By Dr. Ellen Fink-Samnick DBH, MSW, LCSW, ACSW, CCM, CCTP, CRP, FCM
I was recently doing something I do often: stand in my shower with hot water cascading pouring down. A sudden and surprising feeling came over me: I don’t want to get out of here.
This was beyond the normal comfort and revival that comes from consciously pausing to engage in a desired activity. This feeling was overpowering. It served as a cue that I was beyond stressed: I was on overloaded.
Setting the Context
Some people enjoy a long, luxurious bath to ease a troubled mind, if not a busy one with countless moving parts and activities to address. There has always been something inviting about a shower. The space offers a fusion of practical, emotional, and sensory experiences that makes it my preferred place for self-regulation and restoration.
There are many reasons showers or baths feel so restorative:
- Stress Relief and Emotional Decompression: Warm water calms the nervous system and creates a sense of safety, quiet, and temporary escape from current demands.
- Sensory Comfort: The warmth, pressure, sound, and enclosure of these spaces can feel grounding and soothing, particularly after periods of overstimulation or emotional exhaustion.
- The Need for Solitude: Bathrooms are among the few places where people can experience privacy and uninterrupted time.
- Fatigue and Burnout: Sometimes the reprieve provided by a shower or bath feels easier than returning to responsibilities, decisions, and stressors waiting outside the door.
- Mood Changes: There is an important caution here. Anyone who experiences anxiety, depression, grief, or isolation may find themselves lingering because the shower or bath feels emotionally safer or easier than the outside world.
- Physical Relief: Warm water can temporarily reduce muscle tension, pain, headaches, and stiffness.
- Transition Difficulty: Sometimes the experience is less about the shower or bath itself, and more about simply not wanting the next part of the day to unfold. This might be a professional focus, you might be dreading, as a meeting with a patient, their family, or member of the care team. It might be a personal activity, as a delayed discussion with your partner about financial decisions or wrestling with your children about doing their homework.
The Crispy-Edges Phenomenon
Many of my colleagues have recently shared how they are feeling increasingly stressed, or “crispier around the edges” than usual. The emotional labor of caregiving, leadership, advocacy, and constant problem-solving accumulates quietly over time for our case management workforce. We deal with a chronic occupational hazard of addressing the needs of others, before, if not instead of ourselves. This dynamic can unconsciously diminish our well-being.
A shower provides me solace from the many professional and personal commitments in my life. It is where I restore balance and replenish my energy. The relaxation provided by this space can also allow major creative innovation to strike. This action is especially helpful given the amount of creative brainpower I need to advance my work products.
But this recent moment felt different. The shower that day was not simply a need for restoration. It spoke more to resistance. My reluctance to step out of the shower was an important reminder that self-regulation alone, cannot compensate for chronic overload. At some point, restoration must be paired with limit-setting.
The Reminder About Limits
Those of us in the helping professions that comprise our case management workforce, are skilled at recognizing overload in others while minimizing it in ourselves. We normalize pushing through exhaustion. We celebrate productivity. We postpone recovery.
Our nervous systems eventually speak up. Sometimes they whisper through fatigue and irritability. Sometimes they shout through tears, shutdown, illness, or sudden realization that the shower feels safer than the day ahead.
This moment becomes an invitation to pause and ask oneself several pointed questions:
- Where have my boundaries become too porous?
- What responsibilities am I carrying that are no longer sustainable?
- When did restoration become survival?
- What would happen if I gave myself permission to do less?
Moving from Awareness to Action
Restoration and resilience are not simply about finding a temporary escape. They also about creating conditions that make escape less necessary. These may mean:
- Say no more often
- Reduce unnecessary obligations
- Delegate responsibilities
- Build intentional recovery time into the day
- Seek support rather than automatically providing it
- Recognize that productivity is not the same as worth
The shower will always stay a place of comfort and restoration for me. But it now signifies something else: a mirror that reflects the level of overload I have allowed myself to carry.
Sometimes the strongest signal that we need to impose limits is not dramatic at all. Sometimes it is simply standing under hot water in a shower, realizing we do not want to leave, and understanding that the feeling mandates our attention.
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Bio: Dr. Ellen Fink-Samnick is an award-winning author, educator, and thought leader in the healthcare industry. Her focus is on ethics, health equity, integrated care, professional case management, quality improvement, and trauma-informed education and leadership. Dr. Fink-Samnick serves as a faculty member, academic advisor, Institutional Review Board (IRB) coordinator for the Doctoral Program at Cummings Graduate Institute. Her extensive contributions include authorship of seven scholarly texts, over 100 articles, industry position-papers, book chapters, and other knowledge products. Dr. Fink-Samnick is an editor for Wolter Kluwer Health’s Professional Case Management Journal and actively participates in national leadership and consultant roles across the industry, including for the Case Management Society of America.