The season of giving can be a humbling experience for helping professionals, a reminder that behind our education, licensure and emotional support cardigan, we’re just people. Overwhelming client needs can leave us depleted while navigating the holiday season, and all that it brings up, in our personal lives. While we’re quick to discuss self-care with clients, we’re just as quick to deny ourselves much needed respite, often needing “permission” to engage in self-care activities, but we can’t provide effective care for anyone, professionally or personally, if we don’t make self-care a regular practice. There are a number of practical self-care strategies we can start putting into practice, making giving back to ourselves a little easier this holiday season.
Challenges Providers Face During the Holidays
With increasing societal pressure to create holiday magic while navigating complex family dynamics and financial strain, the holidays are overwhelmingly stressful and anxiety-provoking for everyone. Providers have additional workplace pressures as we access holiday-related resources, increase our caseloads, offer a more flexible schedule and/or increase services—all while holding space for the emotional impact of the work during this time of year. Our own feelings of guilt that we can’t do more, anger and frustration with the level of need, and compassion for our clients can bleed into our work, leading us to become over-involved, over-extended or even over-step certain rules and regulations.
Practical Self-Care Strategies for the Holiday Season
Self-care often gets shifted to the end of our priority list in service of caregiving – those we love and those we work with. Here are some practical strategies to make self-care a part of your holiday season:
1. Identify your Non-Negotiables: Between shopping for gifts, visiting friends and family, and other holiday-related activities, our lives become much busier than usual. Are there certain days you have personal commitments, such as a child’s holiday concert that you’d like to attend but feel torn about taking that time away from your clients? Is there an appointment for yourself that seems easier to reschedule to accommodate a client? By framing something important to you as non-negotiable, you’ll be more likely to figure out the logistics to make it happen.
2. Use Your Personal and Sick Days: Helping professionals are natural caretakers and often put others, including our clients, first. By staying home when we aren’t feeling well or in need of a mental health day, we’re actually doing the best thing we can for ourselves and our clients. It’s also important to have perspective around our role in clients’ lives. They utilize our services as needed and aren’t dependent on us. But we have people in our personal lives who are and need us to be well. A tool such as Casebook can help you keep track of when you’ve taken time off and what clients were supposed to be seen on those days, making rescheduling easier.
3. Set and Hold Boundaries— For Clients and Yourself: Witnessing the level of need our clients have this time of year, and the feelings triggered within us as a result, can push us to make decisions we might not otherwise make at other times of the year. We may buy gifts or food using our own money or go above and beyond in other ways. Tracking what resources our clients have received in a tool like Casebook can ensure resources are distributed fairly.
4. Use Supervision for Support: Clinical supervision is an outlet to discuss how we’re impacted by this work during the holidays, explore why we’re struggling with boundaries, and get suggestions for balancing client needs with our own. For supervisors also feeling increased stress around the holidays, having client information for several providers easily accessible can free up time for you to engage in your own self-care.
My last piece of advice this holiday season is to offer yourself grace, no matter the time of year, because this work is always hard. But by putting these self-care strategies into practice and using a tool like Casebook to streamline documentation and manage client care efficiently, you can spend more time focusing on what matters—recharging and supporting those you serve.
