Designed to improve your mindset, develop efficient study skills, reduce overal stress and implement self-care strategies. AACI Wellbeing Resources provides insight and highlights the importance of mental health in the Animal Care industry.
There are a number of challenges that arise from being an animal carer and those new to animal care study. Most students are drawn to the animal care careers due to their love and compassion for animals. It is a balancing act between your love of animals, time spent studying and caring for yourself. This balancing act takes time to establish the habits you require to ensure your wellbeing is correctly weighted.
AACI Wellbeing, Study and career resources provide guidance to assist you in developing the habits and skills required to achieve a state of wellbeing. As you learn new skills, like allocating and managing your time to each discipline, the stress of studying, your work and lifestyle balance shall improve.
AACI sees your mental and emotional wellbeing as the number 1 priority. A focused and well balanced student will perform better in their studies, work and life.
Our Wellbeing resources include videos, courses, self-care strategies and wellness mentors. Our Online Portal has the following programs
These resources are all designed to enhance the success of your course outcomes. Learn how to reduce your risk of stress, burnout, and how AACI assists you through our Wellbeing Resources and Mentorship.
Mental Health in the Animal Care Industry
Animal Care careers are a gratifying job. However, these careers can produce unwelcoming emotional and stressful impacts on a student’s life. In some instances our mental health can become a real issue that sees some suffer from depression, anxiety and compassion fatigue.
AACI has a range of Wellbeing Resources and strategies that provide the building blocks to develop skills and habits that empower you to manage or prevent these issues to arise.
Animal Care carers can be de-sensitised to stress and trauma. AACI range of Wellbeing resources, self-care practices, Animal Care Mentors are all designed to create a supportive environment.
What is Compassion Fatigue?
Working all day with suffering animals and their owners can take a toll. This is especially on those who dispense compassion and empathy. This can sometimes lead to Compassion Fatigue. Compassion fatigue is an ailment that can occur amongst animal care carers.
Compassion is defined as a deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it. It is a kind of focused, action-oriented empathy. Fatigue is defined as mental weariness resulting from exertion that is associated with attending to the emotional and physical pain of others. Stress is a sense of demand for action. If you feel stressed, we sense that action is demanded to help clients.
Compassion fatigue is exhaustion due to compassion stress, the demands of being empathic and helpful to those who are suffering. Compassion fatigue is a form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
What is Compassion fatigue?
A mental health issue that arises from the stress and anxiety of caring for others on a repetitive basis. It relates to absorbing the trauma and/or emotional stresses of third parties. This can then create a secondary traumatic stress response in the individual. These emotional foundations that builds up through exposure of working with those suffering from the consequences of traumatic events.
Compassion fatigue arises in Animal care carers as many caring too much about others. They fail to manage their own wellbeing and undertake activities such as exercise, yoga, eat good food, have sufficient sleep and take mental breaks from stressful activities.
Two factors reduce compassion stress and, therefore, compassion fatigue. One is compassion satisfaction, a sense of fulfilment or gratification from the work. For animal-care providers it is the joy of helping helpless animals, literally bringing them back to life at times, and the delight in satisfying the desperate needs of a pet owner.
The other major factor in reducing compassion stress is detachment psychological and physical from the job and its stressors. This means more than “having a life” and enjoying it apart from the job while away from it. It also and especially means being able to manage the compassion stress of the job.
What are potential signs that could indicate compassion fatigue?
These are a number of potential signs that could indicate compassion fatigue could be arising:
Tools designed to alleviate Compassion Fatigue
Research in Australia by the RSPCA has led to the development of a range of wellbeing tools that are designed to assist animal carers to avoid or reduce compassion fatigue symptoms.
These Wellbeing Tools are developed around:
They recommend that animal carers take time out daily to relax, play, establish an appropriate work-life balance, share a joke, adopt yoga breathing techniques and priorities your self-care.
The key habit to create from these Wellbeing Resources is to prioritise your own wellbeing first
AACI has compiled a range of self-care learning tools and strategies in our Wellbeing Resources section of the website.
To learn more please visit https://www.compassionfatigue.org/
What is the difference between Compassion Fatigue-Compassion Stress and Burnout?
Stress is a sense of demand for action. If you feel stressed, we sense that action is demanded to help clients. Compassion fatigue is exhaustion due to compassion stress. That is compassion stress leads to compassion fatigue.
The symptoms of Compassion fatigue and burnout are similar. The key differences are that burnout gives rise to you being completely worn out from over doing it over a long time duration (not overnight). During this long period of time you continue to over work and fail to have a balanced life and work.
The key factors that differentiate compassion fatigue from burnout are:
Whereas Burnout tends to occur if you are:
AACI has compiled a range of online self-assessment learning tools to determine if you are burnout or suffering from compassion fatigue.
How do you achieve balance? What are Self Care Strategies?
Balance during times stress and anxiety is achieved by developing specialised habits or skills. In basic terms that means ensuring you nurture your body and mind by ensuring adequate inputs are sourced that include:
Having a self-care strategy that includes these 6 aspects provides a strong foundation to develop the crucial skills and habits to ensure a balanced lifestyle is maintained.
Why are emotional support strategies so important?
AACI recommends that students develop an emotional support strategy to assist during times of stress and emotion.
Why Meditation? Remember to Reconnect. Recharge. Refresh.
Research suggests meditation helps you to destress, focus, sleep better, feel calmer, lower blood pressure and even strengthen our relationships. Most importantly meditation can improve our relationship to and awareness of ourselves and gives us a tool that takes us well beyond life
AACI has compiled a list of introductory meditation resources, music tracks, apps and helplines that are a valuable resource to use when help and support is needed.
Helpful Mediation Apps
This is a list of the most popular meditation apps in the world,
AACI is a specialist Animal Care and Veterinary Nursing training provider accredited with Australian Standards Quality Authority (ASQA).
Australian Animal Care Institute (ABN 88 652 496 109) is a Registered Training Organisation (RTO No: 45823) registered by the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA). We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the lands where Australians live, learn and work. Copyright All Rights Reserved.
