Caseloads and Stress Management - Psychology Career - Psychologist

Dr Marianne Trent (: 00:00

Coming up on today's episode of the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast, we are looking at two more ways to maximise your brilliance and to help your vibrancy shine to yourself and to those around you to help you on this career of yours and to, you know, help you be the best you can be along the way. Hope you'll find it so useful

(: 00:58

Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent. We are fast approaching application season, which we're expecting certainly for clinical psychology to open sometime close to the start of September, but the clearinghouse do sometimes like to throw spanners in the works. So don't worry. I'll be here with you every step of the way and I'll be here for free as well with the Aspiring Psychologist podcast, but also with the free compassionate Q&A series too. You can join me on Monday, the 4th of September, 2023 at 6:00 PM You can also join me on Tuesday the 3rd of October, 2023 at 6:00 PM and for the final time in the application series this year. You can also catch me Tuesday, the 7th of November, 2023 at 6:00 PM live across all of my socials, Dr. Marianne Trent. Feel free to just watch, soak up the goodness, listen to me, answer other people's questions or pop along and ask me your questions as well.

(: 02:06

And if you'd welcome some more support during application season or just generally in your development, do consider checking out the Aspiring Psychologist membership, which you can join from just 30 pounds a month as well. Right? Let's have a look at the first of our tips for today. So the first is something that I found really useful during the pandemic. So at that time I was working in the NHS, but also working in private practise, also being a mother and trying to homeschool. And so there was quite a lot of stress going on at that time. Even leaving the house felt really like you were dicing with the possibility of death. It really felt very difficult. So going out and working in the NHS whilst going shopping and trying to run a household and trying to manage my two children under a not particularly massive roof was a real struggle.

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And so one of the things that I found really helpful was to take some time in the mornings before everything started. So for me my sort of mindfulness and stress reducing practises took the form of 10 minutes of yoga each morning. So there's a brilliant programme that you can access for not that much money called Yoga Burn Run by a lady called Zoe. And so the first one in the series you watch three times. So I would do it on a Monday morning, a Wednesday morning and a Friday morning. And then there's a really nice sort of stretchy cool down one on a Sunday. And so the next week you'd then do series two on a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and then do the, the nice stretchy relaxing one on a Sunday. And I think it lasted about eight weeks. And so it was a really nice way for me to spend a little bit of time being mindful, checking in with my body, seeing how it felt, but also enjoying the sort of calm and stillness of my house before it all got rowdy and it all got busy and there were demands placed upon me to, to do things to give more, to do, do do do, do either for my clients or for my children or for my husband for that matter, you know?

(: 04:22

So yeah. Is there a space in your day where you could reclaim some time for yourself to be mindful, to connect with your body, maybe to do some yoga? And if you're listening to this and you're like, oh no, I don't think yoga's for me, have you tried it? Have you tried it? So yoga Burn isn't traditional yoga. It's quite flowy and it aims to get your heart rate up a little bit as well. But it certainly does help with your with your flexibility too and with your strength. So for me, I found that it was a really nice chance to just do 10 minutes of something because we haven't always got time in our days, especially when you're feeling really busy and squashed to do half an hour, to do an hour to do 90 minutes. But for me, I could find you know, 10 minutes four times a week. So I hope you will find that to be useful. It might just be that you do some progressive muscle relaxation before bed. It might just be that you do some soothing rhythm breathing, something that is about you creating some calm in what might feel like chaos. Let's take a quick moment here to take a little break and I'll be back along very soon with the next of Marianne Summer soundbite tips,

(: 06:29

Welcome back. So in the first half we were looking at ways to carve out space for you to be mindful, for you to connect, calm and engage with your body and find some tranquillity, some, you know, some still, calm space for yourself. It's so important and it's still something I do. So when I go for runs I like that since I'm not talking to anybody, I'm just alone with my thoughts. There's no, there's no expectation that I'll do anything other than keep my feet moving, and, you know, connect to the sounds of nature. And I do also do a little bit of litter picking as I'm out and about. It's called plogging which is when you jog but then you in between bins, you pick up some litter and then pop it in the bin on your way past.

(: 07:20

So yes, could you plog join my, join my revolution of ploogging Ploggers. So the next of my top tips is thinking about your caseload. and if you hold a caseload of clients that you see for therapy or even therapy groups or you know, any kind of work that you do within the team, anything that might be on your job plan, you can kind of think about as your caseload. you know, who are those clients? if you're supervising staff, you can think about them as being on your job plan and potentially on your caseload as well. If we've got lots and lots of super demanding or super risky clients, then that can really take its toll on us. So a really useful conversation to have in supervision or in line management if that's a separate service or function for you, is thinking about balancing your caseload.

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So thinking about when you're picking up new work, like actually, I already have, you know, five complex cases you know, and this one sounds a little bit more simple, could I put myself forward for this one? And thinking about the importance of doing that and knowing that it's okay to do that. And I guess it's similar to one of the other things of being boundaried, but it's, it's, it's more than that because you are literally looking at caseload management. You're looking at, well, how full up you're feeling right now. you know, whereas you first took on the cases, maybe you were more resilient, maybe you were more well resourced, or maybe it's the other way around, you know, when you first joined the team or when you first took on this caseload, maybe you were already feeling more full up, but now you are in more into your stride or you're in a better place with your relationship or your course or training or your masters or you know, your peers or your family.

(: 09:16

You now feel like you've got some more flexibility, some more space in your window of tolerance to be able to step that up a little bit. So it's a fluid process, I would say that changes from day to day, week to week. But it's important that you're checking in with that with your supervisor and with yourself. You know, if you find yourself dreading a particular client or a particular day because of the combination of clients or tasks that you've got, could you look at that? Could you jiggle clients around to different days to spread a bit of the joy or a bit of the misery, bit of the things that you find useful, engaging, or depleting throughout the week? and yeah, just make sure you're looking after yourself. 'cause if you're not looking after yourself, then you can't help to put those oxygen masks on other people.

(: 10:07

Hope you found today's episode useful. I will be back along with the next episode of the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast from 6:00 AM on Monday. If you've got any ideas for what you would like to be covered in future episodes, do come and let me know by connecting with me on socials. I'm Dr. Marianne Trent everywhere. Or you can slip into the Aspiring Psychologist Community Free Facebook group and tell me there, or even drop it in the YouTube comments. Please do like, subscribe, share, tell your friends about us, and I'll look forward to catching up with you very soon. Take care.