Managing Mental Health/Social Battery in Acute Care: Trying to work on an empty battery

This iteration of the newsletter will continue the narrative type dialogue of the previous week, and the aim of this topic as well as the last one is to give a voice and a dialogue to something you may be going through that you aren’t sure if anyone else is going through and show you that you aren’t the only one going through it and that other people may be struggling with the same thing, and to show you my journey to see if something that I did could be helpful to you as well.

Do you feel like your social battery is running low?

Something I found early on while working in the acute hospital setting, as well as I’m sure other settings in the healthcare area and PT, OT, nursing etc, is that interacting with coworkers and patients and family members all day would just mentally exhaust me and I would go home and my social battery and empathy/active listening battery would just be empty. This made it difficult for my wife who would like to tell me what happened during her day and any struggles that happened but I would just have a really difficult time listening for more than 5-10 minutes at a time. And I felt bad because I hadn’t seen her all day and wanted to spend time with her and listen to what she did and the positive and negative moments, but my social and listening battery was just so empty that I couldn’t. 

All I wanted to do was just be alone in a quiet place and decompress and destress from the constant stimuli of the hospital environment with the alarms and monitors beeping, patients yelling, communicating and listening to other people’s needs and medical history and tending to their needs throughout the day. I found myself working my schedule and then feeling like I needed to just be at home all day on my off days and I would decline all requests to hang out with friends, I didn’t want to go do anything during the day or go to dinner, I found myself with no energy to cook or clean when I got home and just wanting to order food a lot of nights to try to get some “reward” for working hard and the mental toll it was taking.

In the last newsletter I talked about how I changed my schedule to find a good work life balance and that helped, but I also needed to still find ways to have better social and mental recovery after a work day/week. Because as healthcare workers we may have a patient, family member, or coworker even who gets very upset with us, probably takes some agitation or frustration out on you, or maybe is confused and can be very frustrating to talk to or verbally abusive toward you. In the acute care setting there’s of course also the possibility of a critical event happening with a patient you are working with. So how do you deal with that as people I would like to say have a high capacity for empathy and may be affected by interactions like that strongly. 

One of the things that stuck with me most from my clinical affiliations that my CI told me after a very difficult interaction like that was, “you can’t control what other people do or say to you, you can only control how it affects you and affects your attitude and your day”. That helped me a lot and gave me a bit of tougher skin because I am a sensative person at my core and words can affect me a lot. I will think about how they might be having a hard time being away from home, in an uncomfortable environment, feeling sick and I am there just to try to help them and that’s all I can do, and if they are not interested in that, I can’t force them to understand my side and that’s okay. So that’s one basic thought or principal that has helped me, that you can only control your own actions and emotions and you choose to let it affect you (not to say that it still isn’t difficult to let go of certain interactions).

Recovery is Key

As far as recovering the social battery and mental battery, something I found was that I needed to get myself out of the house, I needed to do something on my off days that got me in a routine or having a hobby that I enjoy doing. The cycle of working and then attempting to recover was not healthy and I wasn’t actually recovering. 

So I started to accept those invites to get togethers or hanging out with friends outside of work, I started to cook more and get creative with cooking which I enjoy, I would make plans with my family or my wife and just having plans to look forward to or ideas and mental stimulation that was enjoyable and exciting to me was so important in changing the cycle from work, recover, work, recover; to now it was work and then doing other things to keep my attention and bring me enjoyment so I was starting to actually feel recovered.

So my big takeaways from this topic are that:

• It is not uncommon to feel exhausted or drained coming home from work, so instead of trying to just be at home and do nothing and recover before going back to work, find something you enjoy doing or hang out with people you enjoy being around to really re-charge that battery.
• We deal with a lot at work when interacting with so many different personalities and listening to so many different stories and situations, if we let things that happen over the course of the work day affect our happiness and our mental well-being we will not be able to have a long career in this field, so try to have maybe a mantra like I adopted or an attitude of a trampoline, where the words and thoughts of others may affect you and they may dig deep briefly, but eventually they bounce right off of you and you keep going and keep helping others because you are very important and your work is helping a lot of people.