About The Self-Care Institute
The Self-Care Institute provides self-care support and education on burnout prevention to individuals as well as teams and organizations.
Our vision for you:
- Decrease burnout, stress, and overwhelm
- Help others without draining yourself
- Feel effective and fulfilled at work and at home
- Understand the core issues around burnout and stress for long-term positive change
- Use self-care as a tool to increase productivity, creativity, and quality of care
Our Approach to Burnout
In 2019, The World Health Organization included burnout in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), a handbook used by healthcare professionals to classify diseases, conditions, and syndromes.
In the ICD-11, burnout is classified as a syndrome that is characterized by three dimensions: feelings of exhaustion or depleted energy, feelings of negativity or cynicism about one’s job, and reduced professional efficacy.
We approach burnout from a research-based and therapeutic perspective. We stay current with the latest research on burnout and stress in various disciplines including healthcare, education, and business. We view burnout as a multi-dimensional experience with personal, cultural, physical, psychological, spiritual, and environmental components. Although we use research to inform our approach to burnout, we also take into consideration unique factors that may be impacting an individual or organization.
Burnout can be debilitating and can be a difficult state in which to live life. Although burnout is something we want to prevent, we are careful not to immediately push it away, put a band-aid on it, or treat it as an enemy. Burnout has a purpose and is often alerting us to deeper issues that need attention. Burnout is a signal that something needs to change and can be a critical turning point.
We believe in approaching burnout with compassion and treating burnout as a messenger that has important information to share. We work with burnout to get to the core issues in order to make long-lasting positive changes for a more fulfilling life at work and at home.
Our Approach to Self-Care
We take a holistic and person-centered approach to self-care, acknowledging that self-care is multidimensional with personal, professional, and cultural implications. Over the past 30 years, much research has been done to study self-care, and we take an evidence-based approach to the practices we recommend and teach.
We define self-care as caring for yourself in your personal and professional roles with compassionate action and mentality.
Self-care involves both your personal and professional life. Your self-care impacts the people you care about and the quality of your work, which makes self-care both a professional and personal responsibility.
This means self-care is not a luxury and not just what you do in your free time. Self-care is a compassionate choice to do what is best for you, which is not always the same thing as what’s easiest or most relaxing to do. Sometimes making a compassionate choice means doing hard things like saying no, setting boundaries, or breaking old patterns. Self-care is also not just about behavior and the things we do but also involves our mindset, self-talk, and attitude towards ourselves.
It’s also important to note here that we are not against hard work. Making time for self-care doesn’t mean you’re not working hard and working hard doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not practicing self-care. Self-care and work can co-exist.
We respect self-care in regards to individual preferences, beliefs, culture, and work setting. There’s no universal self-care plan that works for everyone. To be effective, self-care needs to be tailored to the individual. What self-care is for one person might not be self-care for another person.
We view self-care as a learnable skill that can be developed. Self-care is a practice that needs to constantly evolve with your life and your work. There will naturally be times in life when self-care is difficult to practice, and these fluctuations can be normal. However, a chronic lack of self-care can indicate deeper issues to address.
We approach self-care through the lens of progress and exploration. We don’t aim to achieve a perfect self-care practice or to maintain a perfect work/life balance. Rather, we believe in using self-care as a tool to learn about yourself and to support living a life that’s meaningful to you.
Articles for more info on self-care:
Five Things You Need to Know About Self-Care
What is Pseudo Self-Care?
