Looking after yourself

Introduction

In this section you will be looking at the importance of your well-being and that of the people you care for. People who are in a caring role, either as family carers or who work in health and social care, often find that they are so busy looking after others that they forget to look after themselves. This section offers some suggestions of how to look after yourself.

You will think about different forms of stress and the impact they have on your life and try to find ways of dealing with negative stress.

Making sure you take care of your emotional well-being as well as your physical health is key to a balanced life, so you will also consider ways in which you can support the people you care for to do this as well.

At the end of the section there is a short quiz to test what you have learned about looking after yourself. On successful completion of the quiz you will earn a digital badge.

This section is divided into five topics and each of these should take you around half an hour to study and complete. The topics are as follows:

  1. Why your well-being is important explains why it is important for you and the people you care for to take care of your well-being.
  2. Coping with stress looks at different types of stress and the ways you can cope with it.
  3. Work–life balance and professional boundaries investigates what it means to have a good work–life balance and whether or not this is possible to achieve. It also examines how the boundaries between work and life can become blurred and the reasons for avoiding this.
  4. Person-centred care and self-management discusses what person-centred care means and how you can support the people you care for to become increasingly independent, as well as the benefits of self-management both to them and to you.
  5. Where to find support offers some places to go to for support, either in person or online, and the different kinds of support available.

Learning outcomes