Erin: Hello and thank you for having me. I appreciate the invitation to talk about this topic. I know it is not necessarily the most traditional continuing education topic, but I think it is important.
Introduction
In my coaching practice, we always start in the same way. We are going to jump in that way today. I want you to take a moment and think about the things, that you do in your job, that really energize you, give you that charge, or make your heart sing or feel full. They are the reasons for doing the hard work that we do. I want you to think of just one of those moments to put you in a good place with a positive vibe in which to start off this talk.
I want to tell you a little bit about my story. You heard the professional side of it during my introduction. Now, I want to share why I made the transition from the hospital and occupational therapy into coaching. About two years ago, I started to feel the stress of the hospital and the ICU environment and what that was doing to my body. I gained weight and was having more migraines. I needed that glass of wine when I came home from work. After I put my son to bed, I would just crash. I felt like I was holding it together at work, but my family was not getting the best version of me. In hindsight, my patients were not getting the best of me during that time either. I was headed right towards burnout. Our profession can lead to really high stress levels and fatigue. In 2015, I made a huge commitment to myself. I started upping my self-care, improved my stress management techniques, and that is when everything began to shift for me. It was a transition and a different mindset. Relaxing is not about not doing or getting less done. I have not had a migraine in almost two years. This is the first time that I have been able to say that since I was 15. That is huge from a health standpoint.
I am presenting this topic today because it is really near and dear to my heart. I realized I had spent over 10 years improving my therapeutic techniques, but I had not focused on the inner part of how to be a good therapist, or some of the soft skills. I hope today that each one of you takes away a special nugget. If I can just prevent one person from suffering from health care burnout, it will be time well spent. Today, I will be sharing some tips and techniques that you can apply tomorrow. How we apply them is the important part. You might have heard this before, but this is the idea of best practice. Knowledge and information do not automatically change our practice. It takes an action to change our habits. We will get into that more as we go.
You Are In The Right Place If...
If you are feeling a little drained, stressed, or feeling like you cannot keep up, you are in the right place. You might truly love your work, but the stressors are getting you down. You want to give that A plus version of you to your patients, to your family, and even to yourself. My challenge today for you is to be really present with no multitasking. I want you listen with an open mind, but also with an open heart. I want you to feel the things that we are talking about today. We are so used to listening with our head and critically analyzing and critiquing. But today, I want you to let your heart guide you a little bit more and challenge you to find your nugget, or your takeaway. Not everything is necessarily going to to resonate, but I hope you find one little change that you want to make, and that you want to implement as we finish today.
Stress
I want you to take just 10 seconds and think about where your stress is on a Likert scale, from 1-10. Ten is the most stress that you can imagine down to one with no stress. Where are you at right now? Give yourself a number. Now you have your number, I want you to think about where you feel stress in your body. How does it show up? Where do you notice stress in your body? The next step is to identify your top stressors. What are the top three things that make you feel most anxious during your day? These three questions are key, because it brings awareness and allows us to start recognizing when and where the stress response is getting activated
We cannot change a lot of our stressors in our work or life, but I believe that we have full control over our reactions. The key is who are we being in these situations. The American Psychological Association reports that seventy-five percent of adults reported moderate to high levels of stress in the past month. Three quarters of the population are recording moderate to high levels of stress. That is a crazy number to me to think about. Forty-two percent of adults are reporting that their stress has gone up in the past year, or they have seen an increase. That is almost half of the population. The most statistic is that 75 to 90% of primary care visits are due to symptoms that are related to stress. They have stress related components to them. These are things like obesity, IBS, reflux, depression, chronic pain, and headaches. They are all symptoms and or exacerbated by stress. Let that sink in for a minute. We did not come here to talk about all of the bad things about stress, rather we want to talk about some of the solutions. I mentioned that we have control over our reactions. You may not be able to impact some of your stressors or shift those, but you can have full 100% control over how you respond to them.
Breathe!
The first technique that we are going to talk about is one of the easiest to do. It takes the least amount of time, and it does not take any equipment. If you think about your transitions, whether that is going from patient to patient, patient to meeting, or going from one task to the next, they can be stressful. When I worked in inpatient, I would be in multiple locations, often running late, running from one task to the other. My realization was that my stress did not get me there any quicker. I did not arrive to the treatment any sooner, not did it set me up for the best possible treatment with that patient. During the time it took me to walk from one patient to the other, or clean up and transition in the next patient, I had a choice of how I was going to use that time. I began to use that time to ground and relax. Typically, this was by changing my breath and the flow of my thoughts. Perhaps you can think of a technique that you are already using that helps you kind of reground between patients.
Right now, we are going to talk about the breath, because it is so quick. It only takes two minutes to trigger that relaxation response by your parasympathetic system. You can kind of trick your body into thinking that you are in a relaxed state. Your body says, "Oh, I thought we were stressed, but we are breathing like a relaxed person." You can have a physiological response by calming your breath down. The key is how you are doing it. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I was not breathing correctly. Up until the last few years, I thought I was doing deep breathing. I realized that my inhale tended to be much bigger and longer, than my exhalation. This is the exact opposite of what we want to trigger that relaxation response.
4-7-8 Breathing Technique
The technique that we are going to talk about today is the four-seven-eight breath. You can come up with a lot of different versions of this, but today this is the one that we are going to talk about. The key is that your exhalation is longer than or equal to your inhalation. That is one of the key things you want to think about when you are initiating breathing for relaxation. Another piece of it is that it needs to be slower and more controlled. You also need to use your diaphragm. If anybody has played an instrument or have sung in a choir, you probably have had some education as to how to trigger that that belly breath. This is when your stomach goes out when you are breathing. When we are stressed, we tend to breathe more with our chest.
If you are not familiar with this technique, we are going to do a mini practice today. I am going to talk you through how to do it, and then we are going to take two minutes to go through this exercise.
One breathing cycle:
- To start, you completely exhale out through your mouth. You can do it with an audible sound. Did you hear that?
- Then, you are going to inhale through your nose, and this is when the counting starts. Your inhalation is to a count of four. You should feel your stomach expand for diaphragmatic breathing versus thoracic breathing only.
- At the top of your inhale, you are going to hold for a count of seven.
- And then after a count of seven, you are going to exhale completely out your mouth. You can do that whooshing sound again. Your exhale is going to be for a count of eight. That is one cycle.
