Skills Heroes Need: Self-Care

[ysabetwordsmith]

Self-care is a broad category of skills and resources that everyone needs. Heroes need this more than average, because they often engage in high-stress activities. That means they need to put more effort into resilience and recovery in order to avoid cumulative damage. Look at the high rates of burnout among first responders, and you can see what happens when people don't (or are forbidden to) practice good self-care. These skills are how you avoid falling into a crisis-to-crisis lifestyle. Understand that you can't help anyone else if you don't take good care of yourself.


Rule #1 is Do Not Make Yourself Another Victim. Some scenarios are prone to killing more rescuers than original victims. Remember that if you become a victim, you have decreased the rescuer count by one and increased the victim count by one, which makes matters worse instead of better.

* Practice scene safety and personal safety. Take a moment to assess the scene before approaching an incident of mayhem or a person in distress.

* Aviation safety offers these tips on post-crash survival. Dress for the terrain, get away from the aircraft quickly, and plan to survive with no more than what you’re wearing.

* For water emergencies, remember that about a third of drowning victims are would-be rescuers. Ice rescue adds additional risks. Reach or throw, don't go! Which is very difficult to follow if the person drowning is someone you care about and the recommended methods aren't working.

* For deaths in confined spaces, it's even worse: 60% of fatalities are would-be rescuers. A leading cause of death in such places is compromised atmosphere: low in oxygen, toxic, or both. That's not something that can be readily detected or handled without specialized equipment and training, so given that and the odds, confined space rescue should be left to experts if available.

* Watch out for vicarious trauma or secondary traumatic stress. This can affect a wide range of people who help survivors and therefore listen to or look at accounts of horrible things happening. Know how to recognize and handle it. If you experience serious issues in this area, you may need to withdraw from exposure for a while; consider switching to a more uplifting form of heroism for a while, or even take a sabbatical. Don't hesitate to tap out if you need to.


Build resilience. This is your capacity to cope with challenges without taking damage, and to recover from setbacks. Everyone needs resilience to deal with everyday issues. Heroes need as much as they can get, because they face much harder hurdles much more often. Fortunately, this isn't just a superpower, it can be built by supernary means.

* Study resilience theory. Understand the nature of resilience. This is an innate human capacity, but not everyone has the same opportunities to develop it. Explore resilience factors in children, college students, adults, and seniors. Learn about resilience skills. Explore some protective factors and take a quiz about them.

* Develop your resilience. Try some resilience exercises. Practice resilience skills. Build mental toughness. Learn how to bounce back. Here are some worksheets on resilience.


Practice home care as self-care. Ensure that you have a sanctuary of some sort. Create a lair, inspirational room, quiet room, or other locale. It can be whatever you find comforting, wherever you can recharge. Also support the creation and use of such facilities within organizations and in public places. This will reduce your heroic workload by helping to diffuse tension before people explode.

* Make a birdfeeding station. You can enjoy it outdoors or through a window. Birds make people happy; specifically, the more different bird species people can see and hear, the better their mental health. Maximize the effectiveness of your birdfeeding station by offering different types of food (such as mixed seed, sunflower seed, thistle seed, and suet) in addition to water so as to attract the widest diversity of bird species. You can also grow native plants to attract their associated birds. Because native plants are adapted to your locale, they are tough and require little care. They're the ultimate throw-and-grow species.

* A plant room, porch, or even window promotes connection with nature. Houseplants have many benefits. As a busy hero, you might prefer hardy species that require little care and can survive hardships. Know how to set up a plant room.

* A quiet room can take various forms. At heart it's just a peaceful place for people to relax or attend to activities like breastfeeding that benefit from privacy.

* Set up a sunny window as a sanctuary. This is a good place for a meditation corner, yoga space, or reading nook. You could also fill it with suncatchers, mobiles, and/or windchimes -- whatever makes you smile.

* Put aside a craft room or craft corner. Crafts help mental and physical health, and having a dedicated space makes it easier to find time for crafting. Collect craft tools and supplies for children and for adults. The more materials you have on hand, the more you can make without having to rush out and buy supplies. Invest in good craft organizers so you can find everything; shop here for organizers. Shop for craft supplies online or watch for ways to get free art supplies. You don't need to break your budget; you can learn art on the cheap.


Planning ahead has many benefits. While disasters may strike without warning, an organized life makes it easier to respond efficiently and effectively with a minimum of disruption to other plans. Learn how to think ahead, plan ahead, and organize your life. This will support your peace of mind.

* PACE your plans. A generic "Plan B" may not be enough to handle all challenges, especially for heroes. This system creates layers of plans for maximum resilience.

* Study disaster planning and disaster preparedness. Follow the five steps of emergency management. See the OSHA page on workplace emergencies. Study the Community Emergency Response Team participant training manual and program manager manual. Account for disabilities; you don't want to be That Guy.

* Learn about surge plans. Every organization should have the personnel, materials, and other resources to operate smoothly without stress under everyday conditions, and include a buffer to provide fault tolerance in case of ordinary surges like peak demand hours. They should also discuss and plan for exceptional surges due to uncommon events such as a worker strike, a mass-casualty incident, a bad storm, political unrest, or a natural disaster. Read about how one hospital developed a surge plan and see what it looks like. In fact if you belong to any group that experiences fluctuating demand, such as HVAC, make sure it has a surge plan.


Coping skills are techniques that help you minimize and tolerate stressful situations. They are essential for emotional balance and for self-regulation.

* First determine whether you have a rock problem or a clay problem. A rock problem cannot be changed, or at least not with available resources; you just have to deal with it. Use coping skills to help with that. A clay problem can be changed in some way, although it may take time and effort. Do not misuse coping skills to tolerate a problem that you can and should be solving instead -- and unfortunately that's how a lot of people teach coping skills.

* Study the science of coping. Read about coping theory. Compare different ways to measure coping.

* Explore healthy and unhealthy coping skills. Here are some coping skills worksheets. Some people use coping cards.

* Learn about different types of coping skills. These worksheets divide them by strategic approach. Another way to sort them is by senses. Get a big list of coping skills and try new options to see what works for you or not.

* Coping skills can reduce anxiety and lift depression through self-soothing and other approaches. This is among the most useful resources I've found for dealing with depression: "Yes, I am depressed but I am going to be depressed outside. Activity and depression don't like to live together."

* Pay attention to pain control. In addition to having several different medications in your first aid kit, you should learn as many non-drug methods as possible. Many of these will be available in emergencies when other things are scarce, out of reach, or contraindicated. Heroes venture into risky situations, so they get injured more often. Be prepared to take care of yourself in the absence of ideal support or supplies.


Memorize a checklist of basic self-care skills. This is an important area to master.

* Keep a printout of self-care steps with your physical and emotional first aid kits. Here is a good example for difficult situations: Everything Is Awful and I'm Not Okay. This will help you take good care of yourself or someone else during a crisis when it's hard to think of what to do. This list is broken down by subtopic. It's helpful when you want to focus on a particular type of self-care or for breaking apart a list to store with different kits.

* Collect materials about self-care. Here are some worksheets and other resources. Make a self-care kit.


Cover different areas of self-care. You might make a Wheel of Life to show your current skills in each area, thus illuminating where to focus your efforts on learning new self-care skills.

* Take care of your body with physical self-care. See the previous entry in this series on "Physical Fitness" and "Physical First Aid." Get healthy touch through nonsexual intimacies to fulfill skin hunger.

Eat a healthy diet in general, whatever you find works well for your body. You may need to eat mindfully to figure that out. Also know which foods to eat when you need to raise energy, boost mood, or heal injuries. Understand how to simplify kitchen choices, choose easy food ideas, or eat without cooking when you need to conserve energy.

* Support your psyche with mental self-care. See the previous entry on "Psychological First Aid." Take care of your mind. This list sorts mental self-care activities by time.

Learn about "stuck problems" and how to handle them. Heroes are prone to these due to seeing many awful things. Traumatic stress can cause a spectrum of effects ranging from acute stress reaction (a normal response that fades after a few days) through acute stress disorder (a "stuck problem" that lasts up to a month), PTSD (a "stuck problem" lasting more than one month), to PDSD (a "stuck problem" involving repeated traumatic experiences over time). Developmental trauma disorder happens when the young psyche cannot grow normally due to extreme stress, rather than a well-developed psyche breaking under stress. Traumatic stress is fundamentally a failure of processing that happens inside the brain. When the mind cannot file traumatic memories properly, then they don't integrate into experience, which disrupts the ability to recognize context. The events get "stuck" in a processing loop within the mind, which turns those memories into triggers that cause flashbacks. Know how to stop your brain from looping. Some new therapies focus on the body as a way to "unstick" those memories and thus heal the mind. Supportive friends can help, although these symptoms are very difficult for everyone to deal with.

* Protect your heart with emotional self-care. See the previous entry on "Emotional Skills." Here are some techniques for emotional self-care. Make an emotional first aid kit.

* Take care of your personal space and the world around you with environmental self-care. Here are some ideas for environmental self-care.

* Mind your money with financial self-care. Follow the steps to take care of finances. Some folks like to set aside time each week for this.  Learn money skills like tracking what you spend so you can make a budget.

* Manage your relationships with social self-care. You need good social skills and healthy boundaries for this. Here are some social self-care activities.  Look for ways to make new friends for children or for adults.

* Make time for fun with recreational self-care. Explore these ideas for recreational self-care. Here is a big list of hobbies sorted into categories. If you don't want to make a commitment, just date a new hobby for a week or a month to see if it suits you.

* Nurture you soul with spiritual self-care.
Take care of your soul. Here are some more mystical ideas.

Heroic values make people more prone to moral injury or soul injury. This is most often considered a military issue, but it can occur in civilian life also. There are ways to cope with and treat moral injury.

Comments

[galadhir]

Wow, this is an impressive trove of resources! I've added it to memories so I can come back to it when I have more brain capacity. But I am rather moved by the thought of converting my conservatory (which is currently a store room/craft room) into a nicer place to be by trying to tidy it up and add some suncatchers :)

[see_also_friend]

>>Which is very difficult to follow if the person drowning is someone you care about and the recommended methods aren't working.<<

Another problem: how to keep other panicky people from running into the water.

>>A leading cause of death in such places is compromised atmosphere: low in oxygen, toxic, or both. That's not something that can be readily detected or handled without specialized equipment and training, so given that and the odds, confined space rescue should be left to experts if available.<<

Possible problem: If the problem is identified as "What's taking the guys so long in the basement?" the first response will be to shout down the stairs, or failing that, going downstairs. Then repeat until you've lost 2 or 3 people to the basement...

...anyway, it might be useful to figure out a way to check for bad air, or at least warning signs that mean it should be treated as a possible bad air emergency.

And FYI:
1) keep a carbon monoxide detector in your basement, at a level below where your face will be. On the floor is good if the basement doesn't flood.
2) if working with engines or gases/fire, keep a door cracked open.
3) don't use propane or fire-based heaters indoors

>>In addition to having several different medications in your first aid kit, you should learn as many non-drug methods as possible. Many of these will be available in emergencies when other things are scarce, out of reach, or contraindicated.<<

This looks interesting.

>>...self care...

This set of links looks promising.

>>...Developmental Trauma Disorder...<< >>...moral injury...<<

Hmm...I think I can identify a character who has DTD, and another one in a different franchise who had a difficult moral injury.

It's nice that mental health is becoming a more mainstream topic.

Moral injury...

[dewline]

...that's a lot more widespread now than it used to be, I suspect.