The moment I walk through the front door, I do one thing before anything else.
Not the dishes. Not the laundry. Not checking what’s for dinner or scrolling through my phone. I lie down. Right there, on the couch or the bed, shoes still on sometimes — and I close my eyes for 10 to 20 minutes. Nothing. Just stillness.
I call it rebooting my brain. Because that’s exactly what it is. The shift runs a kind of software that needs to close before I can open anything else. And until I give it that window — that small, non-negotiable window — nothing else works properly anyway.
This is the self care that actually changed things for me. Not a bubble bath. Not a weekend away. Ten minutes on the couch before the rest of the evening began.
Why “Self Care” Advice Usually Misses the Mark for Nurse Mums
Most self care content is written for people with discretionary time. Nurse mums don’t have discretionary time. We have shift work, daycare pickups, bedtime routines, and a partner who is also tired. The gap between “take a long bath with candles” and our actual lives is significant.
Real self care for nurse mums isn’t about addition — adding more things to an already full life. It’s about subtraction. Removing the pressure. Protecting small windows. Doing less, deliberately, so that the doing you can’t avoid doesn’t destroy you.
What Actually Works my experience
The 10-20 minute reboot. Before anything else after a shift — lie down, close your eyes, do nothing. Not sleep necessarily. Just stillness. Your nervous system needs to know the shift is over. This is how you tell it. Everything after this goes better: the pickup, the dinner, the bedtime. Start here.
Shower and change as a ritual, not a chore. Scrubs off, hot shower, normal clothes on. This is a signal, not just hygiene. Your body learns: shift over, different mode now. It works faster than you’d expect.
Lower your standard for “enough” on hard days. Frozen meal for dinner is dinner. One episode of something you like after he’s asleep is rest. Sitting quietly with a cup of tea while he plays is self care. You don’t need to earn rest with productivity first.
Protect one thing that is just yours. One small, regular thing that exists outside of nursing and mothering. A podcast on the drive home. Ten minutes with your Bible before anyone wakes up. A walk around the block alone. It doesn’t need to be long. It needs to be consistent and it needs to be yours.
Say it out loud to your husband. “I need 20 minutes when I get home.” Not as a request. As information. Partners cannot guess what depleted looks like from the inside. Tell him what you need before you need it.
The Real Definition of Self Care for Nurse Mums
Self care is not what you do after everything else is done. If you wait for everything to be done, it never happens.
Self care is what you do first — before the dishes, before the laundry, before you’ve earned it — because a nurse mum who has not rested even briefly is not actually available to anyone. Not her patients. Not her son. Not herself.
You cannot pour from an empty vessel. But you also cannot fill a vessel that never stops pouring. The reboot is not selfish. It is structural.
✝️ Permission to stop: Jesus withdrew. Regularly, deliberately, before the next thing began. “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place.” — Mark 1:35. He didn’t wait until everything was done. He stopped first. You are allowed to do the same. The 20 minutes on the couch is not laziness. It is wisdom. It is stewardship. It is you choosing to show up well — for your patients, for your son, for yourself.
Start with the couch. The rest can wait 20 minutes.
For more on nurse mom life in Australia — the survival strategies and the grace in between: → Nurse Mom Life in Australia: Balancing Shifts, Motherhood & the Guilt Nobody Talks About
Shifting with Grace — for the mum who is learning that rest is not a reward. It’s a requirement.