Written by nursing student Tatenda Malan
This blog post is based on a podcast episode of Mental health and wellbeing made by Service centre Soteekki and is published on September 5th, 2021. Podcast is part of the StudyWell-project, by the students for the students and staff of SAMK. You can find original Podcast here (link) www.campusmowe.fi/podcast. In this episode special quest Katja Warwick-Smith was interviewed by physiotherapy student Andrew Warwick-Smith. This text includes direct quotations from the interview just to make sure the meaning is not being changed or misunderstood.
Katja Warwick-Smith is the Assistant Executive Director of Clinical Service Development Mental Health with Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), Doha, Qatar. Katja Warwick-Smith is a mental health expert with many years of experience in Finland, UK and Qatar. Currently, She leads HMC’s virtual mental health services, including the National Mental Health Helpline.
Mental Health
The first thing to remember – and sometimes we forget this – is that every human being has mental health. We need to appreciate the fact that mental health is not fixed or static. We have good days and bad days. It’s always dynamic. We move on that continuum up and down.
Wellbeing
Also, it is also important to ensure that we are talking about the same thing. Wellbeing does not mean not having any stress. We need a little bit of stress. Life will always have challenges where all kinds of things are thrown at us. Because of this, wellbeing means that despite all these challenges we feel reasonably happy and okay to cope with the challenges.
Again, sometimes forget that we actually need some stress in our life. We talk about positive stress which is to eustress and negative stress which is the distress and if we have no stress whatsoever, we are couch potatoes, nothing motivates us, nothing drives us.
Wellbeing is about all kinds of things coming our way and we’re like; okay I can deal with this; I’m reasonably happy with what is going on.
Resilience
There is another term that people use a lot which is resilience. Again, to make sure we are talking about the same thing, resilience means our ability to bounce back when things get really difficult. Something happens that causes our stress to really pick up. Resilience is about those coping strategies that we use to return to that baseline of wellbeing.
Burnout
The other term that I want to highlight, because I often see and hear this being thrown around is that dreaded term – burnout. Now when we think about stress we have kind of too little stress when we’re not motivated, we are not performing. We have a big performance on our stress curve when sure we have our flight or fight. We are reacting. There’s a lot of challenges on us but we’re doing really well with it.
In other words, never mind we peak with that stress. We regularly bring it down and that means that on our stress curve we don’t start slipping onto that side of distress that negative stress. When we just start to feel too fatigued and exhausted and overwhelmed with whatever it is that’s going on in our lives and when we think about that term of burnout it’s actually really far down on that curve and there are so many points where we can intervene.
Self-care
Two things to remember. First, we have to be the number one especially healthcare workers – look after yourself to be able to look after anyone else. It’s not about patients, it’s also family, friends, colleagues and everybody around you. The second thing is that as we move on this continuum of how we feel and how strong we mentally and emotionally feel, there are loads of points to intervene.
Burnout which is at the end of that negative stress is actually a really serious condition. It is about not even recognizing yourself not being able to recognize your emotions feeling depersonalized nobody needs to get there.
Wellbeing is a set of conscious actions and you know kind of the bad news nobody can do it for you and me all of us we have to take those conscious actions to look after our psychological wellbeing.
Self-check
The starting point – and this is the point that we often overlook – which then means the rest of it is not going too well. We’ve got to stop regularly and do a little bit of a self-check. So, it’s like having a chat with yourself. Now, listen! How are you doing? How are you feeling? How are you behaving? Are you reacting in ways you normally wouldn’t do?
We really need to have a little bit of reflection on regular basis on “where am I, with my well-being,”. We have those up and downs all the time, but if we recognize that, things are now building up, we really do need to stop. And when we stop, and we recognize that something is going on – we need to think about what is triggering stress.
Identifying stressors
There are two groups of stressors. One group is about those things we can and should deal with. “You know all those naggy little things at the background I should have done.”. Or this has been going on for a long time. Stop, deal with it!
Second group of stressors and it doesn’t matter how much you worry about it. It is out of your control. For example, this recent pandemic, ongoing pandemic has truly highlighted to us that okay, we can’t control everything. There are things like we have to wear masks, so we can’t travel and see family whatever it is.
The message is that no matter how much you worry about it, it’s not going to change, because it’s out of your control and for those stressors, you need a different strategy to deal with that the ones you can deal with sort it out. It’s all done.
The stress will go down as you resolve them, the things that are out of your control. That requires little bit of another chat with yourself and what you need to say to yourself is okay. I recognize this stress me. It’s out of my control. There’s nothing at the moment I can do about it, and then we need to accept that.
Refocus
We need to refocus our energy from worrying about it, to managing the stress that it’s causing us, and it sounds like a little thing. But, to be honest, it’s incredibly powerful. We spend a lot of time, not even realizing that all our energy is going into worrying about things that simply are beyond our control and I think that’s something very important to keep in mind.