How to stop bringing work home when you work in social care

Susana Carr

I've driven home from work and realised I have no memory of the journey. My body was in the car. My mind was still in the last visit, replaying what was said, what wasn't said, what I should have done differently.

Most people who work in social care know that feeling. The job doesn't clock off when you do. It follows you into the car, into the house, into the evening, sometimes into the night.

This isn't a character flaw, and it's not a sign that you're not coping. It's what happens when your nervous system has been in high activation all day and hasn't had a chance to discharge. Your brain is still doing its job, scanning and processing, because no one told it the working day was over.

The question isn't whether the job will follow you home. In this work, it often will. The question is what you do with it when it arrives.

Why social care is harder to leave at work

Every profession carries stress. But social care creates a specific kind that's harder to switch off from.

The decisions matter in ways most jobs don't. A missed call, a family you couldn't reach: these aren't abstract errors. They involve real people, often vulnerable ones, and your brain knows that. So it keeps processing.

You also spend your day holding other people's distress. Disclosures. Families in crisis. That emotional weight doesn't just evaporate because you've closed your laptop or handed over at shift change. It's stored in your nervous system, and it needs somewhere to go.

And the system itself adds another layer that's hard to separate from the human cost of the work. The unfinished cases. The decision you disagreed with but couldn't change. Carrying institutional frustration on top of human distress is exhausting in a way that's difficult to explain to people outside the profession.

What doesn't work, and why

The standard advice for switching off from work is well-meaning but often misses the point for people in frontline roles.

"Leave work at work" assumes a clean boundary that doesn't exist when your caseload involves children's safety or complex family situations. "Talk to someone" is useful, but not always available at 9pm when you're lying awake going over a decision you made that morning.

These approaches ask your conscious mind to override what your nervous system is doing. But the nervous system doesn't respond to logic. It responds to signals.

What actually helps is something that works at that level, something that tells your body, not just your mind, that the working day is over and it's safe to come down.

Creating a transition, not a boundary

I've stopped thinking about this as "leaving work at work" and started thinking about it as creating a transition. A moment, however brief, that signals to your nervous system that you're moving from one context to another.

This doesn't need to be elaborate. It needs to be consistent and embodied, meaning it has to involve your body, not just your thoughts.

Some people use music deliberately, the same playlist every commute, so the nervous system starts to associate it with decompression. Others use the car itself as a container: radio on until they pull into the street, then silence for two minutes before going inside.

What matters is that the transition is intentional. Your nervous system is looking for a cue that the context has changed. You have to give it one.

What EFT tapping adds to this

EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) has become part of my own end-of-day transition, and it's what I've built MyTappyPlace around, because of how well it works in this context.

Tapping is a structured practice that combines gentle pressure on specific points on the face and body with spoken phrases that name what you're actually carrying. The tapping sends a calming signal to the amygdala, the part of the brain driving the stress response, while the words help your nervous system process and release what it's been holding.

A short session after work might sound like:

"Even though I'm still carrying what happened today, and my mind keeps going back to it, I accept that I did what I could with what I had."

Then tapping through the points, top of the head, eyebrow, side of the eye, under the eye, top of the lip, chin, collarbone, while staying with whatever is most present from the day.

Three to five minutes. In the car before you go inside, or at the kitchen table before the evening starts. It doesn't require silence or a particular state of mind. Just a few minutes and the willingness to name what you're carrying.

In the workshops I've delivered to frontline teams, this is consistently the thing that lands most: not as a technique to master, but as permission. Permission to acknowledge what the day took from you before you try to be present for anything else.

The thing underneath this

There's something worth naming that sits beneath all of this.

A lot of people in social care carry a quiet belief that bringing the work home is the price of caring. That if you truly care about the people you work with, of course it follows you. Switching off feels like not caring enough.

I don't think that's true. A nervous system that never gets to discharge isn't more caring. It's more depleted. And a depleted nervous system makes worse decisions and burns out faster. Protecting your own recovery isn't separate from doing good work. It is part of it.

Putting the work down at the end of the day isn't abandonment. It's how you show up again tomorrow.

Where to start

If you'd like to try a short tapping session designed specifically for the end of a frontline working day, the free session on this site, "Releasing the Weight of the Day", takes three minutes and needs no prior experience.

If you're a manager or team leader thinking about how to support your team with this, the workshops page has more about what I offer to organisations.

Susana is a qualified Social Worker, Registered Manager of an Ofsted outstanding rated fostering agency, and Level 2 EFT Practitioner trained through the Matrix Reimprinting Academy. She founded MyTappyPlace to bring nervous system regulation tools to frontline professionals.