There’s been a lot talked about mental health awareness over the past few years, and that’s a really positive thing! However, awareness only goes so far, and it can mean little unless accompanied by its older sibling, action.
Some of the best actions that can be taken to look after your mental health are those you take yourself. So, grab a cuppa, raid the biscuit jar (bourbons and custard creams win extra points) and put your feet up, because we’ve put together this post exploring how you, as a social care professional, can put yourself and your mental health first.
Why Do Social Care Professionals Need to Look After their Mental Health?
This question can be answered in two parts: first, why it’s essential to look after your mental health in general, and second, why social care professionals, in particular, need to take an extra dollop of care. So, to the first question – just why is looking after our mental health so important, anyway?
A Mental Health Crisis Playing Out Before Us
Sadly, we’re currently in a mental health crisis here in the UK. Information from mental health charity, Mind, has found that, in any given week in England, 8 in 100 people suffer from mixed anxiety and depression. In context, that’s 4.47 million people in the country suffering.
Everybody has periods of low mood and anxiety; it’s just part of human life. And let’s be honest, we all have those days where the last thing we want to do is leave the warmth of our bed.
But when left unchecked (and especially if paired with unhealthy coping practices like drinking or smoking), these periods can spiral and worsen to the point where more severe interventions are required. This can look like therapy, a course of medication or sometimes a mixture of the two.
Poor Mental Health Can Lead to Poor Physical Health
The impacts of poor mental health can extend well beyond just our heads. It can impair our physical life, too. Direct physical symptoms of anxiety and depression include chronic aches and pains, digestive problems, poor quality of sleep and a more general sense of fatigue and lethargy.
There are more indirect physical symptoms associated with poor mental well-being, too. These can include weight gain/loss and poor dental hygiene, to name just a couple.
In other words, if we want to be in tip-top condition, physically, then we need to keep our brains that way, too!
Why are Social Care Professionals Particularly at Risk of Poor Mental Health?
You don’t need us to tell you that social care professionals are highly compassionate individuals, individuals who are more often than not put under highly stressful and strenuous circumstances.
Let’s be frank: this is one of the most caring areas of work around – it’s even in the job title, for goodness’ sake! The nature of the profession places social care professionals at particular risk of something called compassion fatigue. And we’re talking more than just your everyday tiredness here. We’re talking burnout levels of exhaustion.
Compassion Fatigue
In short, this is where, in caring for others going through their own troubles, social care professionals drain their own emotional stores over time. They dedicate so much of themselves to others that they forget about numero uno.
A 2020 study published in the Occupational Medicine journal, in which over 300 social workers were surveyed, found that compassion fatigue was a risk factor for the social workers’ overall mental health.
A more recent survey found something similar; research commissioned by the British Association of Social Workers in 2022, indicated that two-thirds of social workers felt their mental health was being impacted negatively because of their work.
What Can Social Care Professionals Do?
So… what can we do about all of this? Well, in a professional field where compassion is more baked in than a grandma’s stale rock cakes, it’s likely that these professionals will always have an added degree of emotional strain placed on their shoulders. That’s why finding positive, healthy ways to look after their mental health is so pivotal.
What does that mean in practical terms, though? Well, firstly – and we’re aware how alien this may sound to many of you reading – it requires a conscious effort to put “self” first just as much as you put “others” first. Yes, you read that right. We know that it’s in a social care professional’s nature to be selfless, but you can’t fill from an empty cup!
Think of it this way: it’s not selfish to put your well-being first sometimes; instead, it’s self-full. Social care roles involve putting others first almost all of the time. Hence, a recognition that that’s eventually going to take its toll (unless personal mental well-being is prioritised) is crucial. How can you look after others if you don’t look after yourself?
With all that said, here are a few things that social care professionals can do to improve their mental health:
Share With Your Team How You’re Feeling
There’s an old saying that a problem shared is a problem halved. Generally speaking, those sayings we’ve heard of tend to stick around for a reason, and that’s because there’s some truth to them. For every ten expressions you can reel off, there are a hundred that never made the cut.
Social care professionals often shy away from sharing their struggles with colleagues for fear of putting even more on their plates. Plates already stacked higher than the Christmas Day roast you look forward to each year.
The reality, though, is that when you open up, you not only gather some therapeutic benefit yourself but there’s also the chance that your colleague will, in turn, share back with you.
There’s something powerful about knowing you’re not going through a difficult time alone. We can bear a lot more when we foster a sense of community and not only celebrate and share the good times but help each other through the tough times as well.
Engage in Mindfulness Practices
Mindfulness has become something of a buzzword in recent times, but there’s a wealth of research and scientific literature that demonstrates just how effective it can be. Specifically, there have been studies showing mindfulness and its impacts on stress reduction in healthcare professionals.
A systematic review published in 2020 found that “MBSR [mindfulness-based stress-reduction] programmes were effective in improving particular aspects of psychological functioning in different types of HCPs, including reducing anxiety, depression, and stress and increasing self-compassion.” Which is a fancy way of saying that it really does help, and that you don’t just have to take our word for it!
Not to Be Confused with Meditation
Mindfulness often gets confused with meditation, and whilst there can be a meditative component to some mindfulness practices, it simply means to bring your attention (without judgment) to what you’re experiencing in the present moment. Usually, this is done by initially focusing on one thing, like your breathing.
So, whilst it’s probably not going to help you reach some enlightened state (apologies to anybody who thought mindfulness would be the key to eternal happiness), it is proven to help make things just that little bit more manageable.
It’s going to help bring you back to the now, away from the stresses and worries flittering around your head, so that you can get back to focusing on what’s important to you in that present moment. If you want basic mindfulness exercises, you can try apps like Headspace or Calm. Alternatively, you can try out one of these beginner exercises from Mashable.
Schedule in Some Self-Care
#Selfcare is all the rage these days, particularly on social media – but really, it’s an extensive term that can encompass anything you want it to!
It can be something more stereotypically associated with the term, like drawing a hot bath and having a cosy evening in front of the TV watching your favourite series. Or it can be like walking in the countryside and leaving your phone at home to free yourself from distractions.
Self-care can be as simple as taking deep breaths and slowing everything down a fraction. When you engage in deep breathing, you activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps calm both our mind and body down.
All of which is to say, doing something for yourself that you enjoy for no other purpose than because you appreciate and want it, is a surefire way to help out how you’re feeling.
Social Care is an Emotionally Intense Field for Deeply Caring Individuals
Now, it’s important to stress that the point of this article isn’t to put people off social care roles – far from it, in fact. Instead, it’s to highlight that the nature of this particular area and of the highly compassionate and empathetic people who work within it can combine to impact social care workers’ mental health particularly. Newsflash: social care professionals really care; who could’ve foreseen that?!
That’s why it can’t be stressed enough how important it is for social care professionals to look after their mental health however they can. We live in a world where mental health is talked about more than ever before, but many of us are struggling more than ever. Don’t suffer in silence; reach out if you need to, and take the steps to put yourself first if you’re struggling. You deserve the same level of care you give out day in and day out.
