Transition to the Nursing profession

00:02 Now, as I mentioned earlier, I was very pessimistic about how I was going to possibly fit a mindfulness practice into my everyday life. I'm excited to share with you ways that you can incorporate mindful moments into your busy day as a nurse or a student. [BLANK_AUDIO] First, we'll talk about an anchoring practice. It's actually one of my favorite ways to incorporate mindfulness into my life, in and outside of work. Basically, all you have to do is pick one thing that you do often throughout your day. [BLANK_AUDIO] This could be washing your hands or using hand sanitizer prior to entering a patient's room, checking your e-mail, administrating a medication, or badging into a secure area of the hospital. [BLANK_AUDIO] Now, each time you do that one thing, pause, take a mindful breath, and picture yourself performing your next task in a focused manner. So for example, I work in a NICU, which is a secured unit within a secured unit. So I choose my anchor as the process of waving my badge in front of a badge reader to gain access to wherever I need to go. I stop, wave my badge, take a mindful breath, and set my intention to administer caffeine to baby Smith. Or as I'm entering the unit as my shift starts, I'm going to make it a great day. Or before I head home for the day, I'm going to leave the stressors of my day at work so I can enjoy my day off tomorrow. [BLANK_AUDIO] Now, I'd like to teach you how you can incorporate mindfulness into your head to toe assessments. How many times have you sat down to chart your assessment or reconnect with your clinical instructor, and think to yourself, wait, did that patient have a murmur? Or what limb did I take that blood pressure on? Or did the infant have split or overriding suture lines? I've been there. It's so easy to simply go into autopilot throughout your day. [BLANK_AUDIO] Instead, approach your head to toe assessment with a focused beginner's mind. [BLANK_AUDIO] When you listen to a patient's heart, really listen. Is there a murmur? Is the rhythm regular or irregular? Count the heart rate. Does it correlate with the monitor? What's the location of the point of maximum impulse? [BLANK_AUDIO] When assessing an infant's head, truly feel and visualize the characteristics. Palpate the anterior and posterior fontanelles. Are they split or overriding, bulging or sunken? Does the infant have a caput or a cephalohematoma? [BLANK_AUDIO] If the infant has a lot of hair, sift through it, to look for any abnormalities. What is the infant's reaction to this assessment? Is he or she content, or do they wince when you palpate one area? You get the idea. When you approach patient care in this manner, hopefully you're not gonna miss anything, or you might even catch something before it's really an issue for that patient. [BLANK_AUDIO] Lastly, I'd like to walk you through a mindful hand washing exercise. Remember how good old Florence Nightingale taught us the importance of hand washing? Well, we're about to take it to the next level. Remember that ideally you should wash your hands for at least 30 seconds. Think about how often we do this throughout our day. There are so many opportunities for us to squeeze in some mindfulness. I challenge you to try this the next time you wash your hands. [BLANK_AUDIO] So turn on the water, note the rushing sound that it makes. What temperature is it? [BLANK_AUDIO] How does it feel hitting your skin? [BLANK_AUDIO] Now, dispense soap into the palms of your hand. [BLANK_AUDIO] Move your hands together to create a lather, noting its consistency. [BLANK_AUDIO] Bring your hands up to your face and simply take in the scent of the soap. [BLANK_AUDIO] As you bring the soap to a lather, work it around each individual finger, noting how it feels all the way from the base through the fingertips. [BLANK_AUDIO] What color is the soap now in relation to when you first dispensed it in your palm? [BLANK_AUDIO] Now, place your hands into the running water. Feel the soap slide off your hands and note how it swirls into the sink and down into the drain. [BLANK_AUDIO] Now, dry your hands, taking note of the feeling of the paper towel against your hands. How different do they feel from the time you rinse them to the time they are completely dry? Now, just take a mindful breath and move on to your next task. So there, we have three mindfulness activities that you can incorporate into everyday. So remember, we've got the anchoring activity, the head-to-toe assessment, and hand washing. I challenge you in the next week or so to incorporate those in to your every day practice. [BLANK_AUDIO] As we finish up section two, before we move on to section three and really dive in to sleep, I wanna talk to you a little bit about the assignment that you have for this class. You may wanna pause the video now and pull up that assignment, maybe print it out. It's actually the sleep journal is what you're gonna take a look at. [BLANK_AUDIO] This sleep journal essentially is a way to help you identify what either helps or hurts you from getting a good night's sleep where you wake up the next morning and you feel really, really refreshed, restored, and ready to take on the day, basically. If you have that in front of you, essentially you're gonna feel this out twice a day. In the morning, as soon as you wake up in the morning, what you're going to do is you're gonna fill out that top part of that sheet. So what that is, is essentially to identify how much sleep did you get last night? What time did you did you go to bed? What time did you wake up? How many hours of sleep did you have? If you woke up in the middle of the night, remember to subtract whatever that is, you woke up for 20 minutes or 30 minutes, something like that, subtract that out and the total number. Other notable things that happened last night as far as your sleep goes. Maybe there was a loud neighbor or something that woke you up, so you can jot that down. And then, when you woke up, how did you feel, kind of an one to four scale, with four meaning felt fantastic, one meaning I just wanted to go back to sleep, basically. So you fill that out in the morning. And then, in the afternoon, probably in the evening right before you're about to go to bed, you'll fill in the bottom half of that sleep journal. And that's really to identify what happened during the day. So a few of the things that are on here, how much caffeine did you have, or alcohol was intake? Did you get exercise, and if you did, what time of day was it? What type of exercise was it? How long was it for? Other things, did you nap? Was there any notable activities that you had that you did right before bed, maybe one or two hours before? Because maybe you did a really stressful thing that might affect your sleep that night. And then, other events of the day that may have happened. Did you have something really bad happen at work or with family members that may affect your sleep? And then, what was your mood throughout the day? It's kinda last piece there. Did you feel good throughout the day, refreshed, a lot of energy? Or were you just kinda lethargic and very, very tired throughout the day? What I want you to do is to actually start this today, or tomorrow morning if it's later in the day. Start this tonight or tomorrow morning, and fill this information out for one week, at least one week. If sleep is something that's really, really important to you that you're struggling with, then maybe do it for two or three weeks. Or maybe even longer. The idea is after that week, or after two or three week,s is to really study this stuff. And then, identify are there any patterns? Is there maybe something that you're doing that's helping you get a great night's sleep and feeling refreshed and energetic all day? Or are there other things that may be actually kind of taking away from your sleep and making you wake up feeling really, really tired or lethargic throughout the day? It's really with that analysis of something like this, this sleep journal, that you'll be able to identify for yourself what's working and what's not working. So let's start that now, and then in part three and four we'll go over and give you some tips on how to get a better night sleep. [BLANK_AUDIO]