Maintaining your resilience

The purpose of this chapter is to provide various ideas for relaxing and letting go of the tension from work. Although these strategies may be familiar, when nurses are actively experiencing stress from high-pressure jobs—as a new graduate trying to acculturate to the new practice setting, for example—they may forget to implement them. Ruminating about what happened that day at work and taking shortcuts such as eating fast food and watching television, instead of a healthy meal and exercising, is all too easy. However, nurses must remember that work is only one aspect of life, all-consuming although that work may seem at times. To be a success in nursing, a nurse must be a success in life. The ideas in this chapter will help nurses to remember that life is much more than work. Taking time for some of the suggested activities, or others that are similarly relaxing and fun, is essential to make sense of life when working in a high pressure environment. This chapter presents some examples of how individuals might react under stress and then discusses how these individuals might react in a more self-affirming way. The chapter also presents coping strategies from the literature that are generally helpful in dealing with stress.