A key component of social work is caring for other people. Social workers work with the underprivileged, people who need someone to provide a voice for them, and people who desperately need help and who need their stories told.
Whether you are working with people and their families in small groups, supporting an institution, or making broader policy changes as a lawmaker, a key element of a social worker’s job is caring for their community. However, there’s often one person that social workers forget to care about—themselves.
It’s sad, but many social workers who work their fingers to the bone and who give until they’ve got nothing left will neglect taking care of themselves. This isn’t for a lack of wanting to take care of their own physical and mental health, or even due to a lack of trying, but rather because many social workers just don’t have the proper self-care strategies in place.
Before we delve into some of those strategies, we need to understand why caring for their own well-being is beneficial to both a social worker’s personal and professional lives. The more that you care for yourself as a social worker, the better you will be able to care for others. Here’s why.
Well-being improves performance
Feeling sick or sleep deprived, or when suffering from any condition that drains your strength can have a variety of effects that weaken your performance and happiness both at work and at home. By not prioritizing your well-being as a social worker, you run the risk of suffering effects such as poor communication with clients and difficulty with recalling information. Prioritizing self-care ensures that you can be at the top of your game and ensures that clients are receiving the best level of care. Programs such as the online BSW at accredited institutions such as Spring Arbor University provide you with a level of education that guarantees you can provide your clients with high-quality care, while also being attuned to the importance of self-care and contentment in a social worker’s job.
Having a plan in place for good well-being means that you can provide the best support for the people who need it most while ensuring that you are happy and productive in your work.
Tips to improve your wellbeing
It is important to carve out some time for well-being in your daily schedule. It can seem hard (if not impossible) to do this at first as a busy social worker, but even if you just have five minutes in between shifts or an hour during your lunch break, make the time to take care of yourself, because it will never be wasted time.
Just a bit of time in the mornings, evenings, or on weekends will be valuable. The more you give to self-care the better it will be. Once you have dedicated some time to yourself, then you can fill that time with positive activities that allow you to rest and recuperate, and spend some time away from your work.
Get outside
It seems easy, but very few people spend enough time outside, and even fewer are outside with intention. But spending some time outside in the sun can be extremely beneficial for your self-care and well-being.
Even a brisk walk can lower depression and help with other mental health issues, while also getting you out among the nature and beauty of the entire world. Whether you take a walk after lunch or spend some time outside chatting with friends or throwing a ball around, getting outside can increase your mood.
Go ahead, try it! Stand outside in the sun for a bit and see how you feel, because you will feel much better!
Make sure to eat, drink, and sleep enough
Whether it’s a skipped meal during your lunch hour to catch up on work or a rushed dinner eaten in front of paperwork as you try to keep up with the pressure of work, skipping and rushing your meals will have a detrimental effect on your well-being. While skipping the odd meal is OK, you will find that consistently not eating properly will drain you of all of your stamina and make you less productive.
One of the easiest ways to look after your physical well-being is to ensure that you are actually taking care of your body. Eating enough good food is extremely important. Additionally, make sure to drink enough fluids and keep yourself hydrated as you work through the day.
Perhaps the most important well-being tip of all is that you get enough sleep. Sleep is extremely important for everyone, but especially for social workers. They are constantly handling new information and remembering names, phone numbers, the finer details of a case, and more in order to connect their clients to the people who can help them the most.
Getting at least eight hours of high-quality sleep can allow you to wake up refreshed with a brain that is ready to take on the day and that is able to keep up with the rigorous demands of what you put it through as a social worker.
So don’t sacrifice your physical health and well-being just to get a little extra work done in the short term, because in, the long term, it will have negative consequences.
Take care of your mental health
As much as social workers want to help people out, they quickly find that being around the various problems that their community has can take a toll on them mentally. Many social workers are exposed to the shortcomings of their community on a daily basis. These people are dealing with being left behind, with injustice, pain, and with all sorts of other problems, and look to social workers to help.
That can wear down even the staunchest social worker, and it can also mean that their mental well-being starts to suffer. If the failing problems in your community are all you deal with every single day, you can very easily start making those things all you see. It’s important to care for your own mental health and focus on the positive elements of your work to ensure that you can provide optimistic and assured care to the people who depend on you. Below are some tips to help you care for your mental health as a social worker, and ensure you are in the best place to care for your clients.
Talk to someone and have a support network
Don’t be afraid to reach out and talk to someone about any problems you are experiencing. It could be a professional therapist, someone in your family, a close friend, or even a coworker in the same field. If you are dealing with negative emotions or stress due to your work, it’s important to have an outlet.
Even if you are helping people and making some serious progress, you still might find frustration in roadblocks where nothing is moving fast enough or problems have started occurring that are keeping you and the people you are trying to help from the things that can help them. These frustrations are real and you as a social worker owe it to yourself to speak to someone to improve your state of mind.
Always make sure to talk to people when needed. It’s vital to have a support network of people outside of work whom you can rely on to provide some much-needed relief. Simply hanging out with some friends after work, seeing a movie with someone, or walking your dog around town can help you escape the workplace in a positive way and boost your mood. Try not to focus or talk about work in these moments, just enjoy spending time with others doing an activity that brings you pleasure.
Take time to unwind with a hobby
As a social worker, it can seem impossible to find time for yourself because the job never seems to stop. People are always going to need help and some of the bigger social problems don’t ever seem to completely go away. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should never stop and take a moment to do something for yourself.
Picking a hobby or activity that you enjoy, whether it be alone or in a group can be a great way to take your mind off work and allow you to relax. Remember to choose something that you can do regularly so that you always have an option to take yourself away from work when you need it.
Whether it be gaming, painting, writing, or learning new skills to further your career, having something to focus on or to come home to can be a massive weight off your shoulders, and it can really help after a stressful or busy day. Just make sure it allows your mental well-being to thrive and that you can perform the hobby often, and you will be good to go.
Be self-aware
Finally, one last aspect of self-care that is often overlooked is emotional self-care. Social work can be a very emotional field. From the positive joy that comes in watching your hard work dramatically improve a person’s life, to the frustration of seeing so many people affected by large and difficult societal problems, emotions play a massive role in the day-to-day lives of social workers.
It’s important that you don’t allow both good and bad emotions to control or overwhelm you. It’s easy to become overwhelmed in your work if you don’t make sure that you prioritize your well-being. This can lead to serious consequences for the people who are around you. If you find that your emotions are getting out of control, then you need to ensure that you are able to find a space where you can compose yourself.
So, make sure to always be monitoring your emotions, and also ensure that you are keeping track of how your emotions change as you start to improve your self-care and your well-being. The chances are that as you focus on self-care and your well-being, you will notice a significant improvement in your emotional state. Observing this change in yourself can be extremely satisfying and motivating.
Care for yourself so that you can care for others
It can be very easy to only care about others in the world of social work, and a high aptitude for empathy was likely one of the reasons you became a social worker in the first place. However, don’t forget to take care of your own well-being first and foremost, because you will quickly find that taking care of yourself is only going to improve your capability at work. Make sure that as you improve your education and get experience in the field, you are focusing on your self-care so that you are best placed to help those who need it most.