Self-Care Bill of Rights¹

I have the right to:

• Put my mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health above everything and everyone else.
• Put self-love into action.
• Give to others and this world in a way that energizes me.
• Make decisions about my time without guilt.
• Adequate sleep.
• Focus on my physical body and outward appearance.
• Pamper myself.
• Define leadership and success in a way that supports self-love in action.
• Develop new habits that support my self-care.
• Speak the truth in all situations.

Self-care can directly affect your levels of happiness and health through attention, awareness, and attendance.

• Attention to you, the individual, as an integral part of the whole organization.
• Awareness of issues or situations that are causing problems for you.
• Attendance to the root of the problems that are adversely affecting you.

Self-care isn’t about a quick fix from a meditation session, a massage, or an unplugged weekend—but any or all of those things can be incorporated into our lives, adopted as new habits, and become as essential to our day as brushing our teeth or bathing. Individual self-care can result in a boost in organizational productivity because the happier, healthier individual can relate better to others, cope better with stress, and experience more sustainable energy to apply to the work and mission. Bottom line: your self-care practices are good for your organization!

Self-care involves taking deliberate and consistent steps to prioritize your physical, mental, and emotional health. According to the University of Buffalo School of Social Work Self-Care Starter Kit,² reducing work-related stress is not enough. Self-care is about enhancing your overall well-being, at work, at home, and everywhere else you interact.

Start with a Good Night’s Sleep

With so much on your plate, where can you start to make a noticeable change in the way you live and work? Start with sleep. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), insufficient sleep is a “public health problem.” ³ Blogger Maria Popova, of the popular culture blog Brain Pickings, sums up the connection between sleep and self-care in this quote:

We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities.⁴

As Arianna Huffington, who wrote Sleep Revolution, says, “Sleep is a fundamental human need that must be respected.”⁵ Huffington learned the hard way about respecting sleep, passing out in her office from sleep deprivation and waking up in a pool of blood with a broken cheekbone and cut over her eye. Her experience should tell you that sleeplessness is not a necessary sacrifice to prove your devotion to your organization’s mission.

Be honest: How much sleep do you get each night? Are you sleeping through the night? Do you wake up feeling refreshed? If not, you need to address the issue of insufficient sleep to make a foundational shift in your overall well-being. Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, devotes an entire chapter of his book to the importance of protecting sleep. If, as McKeown says, our best asset for changing the world is ourselves, then we need to invest in, and not damage, our greatest asset.

How much sleep does your body actually need? Is there a magic number? The amount of hours per night varies from person to person and is different based on age. The National Sleep Foundation, a champion of sleep science and sleep health for individuals, undertook a comprehensive research study to answer the question of sufficient sleep and provides evidence-based guidelines on how much sleep you really need at each age.⁶ Drumroll, please . . . adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep per night.

You may have already learned the hard way, like Huffington, what cheating yourself out of a good night’s sleep can do to your well-being. But are you doing anything about it?

“I realized that there was a disconnect between what I knew helped me be at my best and most productive, and what I was actually doing in practice,” admits nonprofit consultant Joyce Lee-Ibarra, who was not enforcing good sleeping habits for herself. Some simple changes Lee-Ibarra made are outlined in Chapter 4.

So what’s the bottom line about sleep? Ignoring your body and brain’s need for quality sleep is destructive, and you’ll pay for it with decreased mental capacity, increased stress and anxiety, and a weakened ability to perform complex tasks and even basic ones. A lack of sleep will make it harder for you to make small changes in your habits to avoid stress and incorporate self-care activities. To address your sleep issues, try monitoring and tracking the number of hours you’re getting per night and how you feel, then start to shift your sleep routine to a healthier habit.

You Really Are What You Eat

What we eat and drink can affect how our bodies and brains work and even how well we sleep. Vice versa, a well-rested body and brain can process the foods we eat more efficiently. Knowing what we put into our bodies can mean the difference between being strong, clear-headed, and effective or being sluggish, dull, and slow. Two steps to enhancing our well-being through nutrition are learning about the best foods for our health and changing our eating habits to ensure we consume them. Understanding what we should not consume and developing the willpower to avoid what is bad for us is just as important.

The Stress Management Society in the United Kingdom⁷ lays out some very straightforward tips for proper nutrition such as:

1. Avoid fast food.
2. Don’t skip meals.
3. Limit caffeine intake.
4. Avoid sugary and fatty foods.
5. Don’t go on fad diets.
6. Don’t pick at your food.

Simple, right? Enough of the “don’ts.” The Stress Management Society also provides some “do’s” such as fortifying your body with vitamins A (supports vision), B (supports your nervous system), and C (protects immune system and reduces cortisol levels); proteins (tissue repair); and magnesium (muscle relaxation, fatty acid formation, new cell production, and heartbeat regulation) to combat stress. Seek the guidance of your doctor if you plan on making changes to your diet, especially if you have any underlying health conditions.

Get a Move on It

In a 2015 article in the Annals of Internal Medicine titled “Sedentary Time and Its Association with Risk for Disease Incidence, Mortality, and Hospitalization in Adults,” our sedentary lifestyle is identified as a major factor for illness and disease.⁸ Many of us spend half of our waking hours sitting, and our inactivity could be the early death of us. If that isn’t a wake-up call, we don’t know what is! We all need to once and for all shift away from looking at exercise as a chore and incorporate more movement into our lives as part of our daily routines and as part of our work.

Studies show that exercise can relieve stress, reduce depression, and improve cognitive function, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.⁹ But even if you intellectually understand the benefits of managing your stress and how fitness can play an important roll in reducing stress, you may not be finding the wherewithal to stick to a regular fitness routine to make real strides in improving your health and well-being. In the 2014 Stress in America report from the American Psychological Association, Americans surveyed continued to “report stress at levels higher than what they believe is healthy, struggle to achieve their health and lifestyle goals, and manage stress in ineffective ways.”¹⁰

How much exercise and at what intensity will help us live a healthier, longer life? The Department of Health and Human Services¹¹ recommends doing one of the following each week for moderate health benefits:

• 150 minutes (2 hours and 30 minutes) of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity (such as brisk walking or tennis)
• 75 minutes (1 hour and 15 minutes) each week of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity (such as jogging or swimming laps)
• An equivalent combination of moderate- and vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity

Looking at these numbers can feel daunting. Integrating movement into your life is not always an easy habit to get started or maintain, but the results can be significant. According to a wellness blog post in the New York Times, people who followed the guidelines above literally—doing 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise—were at 31 percent less risk of dying during the 14-year study period compared to nonexercisers. The overachievers who worked out moderately, mostly walking, for 450 minutes per week or a little more than one hour per day were 39 percent less likely to die prematurely. We’ll take those numbers!

You don’t need to be an overachiever or an Olympic athlete to reap some benefits from exercise. The point is to start with the first step. Even a 30-minute daily brisk walk can do wonders for feeling good.

Down Time

People in the nonprofit sector often feel a strong sense of service to the cause or their clients. This kind of passion and devotion can come at the expense of their personal downtime, resulting in working on weekends, not taking vacation days, or canceling on activities with friends or family. Sound familiar? While self-sacrifice might seem noble or be culturally engrained in your organization, the truth is you can’t sustain your passion if you do not take some time off or away to do something other than work. Repeat after us: “I am not just my work.”

Aisha Moore says when she didn’t have a self-care plan, she woke up 20 minutes before she had to leave for work, leaving no time for herself at the start of the day. “I gave everything to my job. As part of my self-care plan, I incorporate downtime, which involves a mindfulness activity—whether adult coloring, journaling, meditation, tidying my house, or whatever. I’ve created a Saturday morning feeling before I start my workday.” Moore says this time allows her to have more energy and be more productive at her job.

“If our whole life is our work, with no outside hobbies or downtime, we have very little left for ourselves at the end of the day,” says Moore.

“Prioritize personal time and vacation, and encourage your coworkers to do the same,” says Amanda Evrard, development director at NOWCastSA. Says Evrard, “All staff need to feel comfortable with taking vacation days, as opposed to believing that their absence is only seen as a burden on everyone else left behind. And in the event that your organization doesn’t value personal time, or specific coworkers aren’t taking time away, advocate for others and ensure they aren’t being overworked for the collective good.”

The Wellness Triad and having down time are some critical pieces to caring for your Sphere of Self, but you don’t exist in a vacuum. Honoring vacation time and respecting communication boundaries are important aspects of workplace well-being that we will discuss later. Let’s move on to caring for the next sphere.

Family, Friends, Community

When stressed out, you often end up taking out your frustrations on those closest to you, reserving your small pockets of patience for work because you might worry more about getting reprimanded or fired than you do about being kicked out of your home. You know you shouldn’t do it, but when you’re at the end of your rope, you have fewer coping mechanisms and end up turning your home into a slow cooker of leftover cortisol from your stressful day at work. Sometimes, your self-reflection and self-care can come too late, after you’ve already infected others with your stress.

Says one former nonprofit development director who asked us not to use her name, “When I was under extreme stress, I would come home and yell at my husband and my kids. This was really bad because my inability to do something about my stress ended my marriage.”

This is not an isolated case. In a report titled “Work-Home Interference Contributes to Burnout” in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, researchers suggest that, “conflicts between work and home—in both directions—are an important contributor to the risk of burnout.” In addition to recommendations for employers to reduce work demands interfering with employees’ private lives, the researchers also recommend that employees “develop self-regulation strategies to [counter] negative spillover of work at home, such as not working from home.”¹³

For the burned-out development director, after leaving her job, her road out of burnout to revitalization included turning to her community. “I’m not a religious person,” she explains. “But I am spiritual, and I found that connecting with others at my church was a big factor in helping me change my situation.”

Sometimes, being with others actually relieves stress. Sandra Bass, PhD, assistant dean of students and director at the University of California Berkeley Public Service Center, says, “Often when I get stressed I want to be left alone. But sometimes the best thing you can do is be in community with other people.”

The philosophy about reaching out to your community as part of self-care is embedded in her organization where students are encouraged to practice it.

“We work with over 100 student activists and leaders who, in turn, work with hundreds of other students and community organizations pursuing social justice work,” says Bass. “We train and coach students that self-care is not just self-awareness but is a part of community caring. When they are stressed, they need to be in community. We create an environment for that to happen.”

Turn to your friends, family, or community as sounding boards, not to hear your complaints about work but to help you assess your options for mitigating job burnout. How you relate to those closest to you can be the difference between a tense and angst-ridden transition from work to home and one of positive encouragement and nurturing support. While the Wellness Triad of sleep, nutrition, and exercise nourishes your body and brain, positive relationships with your family and friends can be nourishing to your heart and spirit.

Work-Life Juggle, Not Balance

The idea of work-life balance is a bit of a misnomer. The reality is that most working professionals, especially those with families, will never find the perfect balance between work and personal time. There will always be an emergency call or a child’s soccer game before the workday ends to make balance difficult; it simply is not possible to put a wall between your work and family life.

Instead of seeking balance, start honing your juggling skills to smoothly move from one aspect of your life to another. Your self-care practices will help you get better at this juggle, providing you with more energy to get things done. Add some strategy and planning to manage the multiple parts of your home life and work life and access all available support resources at your disposal. With care and attention, you can get closer to managing your Five Spheres with less stress.

“I know there will always be times when my family can’t have as much of my time as they’d like to because of work and my other projects,” says Shai Coggins, a nonprofit technology consultant and blogger. “And work will not always take priority when my family needs me the most. I also give myself time for creative activities because they help me refuel.”

In Chapter 5, we cover techniques to address your work-life juggle such as setting boundaries and knowing when to take a break.

Effects of Social Media and Mobile Phones

We can’t talk about the effects of technology without delving more deeply into what our tech tools give us access to: social networks and other forms of social media. Social media gives us a near-real-time stream of information and disinformation at levels we’ve never before experienced. We are privy to more intimate details of not only the people whom we know personally, but also strangers who become increasingly familiar to us through their constant posts, tweets, and uploads.

Social Media Anxiety Syndrome (also referred to as Social Media Anxiety Disorder, or SMAD) is a term used by Neil Mehta, MD, in a 2011 article titled “How Physicians Can Overcome Social Media Anxiety on Twitter.” SMAD is defined as “when the participation of social media affects the mental and physical well-being of an individual.”¹⁵ The constant barrage of data creates stress due to being overwhelmed, but it can also trigger emotional reactions in us based on what we see and read online.

“Problems have arisen for me personally around issues to do with managing bad news and bad press on social networks, in an environment where some people in the organization were slower to grasp the importance or magnitude of what was unfolding online in comparison to in the ‘real world,’” says Jo Johnson, senior digital marketing manager at London Symphony Orchestra. “This left me unsupported at a time when I needed help and guidance and very nearly pushed me over the edge.”

Johnson was left thinking that people working on the “front line of social media” may not be properly trained to manage crises.

Says Johnson, “Social networks can be unforgiving, and I worry that the mental health of those left dealing with the often very nasty messages could be affected. As social media can still sometimes be seen as the ‘light-hearted’ part of what we all do, this issue goes undetected until it’s too late.”

Many of us may suffer from an “iDisorder,” says Dr. Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, in his 2012 book iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us. Rosen defines iDisorder as “changes to your brain’s ability to process information and your ability to relate to the world due to your daily use of media and technology resulting in signs and symptoms of psychological disorders—such as stress, sleeplessness, and a compulsive need to check in with all of your technology.”¹⁶

With mobile phones becoming an inescapable part of our daily lives, whether at work or at home, another disorder—“iPhone Separation Anxiety,” in which people do not like the idea of being away from their phones for any length of time—was identified in the study “The Extended iSelf: The Impact of iPhone Separation on Cognition, Emotion, and Physiology” published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communications.¹⁷ Does this mean that we should be completely chained to our mobile phones to avoid any anxiety that can negatively affect our work performance? Of course not!

If you are trying to improve your relationship with your smartphone to reduce stress, here are a few questions to ask yourself to see if you are using your device thoughtfully or compulsively:

• Where do you carry your phone? If it is in your hand so you don’t miss an alert, then you have a problem.
• Do you sleep with your phone next to you? Many people do, including some of our colleagues. Put your phone away at least an hour before sleep to avoid disrupting your sleep. Checking your e-mail before you go to bed messes with your brain. Leave your phone out of the bedroom!
• Do you feel uncomfortable or anxious when your phone is not close at hand? Not being comfortable when you’re away from your phone is a problem even if you try to laugh it off.
• When you eat dinner or other meals with family, friends, or colleagues, is your phone on the table, within inches of your fork? Putting your phone within view or easy reach is temptation to be distracted from the people around you. Just don’t do it!

We can blame technology all we want; however, the problem is not that these devices and platforms exist or that they give us unprecedented access to information and connections. The problem is how we are using them without paying attention or noticing that our tech habits have shifted from occasional use to mindless use. In Chapter 4, we offer techniques to temper your addictive or compulsive tech habits and to help you to stop sleeping with your smartphone!