Simply put, physical well-being comes down to eating, resting, moving, and hydrating. You know this bucket is low and needs attention when you have or experience: fatigue and low energy poor nutrition and eating habits a sedentary lifestyle frequent illnesses and a weakened immune system chronic aches, pains, and illnesses …

Mental well-being refers to our ability to regularly experience or engage in mental or intellectual stimulation. You know this bucket is low and needs attention when you have or experience: a lack of interest or engagement difficulty concentrating negative thought patterns social withdrawal Optimal mental well-being looks like: curiosity and…

Historically, self-care has been marketed as an indulgence — images of lounging in a tub filled with bubbles or sitting on a sofa, feet up, reading a magazine while sipping tea. …

Boundaries are essential to practicing self-care and flourishing in our life and work. Most of us weren’t taught the benefits of boundaries as children, and now as humanitarians, honoring our limits through boundary setting can feel rude, aggressive, or selfish. …

In the mindfulness course I teach, we talk about how the brain pumps thoughts like the heart pumps blood. …

During my twenty years of humanitarian service I experienced everything from burnout and compassion fatigue to vicarious trauma and moral injury — and this doesn’t even include what was happening outside of work. I operated almost exclusively in survival mode, my nervous system in a perpetual state of fight or…

Not all lessons are created equal. Some lessons we learn are small — little reminders of what truly matters peppered along our journey. Other lessons are extraordinary — fundamentally changing the course of our entire lives. Over the past twenty years of working in the humanitarian sector, this is the…

Have you ever thought about how you became a humanitarian? Why you chose this particular path? It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: what if the humanitarian path we’ve chosen is actually an invitation — to see and heal and love and embrace our own humanity through the…

Compassion fatigue is a significant issue in the humanitarian sector because of the emotional demands of working with vulnerable populations. Compassion fatigue arises when we neglect our own well-being while helping others, which over time can lead to emotional exhaustion, reduced empathy, and increased cynicism. …