The Importance of Wellness
Personal Recovery Maintenance
Recovery is a personal journey that looks different for each person. But all recovery is guided by the belief that challenges and conditions can be overcome and that a person has the strength, talents, coping abilities, resources, and inherent value to move forward from their experiences and lead meaningful and purposeful lives. The same can be true for how peer support workers maintain their well-being: while each peer’s wellness strategies may look different, they likely all call up one’s resilience, hope, and capacity to deal with difficult experiences.
Setting Boundaries
Boundaries in peer support services can help peers safeguard their own well-being. They also allow peers to model boundary-setting behaviors, supporting the development of self-advocacy skills among the people they serve.
- The principles of making and using a Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) are helpful tools for protecting your recovery in difficult situations. Using careful planning to protect yourself physically and emotionally benefits the PRS and those they serve.
- By recognizing the limits of your role and identifying other resources that can help meet an individual’s needs, you can avoid over-extending yourself, emotionally and logistically, and connect the individual with sustainable support.
- Another essential boundary for some peers may be to make sure not to attend the same peer support or recovery meetings also attended by the people they serve. This provides a useful boundary to allow the peer to focus on their recovery during meetings, rather than worrying about the recovery of the person they serve or how the peer may be perceived.
Practicing Self-Compassion
In a 2021 study in the Journal of Addiction and Addictive Disorders, most peers reported that working with individuals in early recovery from mental or substance use disorders can be intense and challenging.
Self-care is a critical component of being a peer support worker. Self-care can be any activity or practice that improves your feelings of well-being in the moment and over time. Examples include
- connecting with friends,
- participating in a hobby,
- making and eating a healthy meal,
- going for a walk
Like recovery, self-care is unique to the person.
Similarly, self-compassion means affording oneself kindness and empathy, and it is equally important.
Maximizing Supervisory & Institutional Support
Some workplaces offer time allowances for peers to attend recovery meetings during the day or have mental health days built into a benefits package. Supervisors can encourage peers they supervise to use the resources available through their employer, such as an employee assistance programs and paid time off.
Other strategies can include supporting peers in developing a WRAP plan for the workplace (to complement their personal WRAP plan) and educating staff on ways to request accommodations when their work may become too overwhelming or may prompt a recurrence of unwanted symptoms or behaviors.
Another option is encouraging staff to have their own “toolkit” of strategies and physical items that can support their wellbeing, which may include their WRAP plan or a similar plan for addressing situations that may provoke challenging thoughts, feelings, or behaviors;
- small gift cards to a nearby coffee shop for when staff might need to step away briefly for a quiet moment
- small, grounding stones or objects inscribed with a meaningful mantra or word
- items infused with a grounding or calming scent
- photos of supportive loved ones