Nursing and Stress

As nurses, we’re all too familiar with the physiology of stress and how it can impact our health. We may even find ourselves lecturing our patients about the importance of decreasing stress in their lives…only to go back to the nurses’ station and realize that we’re a bucket of nerves!

So, even though we know how stress can affect us, and we want to change, why don’t we? Why do we continue to respond to our circumstances at work (and in our lives) in ways that we know aren’t good for us?

The Good News: There’s Relief for Your Stress!

I want to share some great news; there are some easy methods that you can learn to decrease how you respond to stress and the effects that it has on you. And…over the next few months, I’m going to show you how to use these methods (and more) to deal with (and defeat) your usual ways of dealing (or not) with stress.

First off though, I want to share an excellent article on the Science of Stress that was recently posted on Fix.com. Please bear in mind, I have no affiliation with this site, they’re not a “for sale” site, where you’re going to be offered tons of advice that you have to buy. Fix.com is simply a great site, and I chose this article because it’s well written and has so much great material in it. And it goes something like this:

The Science of Stress

How Stressing Out Can Affect Your Health

We all experience stress. Even the most seemingly Zen-like person, with not a worry in the world, has experienced stress. I can assure you that stress is an innate emotion, which everyone experiences from time to time. While there are many definitions of stress, I like to think of it as something that disturbs homeostasis. Read more…

How I Can Begin to Help You With Your Stress

As you know, this site is focused on using mindfulness and meditation practices in your work and in your life. For stress-management, meditation and mindfulness have been found to be extremely useful (and effective too) for reducing stress.

We’ll get to more specifics in the weeks to come, but if you haven’t already used them, I’d suggest that you check out some of the resources listed below as a means to begin to work with the stress in your life.

• Meditation audio for using your breath as the anchor of your attention during meditation. (Once you get this down, you can “bring” this method with you, wherever you go – at work, at home, behind the wheel of your car!)
• Ebook and two chapters from the book, Minding the Bedside: Nursing from the Heart of the Awakened Mind, on how to meditate.
• Here’s a pitch for my book, Minding the Bedside: Nursing from the Heart of the Awakened Mind. You can even buy it in a Kindle version! Why buy it? Because I really did write it for you. Because it’s a meditation book written just for nurses (although others who are not nurses have bought the book and raved about it!). And, because it has EVERYTHING that you need to learn how to meditate and to use your practice at the bedside.

This site has tons of tools for learning how to meditate.

I encourage you to look through the HUNDREDS of articles that I’ve written and especially check out my weekly meditation tips and other useful meditation materials provided for your health and well being. And please let me know if you’d like to discuss anything with me, have any questions or need clarification regarding anything that I’ve written about.

Thanks for visiting and have a mindful day.