Introduction

Chronic stress and vicarious trauma are very common for professionals working in nonprofit community based organizations, particularly for those working in social services capacities.

In this 2 Tips, we are emphasizing what you and your team can do while in the midst of a workday. This is an alternative to ideas around selfcare being “after the work day care” when we often have very little energy to implement the science-based practices that are at our fingertips.

We previously provided resources on the topic of chronic stress and vicarious trauma: Vicarious Trauma and Chronic Stress in Community Programming  But, this 2 Tips is different for its focus on the workday. Below, we also provide two lists that offer tools and ideas for curbing chronic stress and vicarious trauma at the workplace; while not all of the tools and ideas are things that we promote, many of them we do. Choose for yourself.

And, importantly, we wish you a great end of 2019 and a wonderful transition into 2020.

Tip 1

Use tools and resources for structural and individual adjustments to your workday habits in order to better process and release stressful experienced that arise daily.

Tip 2

Contribute to the whole of your team by catching yourself use, and lessen your use of, equating suffering with being a hard worker and/or equating suffering to adding value to your workplace.

Resources for Tip 2

Here are two lists for which we find several useful, even science-backed approaches to making structural and individual adjustments to your workday habits.

101 Options

16 Options

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You will also receive a free copy of the introduction to Dr. Vèlez Young's latest book, Nonprofit Work is Killin' Me: Mitigating Chronic Stress and Vicarious Trauma in Social Service Organizations.

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