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Nursing is a demanding profession that requires advanced knowledge, specific skills, and caring. Nurses are involved regularly in intense, emotional, and sometimes life-threatening experiences with their clients. These experiences cause stress and have the potential to affect the psychological well-being of nurses. The World Health Organization defines stress as “a state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation” (World Health Organization, 2023). Research has consistently demonstrated that stress is a significant trigger for depressive symptoms (Fuchs & Flügge, 2004) and is strongly correlated with anxiety (Daviu et al., 2019). Furthermore, anxiety and depressive symptoms frequently co-occur, highlighting their high comorbidity (Kalin, 2020).
Like their counterparts in practice, nursing students report high levels of stress. Stressors specific to nursing school include academic demands, client care responsibilities, and interactions with nursing staff and faculty (Labrague, 2024). Stress levels are higher in nursing students than their counterpart non-nursing college students (Bartlett et al., 2016). Li and colleagues (2020) found a statistically significant negative correlation between caring behavior and stress perception in a sample of 792 nursing students. In addition, nursing students also may have financial concerns, homelessness, relationship stressors, health conditions, and other social determinants of health that may hinder their ability to focus on learning.
Hospitals have been actively implementing strategies to retain nurses for decades. Schools of nursing also are exploring ways to decrease stress and improve success and retention. Onieva-Zafra et al. (2020) examined the coping strategies, perceived stress, and anxiety of nursing students and suggested that nursing faculty should develop programs designed to aid nursing students in coping with stressors. Schools of nursing have included self-care modalities such as yoga, progressive muscle relaxation exercise, transformative thinking, and reflection that have yielded positive results in regard to self-compassion, mindfulness, burnout, and resilience (Mathad et al., 2017; Pelit-Aksu et al., 2021; Rajamohan et al., 2023).
Mandates for system-wide change in nursing retention strategies have emphasized the need for more holistically prepared and practice-ready nursing graduates (Drennan & Ross, 2019). Combining the recognized nursing shortage nationwide with the desire to build a more holistic nursing program, a baccalaureate nursing (BSN) subplan was...