Introduction
Meditation has been shown to improve health and wellness in all kinds of situations. From reducing stress to improving creativity and focus, meditation has an array of benefits for people at all stages of life. But what about nurses and nursing students? Is meditation useful for these professionals?
Meditation can be a great tool for nurses and nursing students.
As a nurse or nursing student, you need to be able to handle stress. You will face many challenges and obstacles in the course of your career. Meditation can help you deal with these challenges and become more effective at work.
It may seem like meditation would not be beneficial for someone who works in such an intense environment as healthcare, but it actually has many benefits for nurses and nursing students:
- Meditation reduces stress by allowing you to step back from your thoughts and feelings so that they don’t overwhelm you. This can make it easier for nurses who are under pressure from their jobs or personal lives or both!
- When people meditate regularly (at least once per week), they tend to experience less anxiety overall than those who don’t practice meditation regularly.
- Meditation helps you focus on the present moment by clearing your mind of distractions. This can be especially beneficial for nurses, who have so much information to process every day. Regular meditation practice also increases your ability to concentrate.
- When you meditate, your mind becomes more focused and less prone to wandering. This can help nurses who are prone to making mistakes due to distraction or lack of focus.
There are several reasons why meditation may benefit nurses and nursing students.
There are several essays about nursing by Graduateway that make it easy to see how meditation can benefit nurses and nursing students. First, stress, anxiety, and depression are common among healthcare professionals. Stress can cause physical symptoms such as headaches and stomachaches; it can also affect your mood by increasing feelings of anger or sadness. Anxiety disorders affect nearly 18% of Americans every year, and they’re more common among women than men (Kessler et al., 2005). Depression is another major issue among nurses: one study found that 12% of female nurses have experienced symptoms consistent with major depressive disorder within the past year (Aiken et al., 2008).
Secondary to these issues is compassion fatigue – a term coined by Drs Richard Skalinder & Linda Kreger Silverman in 1984 after observing burnout among New York Hospital’s volunteer staff members who cared for terminally ill patients (Skalinder & Silverman). Compassion fatigue describes how caring for others can lead us into feeling overwhelmed by our own emotions as well as those of others. Over time this can lead us away from our own values and goals toward an unhealthy focus on helping others at all costs… even when doing so compromises our own well-being!
Meditation is an effective way of coping with stress, burnout and compassion fatigue.
You may be thinking, “I’m a nurse. I’m supposed to be caring and compassionate.” But nursing is stressful. It’s hard work, and sometimes it’s overwhelming. You might feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day to help all of your patients or get everything that needs doing at work.
There are many reasons why meditation can help you cope with stress:
- Meditation helps you stay calm in stressful situations by slowing down your breathing and heart rate, which reduces anxiety levels and improves focus on what’s happening right now instead of worrying about the future or regretting the past
- It helps people who experience compassion fatigue (when you feel emotionally drained by dealing with other people’s problems) because it trains them how not only to recognize when they need self-care but also to implement those practices into their daily lives.
- It improves your mood, which can help prevent depression and anxiety disorders.
Conclusion
Meditation can be a great tool for nurses and nursing students. It can help you reduce stress, anxiety, and depression, connect with your patients in a more meaningful way and even improve your focus and creativity.
