While it is often easy to overlook stress among nurses and nursing students, it is one of the aspects that greatly impacts their personal and work life. The most common stressors in nursing include complex medical cases, high patient volume, emotional demands, long working hours, and more. In this article, we provide tips to help you manage stress effectively as a nurse practitioner.
#1. Identify A Job You Truly Love
Locking yourself in a job you don’t like can provoke anxiety more than you can imagine. The best way to maintain mental and physical health is to find a nursing job that motivates you to wake up in the morning or when your shift begins and go to work.
If you think it is time to have a change of pace, getting a MSN FNP degree can be a great starting point, as it will help you expand your career and access opportunities for professional growth in holistic family nursing.
#2. Eat Healthy
Feeding on a healthy diet can enhance your mental performance, energy, and sleep quality while calming your nerves. Processed foods, refined carbohydrates, and trans fat are all linked to depression so it is best to avoid them. Get fresh vegetables instead of frozen or canned ones.
Consider eating a diet of healthy fiber and whole grains to produce and control the mood-regulating chemical called serotonin. Other foods that can relieve stress include nuts, carrot sticks, black and herbal tea, swiss chard, milk, fruits, and yogurt. Most importantly, drink a lot of water to stay hydrated.
#3. Practice Mindfulness and Meditation
Adding meditation and mindfulness to your daily routines can notably lower anxiety and stress levels. Mindfulness can enable you to focus on being present and helps you to be informed about the current surroundings. You will not have to worry about what might happen, combating anxiety and depression. Meditation, body recognition, and yoga are all part of mindfulness best practices.
#4. Set Healthy Boundaries
Setting boundaries can go a long way in enhancing your mental health. This may mean deciding not to carry work home on off days and turning off workplace notifications, email alerts, and texts. It also translates to hindering your family and personal matters from interfering with your work delivery. Limit the amount of time you spend on personal calls or online social platforms to avoid feeling stretched or overwhelmed.
#5. Embrace Regular Physical Activity
If you are looking for a proven stress reliever, regular physical activity can do. In fact, most therapists recommend exercise when treating people of stress, anxiety, eating disorders, and depression.
When you exercise, your body produces endorphins, which naturally lifts the mood. It also helps inhibit the release of stress hormones and boosts your sleep quality. Exercise further enables you to combat unwanted physical effects resulting from stress, such as high blood pressure and sugar levels and unhealthy heart rate.
#6. Have A Healthy Support System
A robust social support system of family and close friends can help improve your resilience to stress and mitigate vulnerabilities. However, if you dwell in isolation, you can make poor lifestyle choices, fail to cope with stress, and increase blood pressure.
Spend quality time with people that matter in your life and don’t shy off to share what you might be going through. Join online forums for nursing practitioners, professional organizations, or a religious group, where you get genuine people to talk to.
Final Words
As you work to manage stress as a nurse practitioner, identify your stressors and use these tips to mitigate them. Embrace healthy eating habits, exercise, practice mindfulness, set boundaries and more to maintain good mental and physical health.
Integrative Researcher in the field of Psychology, Spirituality and Religion, Professor of Integral Psychology and Spiritual Counseling, Bilingual Psychotherapist.