Boundaries Aren't the Problem- Not Knowing Which Kind You Need Is
- Heather Strand
- Apr 2
- 4 min read
The 3 inner boundaries nursing school skipped… and what they're costing you.
By Heather Strand: Mindset Fitness + Self-Leadership Coach
What if the thing draining you isn't nursing itself but the fact that nobody ever taught you how to protect yourself from the inside?
Let's be honest for a second. Most of us came into this profession with a God-given sense of purpose and a whole lot of heart. And we got really good training on the outside stuff. Assessments, interventions, critical thinking under pressure. I spent years in the ICU and I can tell you we were prepared for a lot. But inner boundaries? Not once. Not in school, not in orientation, not in any CEU I ever sat through.
And I think that gap is costing nurses everything.
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This isn't theory for me. It's personal
I didn't learn about inner boundaries in a classroom. I learned about them the hard way: five days in the hospital and then, fifteen months later, seven months off work.
My body kept the score before my mind caught up.
I loved nursing. I was good at it. But I had zero tools for what was happening on the inside. I thought the problem was time management. Turns out nobody had ever taught me how to protect myself from the inside out.
That's what eventually led me out of bedside nursing and into this work… because I kept meeting nurses living some version of my story with no idea there was another way.
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External skills without inner boundaries is a slow leak
Most nurses I work with aren't struggling because they don't care enough. They're struggling because they care so much, and nobody ever showed them where their responsibility ends and someone else's begins.
That's not a character flaw. That's a training gap.
According to Nurse.com's 2024 Salary and Work-Life Report, nearly half of nurses report mental health impacts from their work, and 23% are considering leaving the profession entirely.¹ We don't have a compassion problem in nursing. We have a sustainability problem. And sustainability is an inside job.
This is where self-leadership comes in.
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Three inner boundaries nobody taught you
1. Mental boundaries: your brain after the shift
You know the drive home where you're still in the building? Still replaying that moment, that decision, that patient? That's not reflection… That's your mental boundary being nonexistent.
Mental boundaries are the difference between processing your shift and being haunted by it. Nurses are natural problem-solvers, so our brains don't want to let go. Add perfectionism and a tendency to take responsibility for things completely outside our control, and you've got a loop that runs all night.
Reflection is healthy. Spiraling is just suffering on repeat. Learning to tell the difference, and actually stop one of them, is a skill. It just has to be learned.
2. Emotional boundaries: whose feelings are you carrying?
Be honest. How many people's emotions did you absorb on your last shift? Your patient's fear. Your coworker's frustration. Your charge nurse's bad mood. Your family member's grief.
Emotional boundaries don't mean you stop feeling things. They mean you learn that someone else's emotions aren't always yours to fix, carry, or solve. You can be fully present with someone's pain without taking it home in your chest.
This is where the "dependable one" identity quietly destroys nurses. Research consistently shows that nurses exposed to chronic emotional distress without adequate internal support structures face significantly elevated risk for compassion fatigue.² Being reliable is a gift. Believing you're only valuable when you're absorbing everyone else's hard stuff is a trap.
3. Spiritual boundaries: when compassion becomes self-abandonment
This one is the quietest and the deepest.
Spiritual boundaries are about what happens when your God-given sense of purpose slowly starts to hollow you out. When you're giving from a genuine place of calling, but somewhere along the way you stopped checking in with yourself. Stopped asking how am I actually doing?
Here's what I know: you were not called to disappear. Caring deeply does not require betraying yourself. I want you to sit with that.
Compassion that costs you your identity isn't sustainable. It's not noble. And it's not what you were wired for.
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Both things get to be true
You can love this work and need real protection inside of it. Those two things aren't in conflict and actually belong together.
You're good at telling patients to take care of themselves. You write the discharge instructions. You explain why rest matters, why boundaries around diet matter, why follow-through matters. You believe it for them.
Now apply it to you.
You don't have to start big. Just notice which of these three, mental, emotional, spiritual, feels the most unfamiliar right now. That's your starting point.
If this resonates and you’re ready to explore what leading yourself well could look like in your life, I offer complimentary strategy sessions for nurses who are feeling stretched thin and want a steadier, more sustainable way forward.
Your calling is real. So is your need to protect the person living it.
Lead Yourself First 🩺
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Footnotes
¹ Nurse.com. 2024 Nurse Salary and Work-Life Report. August 2025. https://www.nurse.com/blog/2024-nurse-burnout-statistics-a-detailed-look/
² Weaver, Susan H., et al. "Trauma, Compassion Fatigue, and Burnout in Nurses." Nurse Leader, 2024. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9098943/
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Heather Strand | Mindset Fitness Coaching
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