Emotional wellbeing
Everyone feels challenging emotions, things like anger, shame and sadness. It can be helpful to have strategies to manage and understand these emotions, particularly when we have job roles and a duty of care that we are passionate about: meaning we are more likely to encounter these feelings. Different strategies will work for different people.
For many of us in the veterinary community, our focus is on the caring of others: our much-loved patients and their owners, our colleagues and then outside of work, our families and friends. To do this sustainably, we have to look out for our own emotional wellbeing, which is something many of us find challenging. But to be able to keep giving to others, we need to replenish our own emotional wellbeing. We can liken this to the flight metaphor of putting your own oxygen mask on before helping others with theirs.
When we don’t look after our own emotional wellbeing, we are at risk of experiencing compassion fatigue.
Meditation and compassion training (e.g. compassion-based imagery) can help us find our compassionate self, the part of the mind that brings acceptance, understanding and kindness and learn to direct it to ourselves. Compassion training can help develop the neural pathways involved in these emotions and strengthen them. We can learn to focus this strengthened compassion on others as well as ourselves and develop self-compassion. In other words, train ourselves to become less judgemental and kinder towards ourselves (often this can feel very challenging) and others.
❖ The RCVS Mind Matters Initiative offers a free 14-day, online self-compassion training course.
Professor Paul Gilbert OBE developed the concept of compassion focused therapy (CFT), based on the evolutionary concept that the brain has three emotional regulation systems: THREAT, DRIVE and SOOTHING. These emotional regulation systems developed with our primitive “old brains,” (when we were focused on survival) and are still present in our more sophisticated “new brains,”(which are more cognitive and reflective).
Our “new brains,” possess a greater ability to think and be reflective about oneself and our actions, resulting in the threat and drive systems becoming overstimulated leading to an imbalance of the systems, resulting in feelings of distress, like anxiety. This is particularly true for those experiencing feelings of shame and self-criticism because accessing the third system, the soothing system becomes more difficult. Compassion training is about balancing these systems by developing the soothing system, or in other words, our compassion.
Many psychotherapists can offer compassion-focused therapy (CFT), often alongside other talking or behaviour therapies e.g. for individuals experiencing depression, anxiety or eating disorders.
- Relaxation: This may look differently for each of us. But it can be taking a hot bath, going for a cold swim (perhaps a sauna afterwards!) and practicing mindfulness (See more about this in mental wellbeing).
- Sharing our problems with others: talking to a trusted friend, family member or healthcare professional can be hugely helpful to process and understand our feelings, to feel validated and supported.
- The right kind of exercise, low intensity such as a brisk walk outside (See our Physical Wellbeing Pillar: exercise section for further detail).
- A gratitude journal: writing down things we are grateful for and things we did well on a daily basis has been shown to improve mood and emotional wellbeing.
- Establishing healthy boundaries with work and commitments, giving ourselves time to fully disconnect and unplug. This can be on a daily basis as well as chunks of time in the form of leave.
Useful resources:
- A recent publication on the potential benefits of compassion-focused imagery intervention in veterinarians.
- The RCVS Mind Matters Initiative offers a free online self-compassion training course.
- The Compassionate Mind, a book by Paul Gilbert who developed compassion-focused training. This book gives a readable bit of background into compassion and empathy in our modern day brains, how we can be at risk of compassion fatigue and practical advice as to how to manage this.
- The Vetlife Burnout, Moral Injury and Compassion Fatigue resource can be found by clicking here.
- The Compassionate Mind Foundation offers free guided practices on their website.
- More useful descriptions about self-compassion with some more free guided self-compassion practices from Kristen Neff, another self-compassion pioneer are available on this website, Self-compassion with Kristen Neff.
