3 Reasons Exhaustion Doesn’t Have to Keep You From Self-Care

Previously I wrote about the top 10 barriers that nurses on TikTok identified were keeping them from taking better care of themselves. This started a series of posts addressing those 10 barriers and giving tips for busting through them.

In this series, so far, I covered the top two barriers, GUILT and TIME. In this post, I want to cover the third one, exhaustion.

Many of the nurses who responded, listed this as a major barrier to self-care for them. As I read it, I could feel it. There’s a different kind of tired for those of us that spend our lives caring for others. Not only is the work of a nurse physically demanding, but the emotional toll is extensive.

Over the past couple of years, both the physical and emotional factors have grown exponentially. Nursing has always been hard, but it’s gotten even harder over the past couple of years or so.

So, here are 3 reasons why exhaustion shouldn’t stop you from self-care.

1 – Proper self-care will actually make you less tired

I know, I know. Many of you are reading this and wondering how doing yet another thing is actually going to make you LESS tired. Hear me out. As mentioned above, the physical, mental, and emotional toll of nursing are great. How well we are able to bear that weight depends largely on how prepared we are to bear it.

Consider the marathon runner. Nobody just wakes up one morning and decides they are going to run a marathon that day. Rather they decide months in advance and then spend that time training. A marathon is a grueling test of endurance. It’s possible only because of the training done to prepare for it.

The same can be true with nursing. Working to take better care of yourself can make you better prepared to endure the demands of being a nurse. You can endure those long shifts, just a little easier. You can carry that emotional burden just a little better. You might even learn how to set that emotional burden aside and not have to carry it.

I’m not saying that you won’t come home from three 12 hours shifts in a row tired. Heck sometimes just one shift is enough to wipe you out. What I am saying is that you can get to a point where you recover more quickly. Through good self-care, you can actually get to a point where your off days are more than just lounging on the couch taking in entire seasons of your favorite sitcoms or DIY shows. Not that those things are bad, but if that’s all you ever want to do on your off day, it can be a problem.

2 – Self-care doesn’t have to be hard work

Ok, I’m not going to say that self-care requires no work or that it’s easy. YES, it’s work. However, with a little planning, it can doesn’t have to be hard work. As mentioned in the post talking about ways to find time for self-care, one way to make things easier is to bundle activities. Whether this is prepping meals at the beginning of the week, or getting a little work out in while your laundry is running. Or even folding laundry while watching your favorite TV show. Any tasks that you can bundle together will make self-care easier.

3 – Rest is PART of self-care

I can’t help but assume that when people listed exhaustion as a barrier to self-care that they were thinking of self-care as things such as exercise. There have been times in my life when I would work a 12-hour night shift, swing by the gym for a workout, go home for a few hours of sleep and go back that night to do it all over again. There have also been times when I was so tired I wasn’t even sure I was going to be able to drive home. I’ve even had times when I slept in the car because I wasn’t sure I could safely drive home.

So, yeah if your entire concept of self-care is about exercise, then exhaustion could keep you from even thinking about doing it.

However, rest is an important part of self-care. Sometimes what your physical health needs most is to spend a little extra time in bed, or to go back to bed after getting the kids to school. Sometimes what your mental health needs is a day spent on the couch, forgetting about your responsibilities for a little bit and playing video games, or watching movies… between naps.

YES, exercise and some of the other things that make us tired even thinking about them are part of self-care, but so is rest. Don’t feel guilty for resting. You need it as much as you need all the other self-care habits.

This is just one of the barriers

To get the fill top 10 list of barriers to self-care that people shared with me, Read the original post HERE. You can also get links to each of the individual posts where I give some tips for how you can bust through each of those barriers and learn to take better care of yourself in the process.