Care for caregivers
MINDFULNESS COACH HELPS STRESSED-OUT HEALTH WORKERS COPE
Christina Dufour grew up in a family of health care workers.
Dufour, 35, of Wilton, says her mother was a nurse’s aide and all of her aunts were either nurses or nurse’s aides. “I am kind of the stray one who followed a different path,” she jokes.
Her “path” is that of a mindfulness educator, motivational speaker and performance coach. In 2015, she founded the Carnelian Connection, and has worked with both corporate and individual clients to help reduce stress, boost their productivity and achieve at their highest levels. As such, her clients have included such names as KIND Snacks, Dorel Sports Group and Hearst NYC.
Dufour also has a background in meditation, and has created meditation scripts and guided recordings for MUSE Meditator and the Meditation Studio App.
Though she never pursued health care as career, Dufour says she’s always had respect and sympathy for what these professionals do. And as the COVID-19 pandemic escalated across America, she was struck by the hardships of doctors, nurses and others in the health care industry, who battled burnout and exhaustion as they strove to heal others.
“Their work really entails giving a lot to other people,” Dufour says. “I’m highly aware of this because I’ve grown up near it. I noticed the stress of their work and I thought ‘How can we take care of our caregivers?’ ”
An opportunity to do just that came to her through an encounter with Kristin Gajewski, who, at the time, was a student in the doctor of nursing
practice program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The two had met at a dance retreat in the Maldives, where Dufour was offering meditation.
Gajewski followed up with Dufour earlier this year, looking for help with the final project needed to meet her program requirements. “I wanted to look at meditation as an intervention to reduce stress. I initially reached out to Christina to ask for recommendations of sources for guided meditations,” Gajewski says.
Instead, Dufour pitched an idea for teaching meditation for health care workers. Dufours says she’d been kicking the idea around for a while, hoping it would give nurses and others in the field a coping mechanism for their stress.
Gajewski immediately took to the idea. “Meditation is a cheap and easy to learn tool to help cope with these very real and prevalent responses to the current health care climate,” she says. “Nurses, and health care workers in general, need to take care of themselves in order to be able to continue to take care of others.”
The two decided to collaborate on the course, and, for six weeks, starting in June, offered a virtual meditation program to 17 employees of the dialysis clinic in Southeastern Wisconsin where Gajewski worked. Every Sunday, participants received a newsletter that described the techniques and goals for the week, along with a link to the audio recording of the guided meditation.
The participants did intermittent surveys to determine if there was a positive impact on their reported levels of stress.
The results were encouraging. Dufour says, even though one of the participants actually contracted COVID throughout the course of the project, overall, participants seemed to find the class helpful.
She says not only can meditation release tension, but the practice also can give people perspective on their stress, and help them to manage it. “What I think people were able to get out of it is an ability to view the things going on in lives a little objectively,” she says.
Gajewski echoes those thoughts. “Meditation can help reduce stress no matter what the cause,” she says. “This could include personal or work related stressors.”
Dufour says she was so pleased with how the Wisconsin program went, she hopes to offer more classes to health care workers, first responders and others in high-pressure fields that work with the public. “Ultimately, this is giving the participant tools and practices support them the rest of their life,” she says.
“MEDITATION IS A CHEAP AND EASY TO LEARN TOOL TO HELP COPE WITH THESE VERY REAL AND PREVALENT RESPONSES TO THE CURRENT HEALTH-CARE CLIMATE.”