Extending the Heuristic Inquiry Research Process to Enable Improved Psycho-Spiritual Self-Care Choices Associated With Workplace Stress and Suffering

Abstract

During workplace stress, feelings of failure and inadequacy can arise. Employee assistance and treatment practitioners not to mention the sufferer themselves often encounter the “heuristics of stress” where sufferers, because of well-established patterns can avoid self-care or engage in negative self-talk and self-judgment. This articles extends the heuristic inquiry process, for the first time, beyond use by researchers, to more directly inform a sufferer’s self-kindly, psycho-spiritual self-care. It does this by synthesising and integrating selected scholarship on meaningful detachment, humility and self-compassion to intuitively challenge problematic inner patterns and stimulating self-compassion and inner reflection to bring about healing. In fact, subject to further confirmation, the intuitively-driven, heuristic inquiry process extends inter-disciplinary conceptualisations of self-care which enable the stressed and suffering, particularly as related to harsh self-judgments and blame to reflect on and discover meaning and transformative self-care options in and around the workplace. Finally, although more work is necessary, this paper offers an innovative and reflective approach to worker self-care.