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The holiday season can be especially taxing for nurses and other healthcare heroes. Between taking care of patients and taking care of ourselves, it can be hard to find a good work-life balance. The hospital doesn’t close during the holidays like other work places do, so nurses are destined to work on a holiday at some point in their career while working at a hospital. In this blog post, we’ll explore tips and tricks to help nurses find a good work-life balance during the holidays in order to reduce stress levels and increase holiday cheer.
Creating A Holiday Schedule to Promote Work-Life Balance
If your management is so kind as to tell you what holidays you’ll have to work in the beginning of the year, you can start planning out a schedule with your family for the holidays right away. In order to maintain work-life balance for yourself during the holidays, compromises will need to be made and boundaries will need to be set.
Meaning, if you are scheduled to work Christmas Eve and traditionally you host that holiday at your house, plans will need to be re arranged. Maybe another family member can take over this holiday for you this year. Or maybe you can plan with your family to celebrate Christmas Eve a day early so that you can still host it.
Us nurses are nurtures and naturally want to take care of our families and make sure that they have the best holiday season. But we need to remember to take care of our selves too. This can look like creating a holiday schedule around your work schedule that allows you adequate time to rest, recharge, and also enjoy the festivities with your family. Being burnt out is never fun, but is especially miserable during the holiday season. Creating a holiday schedule to maintain work life balance is crucial.
Prioritizing Self-Care
Your holiday to do list is never going to end, no matter how caught up you get yourself. That’s my experience with it at least, and I don’t even have children yet! There’s just always so much to buy, wrap, decorate, experience, and show up for. Now throw in a busy 12 hour shift work schedule and you have a recipe for burn out and poor work-life balance.
Taking care of your self during the holidays is a gift for yourself and your family. Prioritize time to do the things that help you relax and recharge. Take a longer shower, don’t skip out on your moisturizer, and always drink plenty of water!
Doing this doesn’t mean neglecting your family and spending all your off time alone. On some days when your social battery will allow, you can indulge in self care with your loved ones! Grab your mom, sister, or best friend (or all three!) and go out for holiday pedicures followed by some Christmas time window shopping.
Setting Boundaries and Prioritizing Work-Life Balance
As a nurse, it takes a lot of practice and experience to set boundaries if it wasn’t something you practiced much prior to your nursing career. When I first became a nurse 9/10 times I would come in to work if they called me on a day off, to cover a shift. Or change my work days around in order to accommodate for their needs. Not to say you should never do any of these things if you wish to. But never feel obligated to say yes every single time. This is where boundaries become crucial in a nursing career.
This is a skill that you can se all year round as a nurse, but it’s especially difficult during the holiday seasons. You care and will feel bad if your co workers are left short staffed, but also need to remember that you are just as important as they are and have a life outside of work that takes just as high, if not higher, priority.
Finding Support From Others
This isn’t limited to just asking your spouse for help, but other members of your family, or close friends as well.I’d like to say that you could also turn to your management/supervisors at your workplace, but that can be hit or miss depending on your work place specifically. Especially around the holidays.
Don’t be afraid to delegate different holiday tasks to your family members if it’s something that they can handle for you. Maybe you don’t have time to get to the grocery store, but promised to make a desert or side dish for a holiday gathering. Ask one of your family members who’s also a part of the family gathering if they could run to the store to get the needed ingredients for you and you will put it all together on your next day off. Or maybe you can hand that task off entirely.
Now, you might be thinking, “if I hand off my task am I not giving in to prioritizing work over myself/my life outside of work?” No, you are prioritizing yourself! Work is a necessary evil, so there will be shifts that you just can’t swap or get out of. But that still leaves you time out of work rather limited. Taking away from possible rest and relaxation that you need to catch up on. As well as other task you might’ve been meaning to get to, like gift shopping or wrapping presents.
Managing Your Stress
Regardless of your professional career, the holiday season is a stressful one. You’ve got about 3-4 months of constant stress, planning, and gathering. On top of still showing up to work at the hospital 3-4 days a week. Finding ways to manage your stress levels is important for maintaining a good work-life balance around the holidays.
Every one has a different way of relieving their own stress. From going to the gym every day, baking, doing yoga, meditating, reading a book, and so on. What ever you have to do to keep your stress levels down, it needs to be at the top of your daily to do list as a key item in self care and preserving a good work-life balance. Your life becomes unbalanced when you allow your job to stress you out so much that you don’t even enjoy your time outside of work anymore.
If you’ve let your stress levels get so high that you don’y even enjoy Christmas festivities on your days off, it’s time to take a serious look at your work-life balance and re prioritize a few things. Put yourself and your well being at the top of that list.
Nursing is a noble and often under appreciated job. During the holidays, it can be even more demanding. By taking the time to create a holiday schedule, maintain self-care, set boundaries, find support from others, and manage your stress, nurses can stay focused on their job without overworking or neglecting their own needs. All of which are in support of maintaining a health work-life balance as a nurse during the holidays.
Take time for yourself this holiday season. Utilize the tips and tricks from this post to create a more efficient and balanced work-life routine as a nurse.
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