How can mental health care providers deliver good treatment while avoiding burnout in the context of multiple public health crises? Speakers at the 3rd Annual EBP Conference will offer insights.
As the world has struggled the past three years to navigate a pandemic, it has brought to the forefront the critical importance of self-care, especially for those in the helping environment. Thinking about self-care and resilience, it is often easiest to focus on the individual and to make them solely responsible for their well-being. Historically, we have been told to rest more, eat healthy, exercise, and meditate as ways of taking better care of ourselves. While all of these can have a positive impact on our overall well-being, it does not factor in the important role that workplaces can have in impacting, either positively or negatively, our well-being.
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been hearing about “NOvember” campaigns such as “putting the ‘no’ in ‘November’” and “The NOvember Challenge.” There are a few different versions of the campaign, but essentially it is a call to say “no” to unhealthy/unenjoyable/non-enriching requests and habits. Although this call to action has been around for years, it’s suddenly become relevant to me
Mindfulness has been around for at least thousands of years, often originating out of religious practices. Many consider Jon Kabat-Zinn, as the main person to bring mindfulness out from its roots and into a secular, health-focused perspective. Trained as a molecular biologist and a long-time practicing Buddhist, he believed that mindfulness could serve an important role in medicine.
As I write this, I am wrapping up end of year tasks (this is one of the last must-dos) and looking forward to 2022. I think it is going to look much different than any of us expected. I know for myself, I thought, perhaps naively, that we would be past some of the COVID challenges. I was hopeful at this time last year that we would be back to some normalcy. While things are different than a year ago, we still have a long way to go in managing life as COVID continues to bring more challenges and new variants.