Introduce
Safeguarding can be inherently challenging, especially when balancing it with other demands in your role, and it can take a toll on your emotional wellbeing. Prioritising self-care is essential to build resilience and ensure you feel equipped to seek support when needed.
The good news is that it isn’t just your responsibility to take care of yourself. Organisations must reflect on what it means to create a mentally healthy workforce and how to respond to the mental health and wellbeing challenges of staff.
Develop
It is important to recognise when you are starting to feel stressed. To do this you need to be able to tune into how you are feeling and know where you are most likely to start feeling stress in your body. Some people have clear physical signs that they are experiencing stress. It might be a change in breathing patterns, tension in the jaw, headaches or nausea.
Reflect
The Stress Bucket is a visual representation of how pressure can build and a reminder of how to manage and cope with stress.
Image source: The stress bucket – Mental Health UK (mentalhealth-uk.org
You can see here that the bucket is filled up with different types of stress. Sometimes you might feel resilient and able to cope with these stresses, particularly if you’re able to identify what helps you cope with the stress.
Stop and Reflect: Use the worksheet below to consider your own Stress Bucket and identify what helps you reduce stress and how you can prioritise these things when pressures build.