How practitioners can find time for self-care

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By Linda Childers

Integrative practitioners know self-care is critical for maintaining overall health, yet prioritizing mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing, can be a challenge.

Pam Ressler, MS, RN, HNB-BC, founder of the website Stress Resources, headquartered in Concord, Mass., said time management is often central to self-care for the busy practitioner. She said she believes practitioners must define their priorities, which can be difficult in a technology-driven world where lines between work and home life are blurred.

To help practitioners identify what means most to them, Ressler suggests using a framework like Stephen Covey’s “Four Quadrants,” a time management strategy that breaks your to-do list into four quadrants based on their importance and urgency. By using this framework, practitioners can prioritize important tasks and identify areas that are time wasters.

The first quadrant is “Urgent and Important.” Ressler explained these are critical tasks that require immediate attention, including impending deadlines and resolving urgent matters. The second quadrant is “Not Urgent, Yet Important” and Ressler said these tasks should be priorities and where practitioners spend the bulk of their time. Tasks under this quadrant might include goal planning, relationship building, and self-care. Since none of these activities have a deadline, Ressler said we tend to put them off, even though they’re critical to both professional and personal success.

In the third quadrant, Ressler explained are the “Urgent and Not Important” tasks that may be important to others, but not our own priorities. These can include e-mails, interruptions, and unnecessary meetings. The fourth quadrant focuses on personal social media use, busy work and time wasters.

Ressler said the goal of the four quadrants framework is to focus on the important things in our lives, not the urgent demands that take up so much of our time and cause stress. While it’s impossible to ignore the deadlines and emergencies in quadrant one, Ressler said it is possible to be proactive and spend more time on planning and prevention (quadrant two), to reduce the number of crises and emergencies you experience. Ressler noted that spending too much time in quadrant one reduces productivity and leads to burnout,

Ressler is also a proponent of scheduling time for self-care, and incorporating short bursts of personal time, which can be as simple as five or 10-minute increments throughout the day. Consistency matters more than the length of time, she said.

 “It’s important to step away from “doing” and make time for “being”,” she said. “You wouldn’t cancel an appointment with another healthcare provider, so don’t cancel appointments with yourself.”

Lynn Lyons, LICSW, a Concord, New Hampshire-based psychotherapist, speaker, and author of the recently published The Anxiety Audit, said self-care is also learning to say no to what you don’t have the time, capacity, or desire to do. She encourages practitioners to take time to respond to requests or invitations, and ask, “when it comes time to do what I said yes to, will I be as interested in doing it then?” Saying no allows the practitioner time to prioritize themselves.  

This act of setting healthy boundaries can also be viewed as a component of self-care, and could help prevent burnout, Lyons said.

“Healthy boundaries don’t mean being rigid,” Lyons said. “It means being somewhere between a brick wall and a sliding glass door. You can be flexible when setting boundaries based on the who, what, and when.”

Lyons said practitioners must remember they are responsible for setting boundaries between themselves and their patients and colleagues.

She explained that when practitioners respond to e-mails at 10 p.m., they’re letting others know they don’t have boundaries between their work and personal life. She recommended waiting until the next day to answer any non-urgent texts and e-mails.

Lyons urges practitioners to unplug from technology during their time off to promote better health and self-care. A recent study published in Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience found frequent technology use was associated with impaired emotional and social intelligence, social isolation, and disrupted sleep.

Lyons is also a proponent of differentiating between self-care and self-medication.

“It can be easy to say, “I’ve had a hard day and I’m going to treat myself by staying up late to binge watch television or having half of this delicious cake,” Lyons said. “When you’re practicing self-care, you rarely if ever feel regret or shame afterward. Self-medication, however, does lead to regret. True self-care doesn’t have negative consequences for you or those you care about, but self-medication often does, it can feel like a reward.”

As an example, Lyons explained how going for a brisk walk, or taking a break midday to practice meditation, serves to nurture us rather than fill us with regret.

“We tend to promote a lot of behaviors as self-care that really aren’t, rather than endorsing activities that allow us to feel good about ourselves in the long run,” she said. “You never hear someone say, “I regret going on a walk today.”