self Care About Social Work Practice

Social workers have the responsibility to interact with patients and clients. While clients and patients are happy sometimes, quite often, they find themselves in a very depressed state of mind. Some of the people social workers meet are addicted to drugs or have a child who is an addict. Some are homeless, and others are facing eviction from their homes. These stresses rub off on the social workers, whether they know it or not during their interaction with their clients. Students also face a lot of challenges trying to balance their social life and their school work. They need to learn to balance these, and it can be a great challenge and source of stress for them. This pressure is even more significant for social work students as they have to balance their work while having the stresses of their clients and patients weighing heavily on their minds.

Issues Related to Stress, Burnout and Compassion

Self-care is of utmost importance if one is to protect himself/herself from burnout, stress and compassion fatigue. Burnout (Alkema et al., 2008) is described as a state of being "inoperative" as a social worker. This usually happens when a social worker neglects themselves while dedicating their lives to the service of others. The social worker becomes exhausted and emotionally drained instead of feeling happy and satisfied by their service to others. As it worsens, burnout causes a practitioner to be unresponsive to input from others and easily irritated. It may lead to paranoia and even self-medication with legal or illegal drugs. It may eventually cause the practitioner to hate his/her job and retire or get fired. To understand burnout, researchers have broken it down into its constituent attendant syndromes: compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, and secondary traumatic stress (Alkema et al., 2008; Eastwood & Ecklund, 2008).

Compassion fatigue is regarded as the most common of the three. It describes the emotional and physical exhaustion due to burnout. It emerges when the practitioners come across so many suffering people that they get fed up of showing empathy to their clients and patients. It has been witnessed that it worsens when it is evident to a practitioner that a patient's situation will not improve. One practitioner who I have worked with, but who has since resigned, would get so angry when he heard a patient cry that he would storm out of the room in a rage. He would, henceforth, limit his interaction with the patient as much as he possibly could. The practitioner soon decided that he had worked long enough and retired. He bought a house in the countryside and moved there with his family. He exercises and tries to live a healthy lifestyle.

Techniques for Implementation

Having learned from the experiences of others and my research, I intend to organize my work life so that I don't fall victim to the same pitfalls others before I have fallen victim. I plan to eat healthily. It is recommended that our diets comprise plenty of fruits and vegetables and a lesser amount of protein and carbohydrate. We also should avoid fast foods as much as possible as it comes packed with a lot of calories and unhealthy fat. I also intend to exercise. I will enroll in a gym and exercise at least four days a week. This will ensure that I maintain a healthy weight and reduce the chances that I will develop lifestyle diseases such as diabetes and heart diseases. I also plan to learn the guitar. It has been a skill I have wanted to learn for quite some time now. I feel like it would provide me with something relaxing to do during my free time and will also open me up to new friends. It will also make me leave the house more often to attend open events and meet other creatives.

Self Care Techniques

To safeguard once mental health, social workers are encouraged to adhere to a self-care regime. It has been noted that rather than teaching the individual practitioner to cope with the environment they find themselves in, solutions were being sought at the societal and agency level (Graham & Graham, 2009). To provide support to the social worker, however, five key areas of support for personal self-care were identified: physical, psychological and emotional, social, leisure and spiritual (Richards et al., 2010). If sufficient attention is given to these areas, and self-care techniques associated with any or all of these areas practiced, the practitioner will enjoy reasonably good health and wellness. Some of the self-care practices you could perform are the following:

Exercising: You could choose to join the gym or go for an early morning run. Either way, exercising will give you a way to channel your energy, relieving stress in the process.

Meditation: There are a variety of meditation techniques from which to choose. One can go with whatever one they like best. This also helps the mind detach from everyday concerns. It helps slow your mind down a little bringing calm to both body and mind.

Yoga: These are movements designed to help relax both body and mind. They help bring about mental acuity, attention to detail and overall health and balance. They also help relieve stress and make for a more cheerful demeanor.

Join a club: This could be any club as long as it enables you to meet new people and friends. This increased interaction will take your mind off of everyday stresses and hopefully make you a more cheerful person.

Have a good night's rest: The average person requires at least eight hours of sleep a night. It is encouraged that one goes early to bed and wakes up early. It heightens one's focus and gets him/her feeling rejuvenated. It would be better for the clients if the social worker taking care of him/her is well rested.

Have fun: One is also encouraged to engage in activities that make them happy. It could be anything from having your favorite beverage, gardening, taking an evening stroll, going for an early morning jog to donating to charity or just visiting family and friends. As long as it makes you happy, make it a consistent part of your day (NASW, 2009). This is particularly important for counselors as it helps disengage them from their constant interaction with patients with psychological problems.

Seek spiritual needs: This is an area that is very often neglected particularly by those in the professional domain. Much of what we face in our line of profession is beyond our training and capabilities. It involves matters of heart and soul, and much of our success is based on our ability to connect with our clients and patients on a personal level. She, therefore, recommends that we make it a practice to take a "Soul Journey." She suggests, as an example that one could make it a practice on Full Moon nights, to reflect on the aspects of our work that have had the greatest impact on us. These could be the joys and tragedies that we have encountered in the course of our work, some of which, to a large extent, is beyond human understanding particularly for mental health professionals such as counselors.

Take a break from work: A social worker must never forget to take a break. One should take a vacation, alone or with family, whenever possible to visit new places where he/she can unwind and rejuvenate (Richards et al., 2010). An instructor in foundational clinical practice courses, Erin Benner's piece of advice is that any break whatsoever, even a five-minute break would work wonders as a self-care technique for a social worker. For counselors and other mental health professionals, it can help release a lot of stress to take a stroll in the park.

How My Awareness of Self-Care and Social Work Has Evolved

I have learned to see things from a different perspective. I have previously judged some social workers I've worked with in the past a bit too harshly. I now see that compassion fatigue can happen to anyone and I am mainly at high risk as I want to work as a counselor. Having been equipped with this knowledge early, I intend to take the necessary steps to safeguard my mental health and make the most of my life even as I work in this highly demanding field. Therefore, given the high-stress environment that social workers find themselves working in, it is critical that they adhere to some technique of self-care. Therefore, they will be able to maintain their physical and mental health and enjoy happy and fulfilling careers.

Conclusion

In conclusion, self-care helps one to take care of hi/her mental, emotional and physical health. Social workers should pay attention to the very signs and symptoms of the dangers of which they go out to warn others. Self-care is of utmost importance if one is to protect himself/herself from burnout, stress and compassion fatigue. Therefore, to safeguard once mental health, social workers are encouraged to adhere to a self-care regime. To provide support to the social worker, however, five key areas of support for personal self-care were identified: physical, psychological and emotional, social, leisure and spiritual (Richards et al., 2010). Therefore, I have realized that compassion fatigue can happen to anyone and social workers are at high risk. Taking the necessary steps to safeguard my mental health and make the most of my life even as I work in this highly demanding field will be of utmost importance.

References

Alkema, K., Linton, J. M., & Davies, R. (2008). A study of the relationship between self-care, compassion satisfaction, compassion fatigue, and burnout among hospic...