For compassion fatigue are a couple of different interventions. There are a couple of different aspects where the interventions can help to make dealing with compassion fatigue easier.
Work-life balance Help
It is important to have a good work-life balance. A healthy work-life balance ensures that there is less chance of mental problems such as compassion fatigue.
An unhealthy work-life balance can be recognized by:
- You are less efficient and productive.
- You feel more stressed.
- You lose interest in your hobbies.
- You get more forgetful.
- You have more irritations and more arguments.
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Things that could help to get a healthy work-life balance:
- Say more no. Sometimes you need to choose your own rest over work.
- Make clear agreements with your manager about when you work.
- Plan your days so that you can finish your work in the hours you are working, and you can minimize your overtime.
- Take days of
- Accept you don’t need to be perfect.
- Move your body enough in a day. For example, take a walk on your lunch break.
- Spend time with family and friends. Make sure you have time to do the things you enjoy in your free time.
- Don’t think about work if you are not at work. You need to relax on your time of.
Self-care strategies
To make sure you are relaxed and to reduce stress, you can use mindfulness and other self-care strategies. These strategies work different for everybody, and it is important because of this you experiment with them to find the one that works for you.
With mindfulness, you focus on what you feel and sense at the moment. Breathing methods and guided imagery, can help you reduce the stress and relax the mind and body.
Some examples for mindfulness what you can do:
Pay attention:
You can do this at what you are doing or while you are for example taking a walk.
While doing this you need to think about, what you feel (touch), what you hear, what you see, what you smell and what you taste.
Live in the moment:
Try to do everything you do with all your attention.
Accept yourself:
You need to take care of yourself this can be difficult sometimes at this moment you can act like a good friend of you has this problem and do what you would advise that friend to do.
Focus on your breathing:
When it feels overwhelming or if you just have some time, you can do this exercise wherever you are.
Sit down and bring all your attention to your breathing. How it goes out of your body and back in.
Meditation Help
There are different types of meditation here are three different types of meditation you can do:
Body scan meditation:
Lie on your back with your palms up. Close your eyes and focus one by one on all the different body parts.
Sitting meditation:
Sit comfortably straight up with your feet flat on the floor. Breath in through your nose and out through your mouth, focus on this. If you get interrupted note, it and bring your focus back to your breathing.
Walking meditation:
Find a quiet place where you can comfortable can walk, start walking slowly. Focus on the walking, your balance, and the feeling of standing.
Yoga
Yoga is a mind and body practice. It doesn’t only focus on the mind but also on the body. It builds strength and flexibility. Yoga is a combination between physical exercises, meditation and breathing techniques. The purpose of yoga is to bring harmony between your body in mind. Because of this, it helps reduce stress and the effect the stress has on the body.
It is difficult to start with yoga, because of this is here a 10-minute video where you can start with yoga.
Breathing exercises
Breathing exercises help with thinking clearly and reducing feelings of anxiety. This is because research has proven that the mind breathing patterns a link to an emotional state. So if you calm down your breathing, it also calms down the emotional state.
Here is a video to help with calming your breath:
So the most important thing you should get from this page is that you should take care of yourself. This looks different for everybody, You can do this by relaxing alone or with friends. There are next to this more ways to take care of your mental health, you can do this by journaling, meditation, taking a walk or watch a film.
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