Self-care is more than soothing. Wondering why your self-care isn’t working? You might be soothing instead. Soothing vs. Self-Care Soothing and self-care are two different (but related) things. Self-care is everything we do to replenish ourselves, personally and professionally. In contrast, soothing is any activity that calms us, lowers physiological overarousal, and makes us feel Read More »
Good self-care practices create space for grief (and other emotions) Earlier in my career, before I had established solid self-care practices, I didn’t feel a lot of emotions. “Frantic” is the best label for my lifestyle at the time – frantically working on getting tenure, stuffing the rest of my life into whatever space I Read More »
Stop letting people shove toxic positivity in your face. Be negative when you want to be. Pretending to feel positive about something is NOT self-care Sometimes self-care doesn’t even feel good. I recently had to do something I really, really didn’t want to do. Something I hated but was not optional for me. Trying to Read More »
Lots of people hate the phrase “self-care.” If you are one of them, I get it. We’re going to blame capitalism and hustle culture for that, okay? I’m going to explain how capitalism ruined the phrase self-care, how to really define self-care, and why I still use the label. “Self-care” is a term that was Read More »
At this point, you’ve probably heard of The Great Resignation – but have you heard of quiet quitting? It might be something you want to consider. Read on for more! You’ve probably heard of the Great Resignation – people who are quitting their dissatisfying jobs and looking for work and a lifestyle more consistent with Read More »
I recently had the pleasure of being a guest on Heather Ross’ podcast Better Me, where we talked many things self-care! You can listen to the episode here. Heather’s blog and podcast are excellent, definitely check both of them out as a really awesome resource (RAR!). While we were chatting, Heather asked me a really Read More »
As academics in North America get ready to head into the Fall semester, I hear many of them saying “I’m just not ready” and “I just don’t want to do this.” I hear grad students saying “I don’t even feel like I got a break.” Even people who love their jobs are struggling to find Read More »
I’ve spent the last 6 weeks running our very first offering of Grad Students Against Burnout (G.R.a.B.)!, our online, live self-care course for graduate students (in any discipline). It has been a blast – seeing this project move from being an idea, to an actual plan, to interacting with our very first cohort has been Read More »
One of the biggest pieces of advice you often hear about self-care is to learn to set boundaries. Setting boundaries is important for carving out time and space for self-care – we even blogged some practical tips for setting self-care boundaries in the past. Setting boundaries is also part of focusing in on what work Read More »
“No blame, no shame” is a handy phrase I adopted from Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robins. In that book, Robins uses “no blame, no shame” to refer to not getting caught up in being harsh with ourselves or judging ourselves for how we handled our finances in the past. What is more Read More »