Adventures in self-care

Overwhelm is something I've struggled with for years. Working as a Midwife in an increasingly pressured environment I became more aware of overwhelm as a result of working longer hours with less staff and more demands from a system which to my mind was focusing more on avoiding litigation and putting out fires than the actual quality of care we were giving to women and families. This culture of always watching your own back and box-ticking exercises often has the added frustration of decreasing job-satisfaction and our joy in work. Searching for a dictionary definition of overwhelm, I found this description which I, and I am sure most of my colleagues can easily identify with; " Overwhelm - to bury or drown beneath a huge mass of something". Midwives are drowning under a mass of "stuff"-more demands, less resources, stress, anxiety, time constraints, vicarious trauma, frustration and so much more. The symptoms of overwhelm vary.  For me, I can be...

Today I got up earlier than I would normally on a day-off. I put on my running shoes and set off up the hill behind my house for a run with my dog, Tally. It's been a while since I did this-actually several months since I last did it, and a couple of years since I did it on a regular basis. Realising that my fitness levels were becoming worse and that I was gaining weight, gave me the impetus to get back to a regular exercise regime and to go back to healthy eating habits. More of the healthy eating habits in another post but for today I want to share what I learned about self-care on my run. The main take-away was; I rediscovered my happy place! Getting up that hill, huffing and puffing, dragging my feet, thinking "was this really a good idea", I suddenly came to the field I have run through countless times in the past and stopped, looked around me and realised, THIS is one of my happy places. A place where the concerns of the world fade away and where I feel relax...