.png)
Hindsight is 20/20. As I sit here and analyse how I’ve ended up in the “dark and twisty” place when it comes to my feelings towards nursing and the state of healthcare in general, the puzzle pieces start coming together. I grew up watching the women closest to me doing everything for everyone around them and never saying “no”, even if they were stretched beyond their limits. Working several jobs, raising a family, running a household, taking care of sick relatives and accommodating surprise guests- it was all in a day’s work. I was raised with the message that helping others is the right thing to do. On the surface there is nothing wrong with this type of message because society cannot function without folks helping each other out. Starting at a young age I learned to derive pleasure from taking care of people around me because those were the behaviours modelled to me.
When I was in university, I did the Myers-Briggs personality questionnaire and got “Defender” as my personality type. Here is how the website describes this personality: “Defenders can be counted on to meet deadlines, remember birthdays and special occasions, uphold traditions, and shower their loved ones with gestures of care and support … As employees, Defenders exemplify the strength of humble dedication” (https://www.16personalities.com/isfj-personality). Upon reading that I remember thinking “yeah, that tracks, that’s totally me”. What had really happened is this description further solidified my “saviour” complex. In addition to this unsustainable and unhealthy self-perception, the message I often received in nursing school and in clinical settings was that “the hospital comes first”. Obviously nobody ever said this out loud. It appeared in the form of invisible sub-text when I couldn’t take a sick day during a clinical rotation without receiving an automatic F. It was also there when a manager had me provide a doctor’s note to prove that I was indeed sick for two days after I ended up in an emergency department from pain and puking my guts out for 12 hours straight (I have never had any problems with attendance at work in the past). The same message also appeared on a much larger, louder scale for all nurses with the beginning of the pandemic. This time the written text said “nurses are heroes”. The underlying message was still the same- “the hospital comes first”.
What I’ve realised is that nursing school did a good job of moulding me into a compliant employee. It was only in the course of my career, and through conversations with friends and coworkers much wiser than me, that I’d started to develop some boundaries when it comes to my job. Prior to writing this post I did a quick Google search- in one window I typed in “setting boundaries at work”, in the other window I typed in “nurses setting boundaries at work”. The results were vastly different. The first window provided me with a slew of website links with advice on setting personal boundaries, while the results in the second window mostly talked about the “therapeutic nurse-patient relationship” and how to maintain professional boundaries around it. My suspicion was right- nurses setting personal boundaries isn’t widely considered to be a matter of importance. We are the “angels” who will go to Heaven for sacrificing ourselves to this profession. Well, pardon my French but fuck that.
I just listened to a great episode dedicated to burnout on Farnoosh Torabi’s podcast “So Money” (ep. #1388). The guest speaker of the episode, Cait Donovan- who is a burnout expert and coach, was talking about the importance of boundaries in burnout recovery. She stated that an important first step to make before diving into the practice of setting boundaries is to “notice all the places where you don’t have to say yes. Stop offering yourself when people don’t actually need you.” This resonated with me so much because I am definitely guilty of this. At work it manifests itself in me looking at the assignment board, seeing the staffing holes in the schedule and offering to stay overtime after my shift “because I’m already working and I didn’t have anything planned afterward anyway”. GROANNN. Why would I do this to myself? And more importantly, why would I slip back into this habit after having already established boundaries around how much overtime I allow myself to work? Cait Donovan had an answer to those questions too. “Needing to feel needed comes down to worthiness.” Damn, this woman is good. A lot of my self-worth is tied to being helpful when people need me and it’s going to take many attempts of setting the same boundaries over and over to re-write that programming in my brain. Okay, note to self that consistency will require much self-compassion and grace. Lastly, Cait urged the listeners struggling with lack of boundaries to “empower people to solve problems themselves instead of being the saviour”. In my case this translates to “it’s not my job to cover all the staffing shortages on the unit”. I cannot be everything for everyone. I am NOT a hero.
But enough about me. You’re probably wondering what are some of the ways that nurses can set personal boundaries at work to help themselves crawl out of, or hopefully avoid all together, the “dark and twisty” place of burnout? Here are a few ideas: - block the work/scheduling department phone number on your days off if you can
- if your scheduling is done through an app, turn off notifications on your rest days - do not check work emails outside of work
- if you must work extra, determine ahead of time how many extra hours you can work without sacrificing your mental health and have someone outside of your job hold you accountable to that
- do not look at the schedule to see when the unit/department is short-staffed
- do not offer to stay late or come in early before you’re asked
- if you are caught off guard by a manager asking you to take an extra shift/take on a student/take on any other extra responsibilities you’re not sure that you can handle, it is perfectly okay to say “let me get back to you about that” while you formulate a polite way to refuse the offer -role play (with either a trusted friend/family member or better yet, a therapist) how to remain firm when someone is trying to cross your boundaries Do you have any other tips on what’s worked for you personally when setting boundaries as a nurse? Drop a comment below!
Comments