New Grad Nurse Anxiety PLS HELPPPP.

[raaaachel]

I’m a new grad nurse who just started my residency job a few months ago. My position is on nights but started my orientation during days with a nurse I was familiar with. I never got nervous or anxious for day shift. I’ve since transitioned to my nights orientation to a different nurse. She’s nice but I was really nervous to start following a difference nurse and was praying they were going to be nice. My first shift with her was fine but my second one wasn’t the best. I can tell that when she gets frustrated she can have an attitude and make me feel really really stupid. My next shift with her I apologized to her if I frustrated her and did my best to learn from the shift before. The next week and a half was fine and we didn’t have any problems. We actually get along well! Then came a shift recently where she was really frustrated from the beginning of the shift and I felt like I was just adding on to it. We were behind and I’m still getting oriented to paging doctors and understanding their orders. I understand how she can get frustrated with me and not getting to it fast enough or addressing / prioritizing correctly but she really makes me feel so awful about the mistakes I make and the questions I ask. She can be a little condescending and did it once in front of a patient which actually made me tear up in their room. Both of these instances makes me terrified to come back to work and to even work as a nurse. I well like I can’t enjoy my day offs fully because I keep thinking about what happened and what can happen during my next shifts.

I feel so depressed and discouraged about coming to work and being a nurse in the hospital and it makes me think that I really dislike bedside nursing. How do you deal with new nurse anxiety? When does it get better? How can I take better care of my mental health as a nurse?

[andrea3434]

A good preceptor should not make you afraid to ask questions.

do you have an educator on your unit or someone else you can talk to about this? I have a friend who requested a new preceptor. The original actually later apologized. I get not wanting to rock the boat but the situation is not conducive to learning.