Health care careers require a very high level of intensive training. Being good at the academic aspect of the job is important, but it’s ultimately clinical experiences that will inform a person’s career aptitude. You can understand all of the concepts relevant to healthcare, but if you can’t execute them during times of acute stress, it doesn’t really matter.
Some professions require hundreds of hours of exposure to clinical or otherwise job-specific situations before licensure is possible. This high-intensity training is important for career development, but it can lead to significant amounts of stress. In this article, we take a look at why that is and what you can do about it.
What Careers Require High-Stress Training?
Of course, what it even means for a situation to be stressful can vary pretty dramatically based on a person’s specific tolerance. College in and of itself is considered a high-stress experience. Not only are you working harder than ever before, but you’re also in an unfamiliar environment, responsible for more than just your learning, quite possibly for the first time in your life.
These challenges alone are responsible for high levels of stress in college students all over the country. That type of anxiety could absolutely fit within the broad umbrella of what we are describing in this article.
That said, there are certain job training programs that are specifically designed to expose you to professionally specific stress—that is, conditions you will experience on the job. Common examples include:
- Education: Teachers in training are required to spend hundreds of hours in a classroom before they can be professionally licensed. These begin within the first semester or so of training in the form of observation hours. From there, the student goes into practicum, where they are responsible for occasional lessons, and then student teaching, where they are effectively in charge of everything for an entire semester.
- Nursing: Nurses in training go through hundreds of hours of clinical experience in different professional settings. This experience is designed to expose them to a wide variety of professional situations, both to introduce them to many different sides of the job and to ensure that the first time they encounter stressful situations is not when they are already licensed as a nurse.
- Social work: Social workers in training are required to do shadowing hours similar to those of a student teacher. Again, the idea is to expose them to different situations and get them comfortable in a position of authority.
Other career paths will have internship opportunities and other scenarios where first-hand experience is, if not required, then at least highly encouraged. These situations are always designed to prepare a person for the job. That said, they can create a lot of stress.
Why First-Hand Experience is Stressful
There are a few common reasons why people struggle with the experiential aspect of education. This can include:
- Exposure to new circumstances: New is often stressful, even when the experience or the circumstances you’re being exposed to are ultimately desirable. Our brains simply don’t know how to process situations we’ve never been in before. This can lead to stress and anxiety in the short term. The more you learn how to behave in high-pressure situations, the less impacted by the stress of it all you will be.
- Stressful situations compound: It’s not usually just that you’re in nursing school or training to be a teacher or learning how to be a social worker. It’s that you’re away from home for the first time, removed from your support system, responsible for things you never had to worry about before feeding yourself, doing laundry, possibly paying bills. You have other classes, maybe a job, and you’re trying to figure out how to balance a social life with your responsibilities. This is a time of significant transition, which can create an extra layer of difficulty for college experiences, not just those that are objectively stressful.
- Some jobs are objectively stressful: That’s the other thing. Healthcare is high pressure. Education is high pressure. Social work is high pressure. Speech-language pathology is high pressure. Jobs that have a legitimate impact on other people’s lives carry a lot of pressure and responsibility. It can be hard to adjust to those types of stakes.
In certain cases, it just turns out that a person is not built for some careers. In many other cases, the person can succeed, but they need to modify their behavior to better align with the demands of the role and manage stress more intentionally.
Managing Stress in High-Pressure Work Environments
Fortunately, the stress of a high-pressure job training program is the perfect proving ground. This is a relatively low-stakes environment in which you can develop stress management techniques and improve your overall skills as a professional.
The best thing you can do is to develop a routine that harmonizes with all of your body’s most basic needs.
This means eating nutritionally balanced meals, getting enough sleep, and prioritizing adequate movement.
In other words, exercise. Get out there for 30 minutes a day. It could be jogging, free weights, or even speed walking. The key is to give your body the things it needs to be healthy and successful.
Stress is a chemical reaction. It has a physical presence in your body, one that can be minimized by prioritizing the right set of behaviors.
Mindfulness is another great skill to develop. If you can orient yourself in the present, you’ll be less susceptible to anxiety.
Too often, we as humans experience stress thanks to past-future orientation. In other words, instead of focusing on what is happening right now, we are upset about something that happened recently, or we are worried about something that will happen in the future. Rarely is the exact situation we are in what is causing us to worry.
Even in the context of, say, diffusing a medical emergency, if you take it one step at a time, you’ll realize that the exact task you’re doing at this moment is achievable.
Follow it by another and another, and eventually you’ll see yourself through the situation with minimal stress and anxiety.
Conclusion
Good habits don’t fix everything. Some jobs are just stressful. You’ll decide through training if that kind of regular exposure to stress is right for you or not. However, you can do a lot for yourself simply by prioritizing good habits and practicing them every day. Practice is the key word here. These are skills. You will get better at them. Job training, stressful though it can be, is the perfect place to do that.
