On the latest Got Therapy?, I asked Dr. Dan Rose something our profession doesn't ask itself often enough: having all this knowledge about psychology, what do you actually do to take care of yourself?
His answer deserves to become a professional norm.
Here is the position: self-care for clinicians should be treated as training, planned before, during, and after the hard moments, not as a reward we hand ourselves once the hard moment is over. And we should stop pretending the training makes us immune.
Dan's frame is simple. "When life is demanding, you know, you should approach it as if you're an athlete." He eats, moves, hydrates, reads before bed, and meditates in the morning, and he knows his early-warning sign: sleep. Later in the conversation he called it "an athlete's model of being alive." Athletes don't wait for the big game to start training, and clinicians shouldn't wait for burnout to start caring for themselves.
The structure he offered for the hard moments themselves is just as practical: the three Ps. "You want to be able to think about what you do pre, peri, and post." Before is preparation. During can be as small as a breath. After is repair, self-compassion, and the potential to learn. It's a model we teach clients all the time. We rarely hold ourselves to it.
The second half of the position matters as much. Dan was candid that "no matter how much preparation you have," there will be moments when you lose your cool anyway, and that "there is a level of disequilibrium all of us can find ourselves at." This is not a diagnosis that sits off to the side, reserved for other people. My own view is that the profession is better served by honesty here. This idea of mental health professionals walking around with everything under control and cool? "No, it doesn't work like that. We all have things we have to work through."
A field that models invulnerability teaches clients that falling out of the window is failure. A field that models training, and then repair when the training isn't enough, teaches them the truth: "the goal is not to have ups and downs, but to be able to course correct."
Train like an athlete. Expect to lose sometimes. Then do the third P.
Got Therapy? is hosted by Michael Baltimore Ph.D. and Dan Rose Psy.D.