“Short-Term” Self-Care

Hello again!

I hope you all have had another great week! It’s been an eventful one for me! This week has been the end of summer session groups with Listen & Learn classes and some of our contracts. Lots of stuff has happened! 

I’ve most recently discovered the importance of “short-term” self-care. As therapists, we talk about self-care a lot. In fact, I’ve already done a blog post about what I do for self-care. When I think of self-care, I always think of it occurring at night or the weekend when the work day is over. What about during the few minutes you have in between sessions? I’ve recently discovered how important these few minutes are. 

These are the moments you have to center yourself, to prepare for the next session, recover from a previous session, or even simply to have a quick meal or snack. I’ve noticed that my mindset during the few minutes in between sessions carries over to my next session.

I didn’t realize how important these moments are until this week. I have five sessions back to back one day at the beginning of the week. During one of these sessions, something unexpected happened and I had five minutes before my next session to let my emotions out and recover. This may have been the fastest cry I’ve ever had, but I had a job to do and I knew I had a short amount of time before the next clients needed me. 

These five minutes of letting my emotions out in our office with my supervisor helped me recover from a hard session and prepare myself to best serve the clients I was seeing next. I let myself cry for a few minutes, talked to my supervisor, and then wiped my eyes and led the next session. This “short-term” self-care is a rather extreme example, but it is what I needed in that moment.

Here are some other examples of “short-term” self-care that I do or have heard that other music therapists do:

• Sit in silence
• Meditate
• Listen to a song of your choosing
• Read inspirational quotes
• Reflect
• Write down one thing that went well in the previous session
• Do nothing/Sit back and relax

We talk about self-care a lot. In college, I didn’t really take it seriously. It’s amazing how quickly I am learning in the “real world” just how important it is. Self-care should be taken seriously.

I would love to hear from you! What do you do to take care of yourself during those few minutes in between sessions? 

Thank you for reading! Have an amazing week and happy August!

Emma Kovachevich