Realizing Happiness Essential For Nurses

Nurses are very busy! The call light's always ringing, patients need care, charts and record keeping take up valuable time -- and just when you think you have caught up, there is a code and the whole day's right off track. Being busy is not enough : you want to be professional, talented, caring and compassionate! But do you also have to be happy?

Dr. Robert Holden, contentment expert and author of Shift Happens! Debates this matter in a recent issue of the journal of Nursing Jocularity. His work on contentment has led him to believe that satisfied nurses are better nurses, and a nurse who operates from a central core of joy is basically giving a gift to their patients.

Your smile can be medicine for a patient --even the most terminally unwell benefit from being exposed to contentment and joy. That is's necessary to keep in mind, particularly if you, like many nurses, fight with feelings of guilt about feeling cheerful when your patients are clearly unhappy. Empathy and compassion don't need you to feel bad : you can still be centered in your joy while providing quality care to your patients.

Professionalism is highly fascinating. This is particularly true in a tight job market : there are way more nurses than nursing jobs, and it is not surprising for a nurse to find herself 'called off' to save the facility money. Many nurses hesitate to embrace joy and use humor for fear of not being professional enough and jeopardizing their professional lives.

Patch Adams believes that humor and play are absolutely essential to health care, and has devoted his life to transforming the medical establishment. Content nurses are better nurses : more empathetic, better provided to handle the non-stop pressure of nursing, and, perhaps most significantly, serving as a source of strength and inspiration for the nurses around them.

want to start feeling happier immediately? Give up the pursuit for happiness! Happiness doesn't exist outside of ourselves. According to Dr. Robert Holden, we all have a place within ourselves where we are happy, where we already are crammed with joy. The trick is to hook up with that part of ourselves and give that joy notability in our everyday lives.


Put on your own oxygen mask first! That is's sage advice -- and advice that is difficult for many nurses to hear. We are extremely socialised to take care of everybody else's wants first : making sure the patient is OK, the doctor calmed, the patient's family comfortable...all the while neglecting to notice we're turning blue from shortage of O2! Remedy the situation by committing to putting yourself 1st in your own life. You want to do that to be able to care for others.

Medical care now is so manic, so busy, you have got to be like a machine to make it through the day. Yet we should, we want to, be more loving and kind to each other. Right away, we want to start doing this for each other "and the patients will obviously benefit!