A forthcoming workbook · For nurses and healthcare workers
Both Sides of the Bed
The vigilance that makes you exceptional at work is the same vigilance that is costing you something outside it.
A somatic workbook for nurses, techs, medics, therapists, chaplains, and anyone who absorbs other people’s worst days as a condition of employment. Written by a registered nurse who has also been the patient.
The one idea
One physiology, seen from two sides
Most resources written for healthcare workers pick a side. They are either clinical education, teaching you how to care for traumatised patients, or they are wellbeing material, teaching you how to survive the job, and the split between the two has never been real.
The nurse who is still scanning the room three hours after her shift ended is running the same activated physiology as the patient she discharged that morning. The regulation that gets you home is the regulation your patients feel when you walk into the room, and the knowledge that makes someone better at the bedside is the same knowledge that gets them out of the car park.
There are not two subjects here. There is one, and this book teaches it once so that it can be used twice.
You might recognize this
When the shift ends and your body has not been told
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Still reading the room for danger, hours after report is over
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Sleep that gives back some of it and never quite all of it
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Three days into leave before you feel like a person, roughly twelve hours before you go back
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Something ordinary, a sound or a smell, putting you somewhere you did not agree to go
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The one everyone relies on, quietly wondering who holds it for you
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Home with nothing left, and the creative life you used to have gone quiet
You are not doing it wrong. A nervous system that learned to stay ready does not stand down because the shift ended.
From part two
Three practices you can use before the book exists
Somatic work usually assumes a mat and thirty quiet minutes. You have a supply closet and ninety seconds, so everything in this book takes under two minutes, works in scrubs, needs no privacy, and looks like nothing at all.
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The between-rooms reset
One long exhale at the door, on the way out. The purpose is specific, which is that it stops the last room from walking into the next one. You will not manage it every time, and managing it half the time is a completely different shift.
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The supply closet minute
Feet flat, pressed down until you feel the floor push back. Then unclench three places, in this order, because these are the three that hold without being asked: the jaw, the shoulders, and the pelvic floor. Then two long exhales, and back out. You went in for something anyway.
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The discharge ritual
Report is over and your body has not been told. At the last handwash, one sentence: I am finished for today. At the exterior door, one long exhale. In the car before the engine, hands on the wheel, three breaths, and three things said out loud: what I am leaving here, what I am taking with me, and what needs somewhere to go later. That last one is an appointment, and it is the part everyone skips.
If you are flooded right now
Do not do any of these. A body that is already overwhelmed does not need to be asked to notice more. Go outside-in instead: cold water on the face, push hard against a wall for ten seconds, walk fast to the end of the corridor and back, or name five things you can see out loud.
Build your kit on a good day, because nobody chooses tools mid-wave.
From chapter two
There are names for some of what you carry
What you have been handed is one word, and the word is burnout, and it arrived with a resilience module. Here are four, because a thing you can name is a thing you can work with.
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Burnout
Real, well studied, and not the whole story. The World Health Organization places it in ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition, defined as chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Managed by whom is the question the word never answers.
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Moral injury
Borrowed from combat and applied to clinicians by Talbot and Dean in 2018. Not exhaustion but betrayal, meaning knowing what your patient needs, being trained to provide it, and being structurally prevented from providing it, over and over.
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Secondary traumatic stress
The cost of proximity. Symptoms that mirror post-traumatic stress, arising not from your own catastrophe but from repeated close exposure to somebody else’s.
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The second victim
Albert Wu’s term for the clinician quietly wrecked by an adverse event that nobody debriefed. The term is contested, and the book gives space to the objection.
And underneath those four sits a quieter question, which is whether some of the vigilance was already there before the first shift. A great many people arrive in caregiving work already fluent in reading a room for danger. Nursing did not give you those instincts. Nursing hired them.
What the evidence says
You are inside a phenomenon
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46%
of health workers reported feeling burned out often or very often in 2022, up from 32% four years earlier.
CDC Vital Signs, MMWR, 2023
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About 40%
of nurses intend to leave the workforce or retire within five years, and of those, 41.5% name stress and burnout as the root cause.
NCSBN National Nursing Workforce Study, 2024
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About 27%
probable post-traumatic stress among nurses, the highest of any health profession measured, against roughly 4 to 6% lifetime prevalence in the general population.
Meta-analysis, 2026
Probable means scoring above a screening threshold, which is not the same as a diagnosis.
What these figures do and do not show
These figures carry their limits with them. Most of this data was gathered at the peak of the pandemic and rates have moderated since, the differences between studies are substantial, and screening instruments are not diagnoses. It was worse, it is somewhat better, and somewhat better is still a crisis.
And when the CDC examined what actually protected health workers, the factors were having a say in decisions, trusting management, and having enough time to complete the work. That is a federal agency saying, in the politest available language, that this was never going to be solved by an app.
What is inside
Eleven chapters, organized around the shift
Every chapter carries the same five pieces in the same order, so you learn the shape once and can navigate it while exhausted: the teaching, one practice, a translation into patient care, prompts with room to write, and an outside-in alternative for the days when looking inward is the wrong tool.
Part one · The naming
1. The vigilance that doesn’t switch off
2. The names nobody gave you
3. What you witness enters your body too
Part two · The shift
4. Before shift: arriving on purpose
5. During shift: sixty-second interventions
6. After shift: the transition
7. The drive home: metabolizing rather than ruminating
Part three · The long arc
8. What accumulates, and what heals
9. Trauma-informed care, from the inside
10. When it is more than this
11. Building a career you can survive
Plus a reflective inventory that produces no score, a resource appendix covering referral, peer support and licensure questions, and crisis resources at the front of the book rather than buried at the back.
Be the first to know
The book arrives in 2027
It is being written now. Leave your email and I will tell you when it is ready, and nothing else will arrive except the Sunday Letter, which you can leave at any time.
For conferences and health systems
This material is also a talk
The work in this book is available as a keynote for nursing associations, health systems, nurse residency programmes, and schools of nursing. Forty-five minutes plus questions, with a longer version suitable for continuing education settings.
Questions, answered plainly
About Both Sides of the Bed
When does the book come out?
Spring 2027. It is being written now, and the waitlist above is the only way I will announce it. There is nothing to buy today and nothing to pre-order.
Is this therapy?
No. It is trauma recovery coaching and education, written by a registered nurse and certified trauma recovery coach. It is not therapy, diagnosis, or medical treatment, and it does not replace care from a licensed professional. If you are working with a therapist or a physician, this work can walk beside that care.
Who is it for?
Nurses first, and then the wider floor: techs, respiratory therapists, medics, chaplains, and anyone who absorbs other people’s worst days as part of the job. It is written for the person mid-career who has started to notice that something has not switched off.
Do I have to be in crisis to find it useful?
No, and if you are in crisis today this is not the right resource. The crisis lines at the bottom of this page are, and they are staffed by people whose entire job is that conversation.
Are the practices safe for everyone?
They are gentle by design and they are not right for everyone. If attending to your own body reliably makes things worse, work through this material alongside a licensed professional rather than alone, and use the outside-in alternatives instead.
The vigilance kept your patients alive. Nobody told you how to put it down.
Tell me when it is ready