Nursing Your Mind to Heal Patients

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By Tracey Mujica, BSN, RN

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MSN in Nursing Education and Leadership Program

The Carol & Odis Peavy School of Nursing, University of St. Thomas, Houston, TX, USA

 

My expectations of how my career would develop and what it would become were nothing compared to what I do now. I thought I would be a labor and delivery nurse up until my third semester in my Associate's Degree in Nursing (ADN), which is when I started critical care. I had one rotation in the Emergency Department, and I was immediately committed to a new career path. Once I received my ADN, I was privileged enough to be a graduate nurse in an ED for a local community hospital. I learned so much about not only my patients and their disease processes, traumas, treatments, and interventions but also, about myself. I didn't know it then, but I was very lost in the world of adulthood. 

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This was an extremely critical period for me. I had gone through the loss of a few family members that I was extremely close to and just learning how to navigate through adulthood overall. At the time, in my naivety, I thought that increasing my work hours would distract me, making it easier to not deal with my personal issues but also providing me an opportunity to advance myself as a skilled ER nurse. I could not have been more wrong. Being a nurse in the ED, showed me a world I was not used to. There was so much death, so many missed goodbyes, tears of loved ones who were robbed of time, and exposure to the dark side of humanity. I was not prepared for this version of the world. If anything, this did the exact opposite of distracting me and made my own personal problems more prominent and more difficult to push behind me. 

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I went into a downward spiral that started affecting my work. I wasn't sure how to move forward or what to do to cross over those personal barriers. It took a lot of soul searching and a flight to a foreign country where I knew no one. I immersed myself into a new way of life, a new culture, and a new people. I saw the struggles of this country and the passion the people had for true living. It gave me so much new perspective that it quite literally changed me. I interacted with people who showed me that even though they had a lot of their own personal difficulties and obstacles in life, life is truly what you make of it. 

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Epictetus was correct when he wrote nearly 1900 years ago, “We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them”. I do not believe there is ever a way to truly prepare someone for the negative psychological impact that nursing can have on you but teaching how to positively respond to these scenarios is key for resilience and decreasing burnout. It is vital we begin to teach new nurses the various possible positive responses not only for their own benefit, but for the benefit of the patients we care for. Afterall, we cannot care for others until we first care for ourselves. 

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Reference

Epictetus (2004). I. The Enchiridion (G. Long, Trans.). In Enchiridion (pp. 1). Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy. (Original work published 125 A.D.).