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“Abby Newcomb is one of our Get Quiet challenge winners and her story speaks for itself. She tells the story of how as a health professional she was so good at helping others help themselves, but not really helping herself. How many of you can relate? You are good at caring for your kids, husbands, wives, jobs, patients, but when it comes to you…there is not time! Like Abby said, you secure YOUR oxygen mask before securing your loved ones or someone elses. Abby is starting on this journey of getting quiet, and it is not easy, and is understanding it is a process not a pill. Abby’s story is real, raw, and one I can relate to being a health professional. “- Dr. T
Your Comment or Story: I am going into my 5th year of nursing and have landed in inpatient psych. As part of maintaining my license, I went to a conference where a family practice doctor said that the overwhelming majority of her patients suffer from depression and anxiety. She said that when she started to treat this, she noticed that the hypertension, diabetes, etc started to work itself out. She left us with her prescriptions for forgiveness (especially towards self), exercise- preferably in nature, sleep (8 hours/ night), drink plenty of water, and meditate.
I found myself incorporating this into my daily patient education, as so many of my patients have depression and anxiety at the top of their laundry list of diagnoses. Unfortunately- the overwhelming response is to want a pill to make it all go away. Tonight I worked with a 78 year old with a decade long dependence on benzodiazepines- an effective and addictive pharmaceutical response to stress/ anxiety/ etc…. generally creating some level of numbness to the world around. As she is on her taper off, her anxiety resumes. She came to me wanting a quick fix as her blood pressure was rising, along with her breaths. I quickly led her into a meditation- forcing her to focus on her breath in and breath out. Her blood pressure dropped twenty points systolic.
There is a strong reference to oxygen masks on airplanes in nursing. We must secure our own before we can help anyone else. Teaching meditation and coping strategies for stress, anxiety and depression loses its effect if I am not willing to practice. After months of racing thoughts, and a few hardships- and realizing the sub par nursing care I was providing by not practicing what I was preaching, I committed.
I started making time for myself first thing in the morning- forcing myself to sit quietly with the thoughts racing through my head. Its amazing how often we try to avoid this. Anything to fill the time so that we don’t have to sit alone with our thoughts and ourselves…. In the comfort of my bedroom, cozy in my sweats- I take on this challenge. No Facebook/Instagram/ tv to distract me ( or the seeping in of deeper distractions- drugs, alcohol, numbing the place of having to sit alone with myself), I light a fall candle and play instrumental music and walk myself through a relaxation series I picked up from my novice yoga days at the good old YMCA, concentrating on releasing tension head to toe. Then my grocery list comes to mind. Or bills I have forgotten to pay. Text messages that urgently need composure. A sink that desperately needs scrubbing. And… I flake…. Giving in to the racing thoughts and completing the actions before I could ever let my mind quiet.
Two weekends ago I took a healing touch class and learned about opening chakras. My instructor, now an RN at the children’s hospital, admittedly told the room full of nurses that we might find this bizarre and too far or, as she had us swing penjulums around each other’s chakras (energy circles). As crystal collecting/ sage burning/ rain dance -dancing as it may seem, chakra opening has become part of my daily meditation…in fact, this my only meditation some days. It grounds me. It calms me. It makes me immediately appreciative and aware, and after all- that is what meditation is about right? Being divinely, serenely aware.
