Self Care in Times of Total Insanity

You're listening to the Nonprofit Power Podcast. In today's episode, we're taking a look at self-care in times of total insanity. So stay tuned. If you wanna have real and powerful influence over the money and policy decisions that impact your organization and the people you serve, then you're in the right place. I. I'm Kath Patrick, and I've helped dozens of progressive nonprofit leaders take their organizations to new and higher levels of impact and success by building powerful influence with the decision makers that matter. It is possible to get a critical mass of the money and policy decision makers in your world to be as invested in your success as you are, to have them seeking you out as an equal partner and to have them. Bringing opportunities and resources to you. This podcast will help you do just that. Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast. Hey there folks. Welcome to another episode of the Nonprofit Power Podcast. I'm your host, Kath Patrick. I'm so glad you're here for today's episode because I wanna have a conversation with you that I've been having with so many of my friends and my colleagues, people that I've known forever, and people that I just practically meet on the street. And all of us are dealing with the same set of stuff, which is that the level of stress and overwhelm and anxiety over what is happening in the world, what is happening to our country, what is happening to the people we love and care about, what is happening to our communities. There's so much bad, scary, overwhelming stuff going on constantly that it is really hard sometimes to just get out of bed in the morning. Nevermind show up as our best selves, as our best empowered warriors fighting for what's right and fighting for the people we serve, and to protect our communities and all the members of our communities. And we can't do that without some help. So the conversation is increasingly turning to a search for information, a search for ideas. What are you doing to cope? How are you managing? It really hit home for me this week, when I had my annual wellness check with my primary care doc, who is wonderful. She listens really well. She asks really good questions, and she pays attention. So she starts conversation with, so how are you? And I answered the way I always answer these days, which is if you don't count the political environment, I'm doing fine. I'm great. My physical health is good. Mental, emotional health, eh? It depends on the day. It depends on what crap is coming out of this administration in any given moment. And she said to me, now granted, I live in the Washington DC area, so there are a lot of political folk and a lot of folk are being affected by government cuts and all of that. But she said to me, I hear that from almost everyone who walks through my door. And then she looked at me very seriously and said, how are you doing? How are you coping? Are you okay? And that's when it really hit home for me, because like I say, when I meet my neighbors on the street and they're walking their dog or whatever, the conversation turns to the same set of stuff. And we are all both asking genuinely, are you okay? Because we know there are so many reasons not to be okay right now. But there's also a little bit of searching in that, like, have you figured something out? Can you share it with me? So that's the conversation I wanted to have today because I think it's incredibly important that we talk with one another about this on a regular basis, and that we keep our emotional wellbeing and our physical wellbeing, because they are tied, at the forefront of our attention in this time. And I know that that is a lot easier said than done, which is why I want us to talk about it. I will begin this by saying I don't have the answer. Nobody does. But I have some thoughts and observations that I wanted to share both about what I'm finding is working for me. And what I'm hearing from others is working for them. And what I see in that are some patterns, some consistencies that I think are worth calling out. There are also a couple of cautionary notes that I think it's important for us as nonprofit leaders to flag and be super aware of with our teams because they're looking to us for help. And too often we are not prepared We haven't in the past had to necessarily be prepared to give that level of support for emotional wellbeing. But we're there now. And so I think as leaders, this is a super important question for us to be thinking about very consciously and being very intentional with our teams about how we deal with this, how we talk about it, and how we model both behavior and an environment of policy and practice around how we support the members of our team. So that's a lot, but it's all basically the same thing, which is how do we all be okay when so much is not okay in the world? So I mentioned patterns and I think what seems fairly clear is that there are two major aspects to both wellbeing and therefore to effective self-care in this process. And I acknowledge that the term self-care gets thrown around a lot. It's poorly defined and overused and it's all sorts of things, but I think it is at the heart of what we need to do here. We need to take care of ourselves. Right? That's really all it means. It's not a product line. It's not a membership you have to join. It's just the concept of taking care of ourselves when that feels especially hard, and when we may feel like, there are certainly days when I feel like, it's all I can do to just get through. And survive the day so that I can show up and do the work that I'm committed to do and be there for the people that I'm committed to being there for. And figuring out how to add on taking care of me can sometimes feel unattainable, and just like too much work. I also know that that doesn't work for very long, and that is just super clear. So what to do? There's two pieces to wellbeing and self care. There's physical wellbeing, and there's emotional, spiritual, mental wellbeing. And of course they're inextricably tied, but I think it's helpful to think about them as two kind of categories. In that, I think it's really helpful if we understand the physiology of stress, of what stress does to our bodies. Cause we live in these bodies. We can't exist outside of them. So we gotta take care of the body first and foremost. If it quits, we're in deep trouble. And right now, I'm aware of way too many nonprofit leaders who are completely neglecting their physical health because they're going flat out just trying to do their job. But we know that's not sustainable. And what I fear is that an awful lot of us are headed for a kind of scary cliff, because you can only push your physical endurance, your physical capacity so far. You can only neglect your physical health so long before stuff starts to break, before systems break, and you start having really serious stuff go wrong. Which by the way, will definitely take you out of the fight. You know, part of it is that your body is actually pretty good at this. If we refuse to listen to our bodies when they say, Hey, we need a break, we need to be taken care of. If we won't listen, they'll make us listen. And they'll keep smacking us with bigger and bigger problems until finally we're forced to pay attention. Now, if we're lucky, we just get the flu and have to go lie down for a while. If we're not lucky, we wind up in the hospital or worse. We don't want that. Nobody wants that. It also, I will submit, does not serve the cause. I think now more than ever, there is both a strong pull toward martyrdom. And there are also massive reasons why martyrdom is an especially terrible idea right now. Cause we can't afford to lose anybody in this fight. And martyrdom eventually takes you outta the game. That's not helpful. So understanding the physiology of stress and what it does inside your body is really important for awareness, but it's also important because then that information tells us how to mitigate that. All of the physical techniques that you have heard about or learned, or hopefully are practicing regularly, to mitigate the physiological effects of stress are super important to do. And it's kind of like anything else. If your diet is a nutritional disaster six days a week, and one day a week you try to eat healthy and clean. Well, you know, that's gonna have not a ton of great effect. It's better than eating crud seven days a week. Or if you go to the gym once every two weeks, but you're not consistent about it, it's better than never going. But it's not gonna give you anywhere the benefits as it will if you do it consistently. Same thing with managing the physiological effects of stress. The more we can build into our daily practice some very simple, takes under a minute to do most of these things, to manage the physiological effects of stress, the better. So breathing. Breathing is absolutely always accessible to you. It doesn't matter how much multitasking you're doing, you can add deep breathing into that multitasking process. Or, radical thought, you could pause for one minute or two maybe, and just stop all the multitasking. And take a few moments for a few deep diaphragmatic breaths that are deeply inhaled in the belly and deeply exhaled. A minute or two of that will reset your nervous system. It will reset your vagus nerve, it will calm you substantially. You could wait until you're stressed to the max before you say, oh, hey, maybe I should breathe a minute. That's an option. But better is to just every two to three hours, take a two minute breathing break and just build that in. It will train you to do that regularly. With practice, you will become more aware of how much of an impact it has, and that's a virtuous feedback loop. It feels good when you reset all of your stress responses. The cortisol level drops. You get out of your sympathetic nervous system and back into the parasympathetic. Everything gets better very quickly with deep breathing. Stretching is helpful. There's a number of very simple physical techniques that you can use to just very quickly do a reset and reduce your stress. There is actually a ton of research that the act of smiling changes your body chemistry. I had a mentor years ago who taught me this, and I was super skeptical at the time. I was like, really, dude? I don't know about that. And he just was like, don't believe me? Try it. And sure enough, it not only shifts your mood. It shifts your stress levels, it ratchets them down. Now, it's not a radical shift, it's incremental, but we'll take incremental. And again, it costs nothing. It takes no time whatsoever. And the way my mentor always described it to me was just smile quietly to yourself, like you know a really cool secret. And even as I say that, I can't help but smile. I'm not gonna take up your precious time with all the background on why and how that works, but it does. And if you wanna know more, you can research that. But little tiny physical acts to reset the body's fight or flight response. Because what's going on when we feel under threat, which almost all of us are feeling pretty much every waking hour right now. When we feel under threat, our whole body goes into fight or flight mode. Our muscles tense, our digestive system slows down. We are preparing to either do battle or run like the wind to get away from the thing that is chasing us. To either fight or flee, we are gonna need very alert muscles and very fast reflexes to do either of those things. So we're just like a bundle of coiled energy all the time. Now you may be one of those people, I'm one. Who, when they're a tightly coiled bundle of energy, we get a lot done. Ho, ho, boy can I get stuff done when I'm a bundle of coiled energy. I also realize when I'm doing that, that I barely breathe, that I don't take deep breaths. It's high chest breathing, and I'm in alert mode. That's not sustainable. It's not meant to be sustainable. It's supposed to be a short burst. Your body's releasing a flood of chemicals into your system to prepare you for this very short interlude of either fighting the threat or running away from it. So that is great when the threat is a saber tooth tiger and we have a few minutes to either fight it or run away from it. Or the problem's solved a different way, and the tiger gets to eat tonight. And then we don't need the stress hormones anymore 'cause you know. But that's not designed to be how we live for hours at a time, nevermind for days or weeks at a time. When we're living with that flood of stress related chemicals in our system, that's deeply unhealthy and it causes all kind of health problems. So we need ways to do two things. We need ways to recognize that's where we are, that we are in that heightened state of fight or flight. And then we need to take an action to reset that. And the quickest, easiest way is deep breathing. There are plenty of other things you can do that take a little bit more time, but that are also a hundred percent worth it. The other things you can do might take from five to 20 minutes, but you can multitask while you do them. So the kinds of things you can do for five minutes would be to do something that raises your heart rate that's a physical activity. Not sitting there hyperventilating because you're stressed out, but do a physical activity that elevates your heart rate a little bit. It allows your body to do something with that flood of fight or flight hormones and chemicals that just are dumped into your system. It's supposed to make you take physical action. And when we have that flood and we don't take physical action, then we're just sitting there in a toxic stew that is really bad for us. So a short burst of vigorous physical activity is extremely helpful. You can climb a couple flights of stairs at a brisk pace and you can do that while you're on a call or while you are listening to meeting summaries or whatever you're doing. You can keep working if you need to, just do something to dissipate and give that flood of stress chemicals a place to empty themselves out. Even more helpful are things like take a brisk walk. And get outside. Get outside in as real air as you've got wherever you are. I recognize that might not be so great in some places, but if the weather and the general environment permit and you can safely walk outside, that is extremely helpful. Because there is a tremendous additional stress reduction benefit of simply being in nature. Even if it's urban nature, if there's some trees, if there's a few flowers, if there are a couple of birds chirping. All of that acts to help calm us and reset our nervous system. And the physical activity is a bonus because it is allowing those stress chemicals to dissipate and it's forcing you to breathe. If you're walking briskly, you're gonna have to take at least somewhat deeper breaths. If you consciously take deep breaths while you're walking, then you get bonus points 'cause you're gonna get a double effect. So managing the physiological havoc that is the result of stress is super important. And there are some very simple techniques. You don't need anything special. You don't need any equipment. You don't need anything just to take anywhere between one and 20 minutes, depending on how much effect you want to get. But there's no excuse to not at least do the breathing. 'cause you can do that as often as you want. You can always find a way to at least get in the breathing And if we make that a regular practice, that alone can do a tremendous amount for not only your physical wellbeing, but also your emotional and mental wellbeing. Yogis have it right. This is incredibly powerful stuff. So then there is the spiritual, mental, emotional wellbeing piece of this, which is huge as well. And the pattern that I have observed, the thing that I think is fairly universally true about this, is that there is no universal answer for self-care in that realm. Except the following: self-awareness is critical. We have to take the time and be willing to do the exploration to discover what works for us. Because what we basically need to be able to figure out is, what are the things that give you energy, that feed your soul, that light you up? That make you feel good. Again, none of this has to take an enormous amount of time. It doesn't have to cost a dime. If your most bestest restoration activity is a spa day and that's what works for you, then take that spa day. But for every person who needs that, there's another person who needs to go out and be as vigorously, physically active for as long as possible out in nature in order to get that same result of feeding the soul, of recentering. Of feeling grounded, of being in your happy place, of finding joy and in the process alleviating stress. The other thing that is fairly universal, and this is super duper obvious, but not enough of us do this often enough. Which is to remove, at least for a little block of time, once a day at least, remove the provocations. The easy part of that is to just put away all the inputs. Put away the phone, put away the laptop, put away the tablet, put away all the devices that deliver you all the bad stuff. I get alerts from both the New York Times and the Washington Post on my phone, and some days, I can't go five minutes without some new, horrible thing showing up on my phone. And when that starts happening, I turn that thing over and I just don't look at it. I used to love reading the newspaper with my morning coffee. I don't do that anymore because I need to be creative during my workday. And what I've found is that if I spend half an hour even, reading soul sucking story after soul sucking story of how bad things are, that when I go to be creative, it's not there. I'm just already emotionally exhausted and I have no creative reserves. I just feel awful. So I know that that's not something I should do to start my day. I still wanna be informed, so I will read that in the evening. I'm not in a job where I have to know the most up to the minute political news, the second it happens. I don't have to go out and hold a press conference every time Bozo does something stupid. So that is a thing that required self-awareness. I had to figure out that something that used to give me pleasure was now a source of stress and upset, and was actually robbing me of something that's very important to me. You have to pay attention or that stuff will just morph into your life and you don't realize what's happening. It took me a while to figure it out. But once I did, I changed my routines so that I could get back my creative energy. And I was not setting myself up for having a worse and more difficult day than I needed to have, while still getting done what I have to get done. Both my job and being an informed and responsible citizen requires that I know what's going on. But it doesn't require that I know it the second it happens. It'll wait a few hours. So similarly, there's stuff that you can shift and stuff that you can't. That is true for all of us. So we have to work with our own set of stuff. But it absolutely requires self-awareness about what's causing us the most stress, what is robbing us of joy or creativity or other things that we care about, and what can we do to mitigate some of that. And then the other piece of self-awareness is being really clear about what it is, all the things that feed us. That give us energy back, and bring us joy, and reground us and make us feel centered. You might not have one thing that does all those things. That's really cool if you do. I kind of do. For me it's hiking. When I'm really in need, you will find me on a trail, because I get all those things all at once from one activity. Now the trade off is that I don't get maximum effect if I just go hike on a trail for 20 minutes. I need to take two or three hours to go do that. But those two or three hours are so worth it, because here's the other thing that happens. Once I drop the stress levels, begin to recharge my energy, and get myself away from all the negative inputs. There's a bonus thing that happens, which is that my mind opens up and the downloads start, all the creativity is flowing. I get the most amazing, brilliant, creative ideas when I'm hiking because I've let go of all the garbage. And the good stuff can't come in if your brain is crowded with all the garbage. So we gotta have a way to open the door and let some of the trash out on a regular basis. Because this administration and this Congress are shoveling the garbage in as fast as they can. The self-care project is all about self. We gotta take care of ourselves. This is the caregiver's mantra too, by the way. And I don't know how many of you have found yourselves in an intense caregiver role. Um, I have found myself there more times than seems reasonable in life. And what I found, particularly when I was in the position of caring for a loved one who was very ill over a prolonged period of time, that I also had to take care of me. Or pretty soon I wasn't much good to the person that I was helping. It's the same with the work that we do. It's also the same with the teams that we lead. Understanding that everyone in our orbit, and especially the members of our teams, are struggling, same way we are. Everybody's struggling. This is universal. So we have to get ourselves right in order to be there for our team and the people we serve. We also have to recognize that each member of our team has to do everything that I was just talking about for themselves. That we are all responsible for figuring out what self-care looks like for us in this rather extraordinary time. And that it's gonna require more attention, more awareness, more intentionality, because there are so many forces pushing us to the brink all the time, and it's easy to just get swept away by them. So as leaders, it falls to us to not only figure this out for ourselves and do that work. But we also need to create an environment where the members of our team feel supported in doing so for themselves. And this is a big deal because I know some very well-meaning non-profit leaders who are stuck in martyrdom mode. Not because it's an ego trip, but because they feel like they are holding up the airplane by pulling up on the armrests. And if they let go for a second, the plane will crash. And you know, getting them to pry their fingers off of those armrests is not easy, but we have to do that. And if we're not able to do that for ourselves, the insidious thing is we then create an environment for a team in which they get the message that it's not okay to take care of yourself. Because if you do, then that means you don't care enough about the work or you're not dedicated enough or whatever. That the only way you show dedication to the cause and to the people you serve and to keeping the organization afloat and all the things. The only way you show that is that you just are a stress ball and working to the max every second. And all that gives us is a whole pile of burned out people at some point. Whose physical and or emotional health will fall apart at some point and take them outta the game, at least temporarily. So even if we just want to think about this from a strategic standpoint, although I hope that we'll also think about it from a caring human standpoint. That as leaders, it's so important that we not only model the process of self-awareness and then taking care of ourselves and that we talk about it. Cause you could do the whole breathing thing without anybody realizing that's what you're doing, which is really cool. Like if you're in a really intense negotiation or in a conflict situation where you're trying to regulate yourself, but you don't want the other person to know that you're even stressed out. So you're doing your breathing thing super unobtrusively. That's cool. But that's not always the case. Sometimes it's just the stress and the overwhelm of daily existence right now. And for that, it's incredibly important that we talk about that. That we talk about that we are all struggling. We all have this challenge in front of us to figure out how we maintain our physical and emotional health in this environment. And that it isn't easy, but there are things we can do. And to say out loud, and here's what I'm doing. Here's how I'm managing. These are some things that are working for me and they may work for you. The physiological ones will work for everyone. 'cause it's based in physiology. But the ones about what lights you up? What brings you joy, what helps you recenter emotionally, helps you recharge. That's very individual. And the only thing that's universal about it is cultivating the self-awareness to know what are those things for you? And then us as leaders, not only giving permission, but really encouraging. And modeling. Taking the time, creating the space to do those things that recharge us. And you know, from a practical standpoint, some of that, maybe a lot of that will need to be done outside of work hours. But still we can build some of that into work hours. If you're somewhere where the weather allows, take some of your meetings outside. Do a walk and talk meeting. Find ways to get the team outta the office, moving around. Doing some things that can be part of the workday, but that will also just seamlessly weave in a few of those stress managing ingredients that will help them just be a little bit healthier and be coping a little bit better. This is a journey and whew, we got a long way to go on this journey. So, and you know, we're already about 10 metaphors over the limit here, but I'm gonna throw one more in that's even more overused than most, but it's very apt. Which is that we are in an ultra marathon. This is not a sprint. And if you treat it like a sprint where you go all out at your max speed, your max capacity for the short burst, what are you gonna do for the other 50 or a hundred miles you still have to run? There won't be anything left in the tank, and you'll be there by the side of the road wiped out. So we gotta figure out how to do this from an endurance standpoint. And any endurance athlete will tell you, the only way you're gonna run 50 or a hundred miles is if you are taking very careful care of your body and of your psyche. And if you don't do that, you'll crash out. So like I said, I don't have the answer. There isn't a one answer, but there are some universal principles that I think are super important. And those are the self-awareness, cultivating the self-awareness. And taking the action. And taking the actions consistently to manage the physiological effects of stress, and to manage all of the emotional and spiritual wellbeing aspects, so that we can stay fully in the game. Because ultimately we wanna stay in this fight and win it. Let's make sure that we do that for ourselves and that we support our team so that our entire team is able to do that alongside us. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode right here on the Nonprofit Power Podcast.