New resource for social workers struggling with daily stresses of the job

Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 14 August 2023

A new resource for social workers struggling with the daily stresses of the job has just been published.

The Resilience Workbook: Exploring the Three Pillars of Resilience is a practical guide to looking after yourself, with useful information on how to build better coping mechanisms.

Author STEPHEN MORDUE acknowledges that resilience and wellbeing are a joint responsibility, and not something that employers should just place on employees.

He has put more than two decades of experience as a frontline social worker and a social work academic into the publication, and shares some extracts…

What do you think resilience is?

Resilience is not about how you endure it is about how you recover:

• Your resilience needs maintenance, both when you rest and when you actively engage in tasks that enhance your resilience pillars

Resilience is a dynamic trait – not a static character trait – you don’t have a certain amount of it all the time that you can draw on.

• It’s environment dependent
• It fluctuates over time depending on physical factors

Resilience is about emotional control (and that fluctuates)

• The more emotional control you have the more resilient you will be. The more you respond to things pragmatically in a planned way rather in an emotional way the more resilient you are.

We can build a resilience window.

• The more self-care and wellbeing principles and methods we engage in the bigger our resilience window – which is the safe space we can operate in. When we hit our resilience threshold we’ve run out of options. The secret is not to reach it.

Resilience is about leveraging our strengths (but we need to build our strengths first)

The three pillars

Emotional Resilience - while there are ways to focus on building our emotional resilience our physical and practical resilience pillars support this pillar more than we probably think.

Physical Resilience – this pillar helps with both the emotional and practical pillars – even though many of us do mental brain work we need a physical preparedness for it.

Practical Resilience - these are the systems, the routines, and the plans we have in place to make sure things get done.

Resilience is threefold. Emotional – Physical – Practical.

Tips for managing your stress response

(if you have health problems, consult your doctor first):

Meditation – multiple studies show that even brief meditation programmes lead to less feelings of stress, more focus, and improvements in planning and workflow.

Cold Water Therapy – regular exposure to cold water can help build resilience to stress.

The Shakti Mat – a type of acupressure mat that contains hundreds of thousands of small plastic spikes designed to apply pressure to specific points on the body. Using a Shakti mat has been associated with several health benefits, including stress management.

Exercise –exercise has been shown to increase the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein that promotes the growth of new brain cells and is associated with improved mood and resilience to stress.

Managing your energy

Rest – we need three types: micro (e.g. five minutes away from a task), mini (e.g. 30 minutes for lunch) and macro (longer periods you get to yourself during evenings and weekends)

Sleep – the best hours for most of us to sleep are from around 10pm to 6.30am. We should aim for about seven to eight hours of sleep a night. Look at the quantity and quality of your sleep.

Exercise – this is just being more active. Moderate exercise is something that just gets you a little breathless. The government suggests 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week.

Nutrition – poor nutrition elevates cortisol production, released in response to stress. Deficiencies in B vitamins, vitamin D and magnesium have been linked to increased stress and anxiety. Eating a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains can help reduce inflammation and support a healthy stress response.

Managing Time and Task

As human beings we thrive on structure, routine and repetition.

Planning – routine requires planning, using some sort of system (like an electronic calendar or paper diary) as far in advance as possible.

Procrastination – breaking down a task into its constituent parts makes it easier to slot into pockets of time when we are allocating time to task.

Single Tasking – when it comes to deep work tasks, we can only do them one at a time without hitting problems. These tasks are best done to the exclusion of everything else.

Chunking – a strategy for grouping similar tasks together, tasks that take the same mental faculties as each other.

The 2 minute rule – if it takes less than two minutes to do, just do it!

Eat your frogs –do the things you don’t like to do or find difficult first! If you have several frogs to eat, eat the biggest, ugliest one first.

Run through the finish line – when you get near to finishing something, keep going. Olympic sprinters don’t run the first 80 metres of the 100 metres and then start slowing down… they finish the job. They run through the finish line then slow down.

Stephen Mordue worked as a social worker for 12 years before becoming a lecturer in social work at Sunderland University, where he has taught for more than a decade.

The Resilience Workbook: Exploring the Three Pillars of Resilience is the latest in his publications on workplace stress and is available now. Other books of interest include How to Thrive in Professional Practice, and How to Thrive at Work.

Stephen also blogs about self care and contributes to Social Work Shorts You can find both channels on YouTube and Twitter @selfcareshorts @socialworkshorts