Self-care for Nurses: 6 Strategies to Maintain Your Mental Health

Think about your approach to maintaining your mental health. Do you have one? Or has your mental health, perhaps along with your physical health, dropped far down the list of priorities?

“In my experience, nurses are very slow and sometimes even reluctant to attend to their own mental health needs,” said psychologist James Jackson, PsyD, director of long-term outcomes for the ICU Recovery Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.

Nurses are so centered on others—and so highly adept at caring for others—that they often don’t even have a framework for caring for themselves. This type of self-neglect can be dangerous, though. Self-care for nurses is so important that the American Nurses Association has once again devoted an entire week, May 1-9, to focusing on it during Nurses Month in 2021.

So, if you are starting to feel the effects of neglecting your own needs in the name of caring for others, consider this a wake-up call.