Self-care by Melissa Herring

mherring1_1 — 2025-10-23 02:40:29 UTC

While self-care for counselors is required in the Code of Ethics, maintaining one's health, both mental and physical, must also be self-driven, deliberate, and personal. Our natural focus is on others rather than ourselves, but creating a balance between giving and replenishing ourselves regularly gives us the fuel to to avoid burnout and fatigue. It is our individual responsibility to create spaces for ourselves, whether figuratively or literally, where we can "let go" and leave the stress and weight of other's feelings and problems. These spaces need to become sacred to us in order to maintain health and balance in our lives. In our profession, we spend almost all of our time putting others first, so taking even fifteen minutes per day focusing solely on ourselves provides us with almost two hours per week of rejuvenation.

mherring1_1 — 2025-10-23 02:52:38 UTC

My biggest take-away is that we are all in a profession that mandates self-care as an ethical requirement, and while I agree we all need to practice self-care, I see the irony in requiring "givers" and "helpers" to take care of themselves. Our nature is to dive into various situations to help our students, our clients, our friends, and our families with emotional, social, physical, educational, and environmental issues they are facing. We focus on them and worry about them at work and at home, often neglecting ourselves and our own lives in the process. To turn that focus off sometimes seems impossible for us, which explains the need to include self-care in our ethical policies. The practice of self-care should not only involve yearly vacations or weekends away, but should also include daily/weekly practices that provide relaxation, rejuvenation, and personal growth.

mherring1_1 — 2025-10-23 03:12:58 UTC

My biggest self-care strategy is reading for pleasure. I have always been an avid reader and enjoy almost all types of literature. As an English teacher for 30 years, much of my time was spent reading class novels, newly published young adult books that I could recommend to my students, and student essays. While I enjoyed reading these things, in the back of my mind all of that reading was still "work." I was reading to make a recommendation, analyze a chapter, or correct grammar. Now, as a graduate student and full-time school counselor, finding time to read for pleasure is more difficult. Making myself take 15-30 minutes each night before bed to "escape" into a fictional world quiets my mind to all of the outside noise and allows me to sleep better and wake up more refreshed.

mherring1_1 — 2025-10-23 03:19:46 UTC

My husband and I lead very busy lives between work, graduate school, and following our 11 grandchildren as they compete in sporting events. If we are not careful with our weekends, we often hit the ground running at 7:30 on Saturday morning and do not stop until 7:30 Sunday evening. We love doing this, but we also love working in our yard, going to dinner (without grandkids), and traveling to college sporting events. My goal is to deliberately free up one Saturday per month where we focus the entire day just on us and activities we enjoy. Not only will this allow us to engage in what we love to do, it will also provide us with a time to reconnect with each other, check on each other's mental and physical well-being, and deliberately spend quality time together.

mherring1_1 — 2025-10-23 03:23:48 UTC

mherring1_1 — 2025-10-23 03:25:15 UTC