Using Self-Care Strategies to Make Lifestyle Changes
Clinical Reviews
With Comments from Lynn Keegan, RN, PhD, HNC, FAAN
Using Self-Care Strategies to Make Lifestyle Changes
Source: Timmerman GM. Using self-care strategies to make lifestyle changes. J Holist Nurs 1999;17:169-183.
Context: Self-care in health promotion includes developing the skills needed to devise, implement, evaluate, and revise a customized plan for lifestyle change.
Objective: To examine the strategies and barriers to making lifestyle changes.
Design: Use of content analysis to examine the strategies chosen by participants to initiate a lifestyle change, as well as the barriers they identified to change. Goal achievement and effectiveness of the strategies chosen were evaluated at weeks 5 and 10.
Setting and Participants: Participants in the study were 95 nursing students aged 18 or older, who were enrolled in a health promotion course in a major southern university.
Results: Using self-care strategies to make lifestyle changes, 42.1% had achieved their goal and 49.5% had partly achieved their goal by week 10. Social support, tailoring strategies, self-monitoring, medication, and cue restriction were considered the most effective strategies. Being able to individualize the strategies was most important to goal achievement, followed by having a specific goal, planning for barriers, and being able to make revisions.
Comments: One of the values of this study is that it targets nursing students in a health promotion course. Often more seasoned nurses learn the value of self-care only after encountering too much stress, experiencing personal or professional conflicts, or developing an illness that necessitates introspection. Many will then begin a self-care regime that boosts energy and productivity. The joy of this study is that nurse researchers are honing in on teaching students self-care skills prior to their entering the work force. Nurses already in the workplace will want to heed the advice from this and related studies: Self-care contributes to hardiness and happiness.
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