 Hi everyone. Thank you for coming to join us over here with Dr. Phelps and self-care in times of stress and uncertainty. I wanted to remind you guys about the handout that was emailed to you for this specific presentation. So open up your emails and pull that up or if you've printed it get it right out in front of you. Thank you for being here. And I just wanted to remind you guys about asking questions in the chat and you can also click on ask a question link on your bottom left screen and that's actually preferable so that the presenter can look at those and kind of address those as we as we go. So today we're talking with Dr. Cynthia Phelps. She's an international speaker, coach and researcher with a focus on mental wellness and compassion. Much of her professional work occurs at the intersection of mental health and technology. She's the president of Health E Designs LLC and founder of Inner Ally, a B Corporation building mobile apps to help people improve their mental wellness. Dr. Phelps develops professional training programs that use self-compassion to help people thrive emotionally. She's a certified mindfulness instructor and teacher of self-compassion through the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion and you can learn more about her on CynthiaFelps.com. I have looked at the website. I've looked at all kinds of resources from Cynthia and it's amazing. So make sure you head over there and I'm going to go ahead and hand this off to Dr. Phelps. Hi everyone. I just wanted to kind of show you this handout that we have here and if you for some reason don't have the handout right in front of you and you still need to print it, that's okay. But I want you to have it so that it does have some resources on it for you. If you just have a piece of paper or a pen near you, that's going to be sufficient for what you need to do today. So awesome. Well, let's get started, shall we? Okay, good. Well, I am very excited to be here. The you folks as community health workers, promodoras, the helpers and the facilitators and the guiders in our community are so critically important to our community's health. And other speakers have probably said this today, but I am so grateful for what you're doing. And particularly in this time of coronavirus where we're having to take extra steps to keep our community safe and healthy and you are the front lines. And so today I want you to come away with some real tools that you can use in the moment to help you with your work. My expertise is in helping people develop resilience and emotional wellness. And so I think you've probably seen multiple articles on the internet on self care, where, you know, they tell you to take a bath or go for a walk or read a book or get a manicure or something like that. And all of those things can be really wonderful. But sometimes those can feel like just another task that we have to do. And especially in a time where we're so pressed with so many things to do, and we know that our skills are so valuable, we need to be getting out there into the community and helping the sharing. And so today is going to be a different spin on self care, where it's tools that you can use in the moment. And they're all tools to help calm and soothe yourself in the moment. This corona pandemic is very taxing on us. You know, we already have challenging jobs. I wouldn't be surprised and, you know, in your personal life, you may also take care of other people in your life. And so, you know, you have your professional position, what you do at home, and maybe in other fastest of your community. And now you have this other thing on the top of it. And so this can create a lot of stress. And some of our normal mechanisms that we use for self care and coping can be not enough, or they can even begin to break down and not be healthy for us at all. And so the first thing that I wanted to do was really to tell you that this session is built on something called self compassion. And so compassion is very simply like when we see another person suffering, we can look at them. And immediately we can feel, have empathy in our bodies and feel that they're suffering. And then compassion is that extra action that we take to help or to comfort that person, usually both. And so self compassion is that same process yet directed in towards ourselves. And so I'm sure you've heard like the phrase that you need to fill your cup before you can fill others. Or another one that's really common is you have to put your own mask on before you put your other person's mask on, which has different connotations now. But originally it was about flying and losing oxygen, right? That if you don't have oxygen and you don't have health for yourself, you're going to pass out before you can actually help your child or the person that needs help next to you. And so that is what today is going to be about. And so what I wanted to do is start with talking about our physiology. And you probably have all heard about the fight or flight response. And so this is a normal human response for when we get into a situation that is scary or threatening, right? And so kind of the typical example that's used is like, you know, there's a bear that's chasing you. That's coming at you, right? And so you either you fight or you run away. So fighting or flight, which is running away. And there are mechanisms in our body that basically take the blood in our body and they put them in the big muscles, like our thighs and, you know, our biceps. And it tends to pull blood out of our brains, actually. And so what we're really good at when we're in that super agitated state is we're good at, you know, getting ready to defend ourselves, or we're getting ready to run. And that's physiologically an excellent adaptation. The problem with something like a pandemic or a chronically high stress career is that this fight or flight system can kind of get turned on, you know, maybe not all the way, but just enough so that it becomes a problem. And so that fight or flight physiological response is like adrenaline response. And so, you know, you probably felt like a beating of your heart, you know, that real anxiety response that you have. You know, you might just want to get up and run. But when you have things coming at you constantly like we do right now, you know, just listening to the news, even if you limit it to like once a day, the problem is that that can cause trauma and stress and anxiety. And so what that does is it raises cortisol in our body. So cortisol is also not a bad thing. It's a normal physiological response. And so cortisol during the day raises, and it's kind of our wakefulness state. And then at night it drops so that we can sleep. But the problem with chronic stress is that it can raise our cortisol levels at a regular level. And so you know, you end up with sleeping problems and chronic anxiety and depression and a variety of other problems. And so it's really important for us to identify when we're in a state of fight or flight or when we're in a state of raised anxiety so that we can address that in the moment so we can prevent some of these long term problems because chronic anxiety and high cortisol levels are related to lowering of your immune system. So that's a real problem. So I wanted to kind of expand on the fight or flight response because there's really more to it. And I wanted to relate it to some of the things that you might be going through as a result of the pandemic. And so in the flight response, essentially, this is kind of you want to take some quick action as a result of something that's threatening to you, right? And so you might be experiencing like getting in fights with your family. You might be experiencing fighting on somebody's wrong on social media and getting in arguments on social media. You probably have witnessed panic buying or even experienced some of that yourself. That feeling that you need to kind of run or kind of, you know, your muscles are real tense. And maybe kind of even feeling an inability to sit still. A lot of these things are really aligned with that fight portion. And now for the flight portion, you know, this is all about escape, like what you're feeling right now is uncomfortable. You know, it could be grief, it could be sadness, it could be hopelessness. There's so many appropriate emotions that emerge from a situation like this. So escaping, you know, you may find yourself escaping with food or alcohol or drugs. I personally noticed over the last few weeks that sometimes I'll just find myself at the refrigerator. And you know, I'm not even hungry, but like I just kind of want to get away from what I'm doing. And so my friend was like, you should put a little posty note on your refrigerator that says, is this really what I need? I was like, that's a great idea. And so, you know, other forms of escape might be like binge watching TV or getting lost in reading books, playing video games, daydreaming, spending way too much time on the computer. You know, the issues that I'm talking about, I don't want you to at this point really put a judgment on them as good or bad, right? Because all of those escape mechanisms could be healthy in one case and then maybe not healthy in another, right? But these are all some things that you might be experiencing based on kind of that flight response. So there's fight, flight, but there's also freeze, which is part of this response as well. And so you can see this in animals, where they are, they just they've just freeze in place and it's kind of play dead. In humans, the way that you might be responding that would correlate with this is maybe oversleeping, wanting to kind of isolate yourself and to have and you know, no, no correspondence or don't want to talk to anybody on the phone. You might be feeling increased depression. You might have an inability to really kind of follow through on some work projects or to start new projects. You know, all of this is very normal kind of freeze response. So fight, flight, freeze, and there's actually one more that might be pretty relevant to this population and it's called fawn. And what this means is you take the focus off of yourself and you actually put it on another person. So it's kind of a way of an escape by taking the focus off of yourself. And so oftentimes caretakers will ship their focus and just be like, I'm 100% going to take care of other people, my family, you know, my children. And when that becomes healthy, of course, is when you don't take care of yourself. So ignoring your own needs, just doting incessantly on other people, obsessively checking in on people by phone or social media, worrying about what's going to happen to the people that you love, and also even kind of perfectionism where, you know, the responses that you, if you really get down hardcore into the emotional response, like all of us really want to be loved and accepted. And so what can happen in this stressful time in the fawn response is that we want to all of a sudden be perfect. We want to be the perfect parents, we want to be the perfect workers, perfect helpers. And yeah, that's a lot of added stress and may not even be possible. So I just wanted to kind of go through some of those responses. I mean, this is a very challenging time. And so these responses are normal. But that said, we need to pay attention to how we address the feelings that come up with these, and we need to pay attention whether they're serving us or not serving us. You know, try to try to throw out the idea of good or bad for you, and just give a less judgmental of like, is this good coping mechanism? Is this not a good coping mechanism? Because, you know, we have enough to handle right now, we don't need that self judgment. And so the next thing that I want to talk about today is one of the things that we can do for ourselves to help soothe ourselves. And so, you know, the things that I just went through the fight, flight, freeze, fawn, those are all really important for us because it helps us to recognize the behaviors that we're exhibiting in this time. It also can help tie them to kind of the emotions that we're feeling. And many of them are difficult emotions right now, like I said, of grief, sadness, helplessness, hopelessness, loss of control. You know, all of these are very appropriate responses to what's going on. But we also don't want to stay there, right, because we want to get back out there and help. And so one of the things that we can do when our nervous system is in this heightened state of arousal to calm ourselves is to take a cue from our own physiology. So when we're in the fight or flight response, we're really geared up and our nervous system, it's called the sympathetic nervous system is on. Now part of the counter to this is the parasympathetic nervous system. And so the way you can turn that on is by taking deep breaths. And then there's another system in our physiology called the oxytocin system. And so you might be most familiar with this if you've had a child. The oxytocin system is called oxytocin is called kind of the love hormone. It's one of the things that helps you bind to your infant. And so it turns out that we can leverage that for ourself to be able to soothe ourselves. So if you think about, you know, if you're male, you don't have to have had a baby to understand this. But if you think about holding an infant, you know, some of the things that we automatically do with those infants is, you know, we kind of cool at them like, oh, ah, right. These are kind of the sounds of soothing compassion. And if you notice when I do that, I'm actually changing my breathing. And so it's really closely aligned with things like taking a deep breath and then slowly letting out like, ah, these are some of the sounds of compassion and the way that we can slow kind of our out breath and take bigger breaths to calm our nervous system down. Now, when you're holding that infant, another thing that you probably do automatically is you do like kind of a pet, right? Or, you know, you do the same thing to your kitty or your puppy or, you know, maybe your spouse or a loved one, you know, a little pet on the head or the shoulder. It turns out that as humans, we have an innate ability to do this one motion. And it's very much like this, right? So automatically, I know how fast to do this. I know how hard to press, you know, I'm not going like, boop, boop, boop. You know, that doesn't work, right? It's this nice, slow, modest pressure pet. And we all know how to do this instinctively. And it turns out we actually have receptors in our bodies that pick up this type of touch. And it goes right to our amygdala in our brain, which is the emotional center. And it helps to calm us down. And so there are a variety of types of soothing touch that I've given you on your handout. And I'm just going to demonstrate some of them for you right now. One of the things that you can do is to kind of hold one hand in another, and maybe even hold it like underneath your like at your chest or maybe even down in your lap. And this this holding of yourself, you know, and you can even do holding of arms like this can feel very calming to you. And another way of kind of holding to you is to kind of hold your arms this way. And you know, you guys are in your house, I can't see you. So I want you to do this with me. Don't be shy. Because this is how you really get the benefit. And so you can just kind of squeeze your arms a little bit. Or you know, you can kind of squeeze in on yourself as if you're kind of holding yourself really tight. You know, these movements actually help release oxytocin in your system. And it's called soothing touch. And like I said, it's what you do normally with a small child. So one of the ones that I find particularly powerful is one why where you take one or two hands and you put it like over your chest area, your breastbone, and just kind of apply a little bit of pressure to your sternum, which is that bone right there. And you can do this in combination with taking a deep breath, like and now do that once with me. Just put a little bit of pressure on here. You might even just close your eyes and take a deep breath in and let it out. You know, and if you're watching me do this, you might notice that my shoulders drop a little bit each time I do that. And it's literally calming down my nervous system, taking that, just taking a moment to take a deep breath, taking a moment to do one of these soothing touches. There is, you can also do a variety of kind of, we can rub, like some people get some comfort out of rubbing their chest. Some people get comfort out of like more of a belly rub. I know that can be a little bit, I don't know, hard for women because can be so self-conscious about our bellies. But if you really kind of allow yourself to take all those hangups and just put them on the shelf for a little bit, rubbing your belly can feel very, very soothing. And I remember the first time I learned about some of these techniques that I was kind of just like, it felt embarrassing. I didn't really want to do it. But the more that I learned to work with them, the more I realized that they're very powerful techniques. And so, you know, we're not always in a place where, you know, we can kind of in public rub our bellies, but it might be that we can just slip off to the restroom or in our car between appointments. We can just take, and it just takes literally like 30 seconds. Just take a break and take a breath and try one of these soothing touch movements. It can be very powerful. And it is a way to show yourself some kindness. So if you're having a really stressful day, this is a way to be self-compassionate to yourself. It doesn't take very long. And so, with self-compassion, whenever I teach it, I teach, I teach it a couple of ways. I have an eight-week course. I have a shorter six-week series. I do a variety of workshops like this. But invariably, you know, people will say, well, I can't be self-compassionate because then that means I'm going to be weak or I'm going to be lazy or it's self-indulgent or I don't deserve it. And, or it's going to make me not productive, you know, like I really need to be harsh with myself. But all the research that I have seen over the last 18 years, that's just not the case. And so, it may feel that way, but I really encourage you to push through the awkwardness and actually try to get to a place where you allow yourself. Like, I give you permission to do this for yourself. And that's super important. And so, you know, some people also think that self-compassion is just, you know, soft and squishy and, you know, and just like taking a bath and speaking to yourself, like really kindly and like, oh, which that's half of it, actually. And that's a very soothing and nurturing part. And in fact, you know, I kind of have a little character that I use when I talk about self-compassion in that way called the grandmother. And so, she's that kind, nurturing voice. And so, you know, she might say things to you like, oh, honey, you know, I just love you so much. You're doing such a good job. And that voice is this soft side of compassion. But compassion can also be fierce, because sometimes showing compassion for ourselves has to do with standing up for our own rights or setting boundaries and saying no and taking care of us. And so, with the different soothing touches that I gave you, one that's a little more aligned with fierce compassion might be taking your fist and putting it over your chest and then taking your other hand and kind of cupping it over. So, go ahead and just try that with me, because it feels a lot different than that other one of just the hands on your chest. It kind of feels like, you know, like I feel more compelled instead of going like, I feel like the sound of fierce compassion is right. That's the compassion where we have to take care of ourselves, the way we have to set boundaries and we say, no, I can't do that, because if I break, I can't take care of all the people around me and that whole system breaks. And so, it's important, not just important, it's essential. That's why we call you essential workers. It's essential that you're healthy and emotionally well. I mean, let me be clear, emotionally well does not mean you're always going to be happy. But it means that when we come up with difficult emotions, we can use some of these tools like soothing touch to be able to help ourselves. Okay. All right. So, we're going to go to a little activity. And then we're going to talk about one more tool. And then we're going to open the session up for questions. So, for this activity, I want you to have a piece of paper and a pen. But what we're going to do is we're going to close our eyes, do a little visualization, right? Open our eyes and then write. And then close our eyes, do a little visualization, open our eyes and write again. And then we'll have like a little recap of what you just did. So, if you would gather your pen and pencil or paper right in front of you and just go ahead and close your eyes. And I want you to think about a time in the last week or two that you had somebody who you were in contact with maybe a friend or a co-worker who was really suffering. You know, maybe they lost a job or they know somebody who was ill. Now, it might be because of your line of work that you have a whole laundry list of people that come to mind. And that's okay. But for this exercise, I want you to just go ahead and pick one person and just focus in on them now. And I want you to think kind of put yourself back in that situation, whether it was a house call that you were making or whether you're talking to them over Zoom or the phone. Put yourself right in that situation where you found out that this friend or colleague was really having a hard time, was really struggling with something. Now, I want you to think to yourself right back in that situation where you were, what did you say to that person in the moment when they told you about their suffering? What kind of tone of voice were you using with them? Was there some kind of action that you took to help relieve suffering? Even if it was just a suggestion. And now I want you to just pull yourself away from that decision or that visualization and come back into your room and open your eyes and just quickly jot down some notes. What did you say? What tone of voice were you using? And was there any kind of action or plan? You don't have to write too much and you can always come back to it. And so now when you're ready, I want you to just close your eyes one more time. And now we're going to visualize a time in the past week or two where you were really having a hard time. Maybe you got a bit of bad news or maybe just the overwhelm of circumstances right now got to you. I want you to pick just one instance, even though there may be many, where you were really kind of struggling and having a hard time and put yourself right back in that situation. You know, were you in your car? Was it a fight with a loved one? Was it wherever you were? Put yourself back in that situation in your mind. And I want you to ask yourself, what were you saying to yourself? After you got the bad news, after the fight or the struggle, what did you have to say to yourself? Do you remember the tone of voice that you used with yourself? Was there anything that you did in the moment to comfort yourself and taking in a deep breath now? For real, do it with me and letting it out and opening your eyes and letting go of that stress and just coming back into the room now where we are. And I want you to just jot down a few notes that you had about your experience with yourself when you were going through something difficult. Now that you've kind of got some notes on each of those, I want you to just take a moment to compare the two columns and what's different? The how do I treat a friend column versus how do I treat myself column? What's different between those two for you? Just noticing, not needing to judge. So if you did this exercise and you noticed that there were some significant differences between how you treat a friend who is suffering versus yourself, you're not alone. In fact, you know, Dr. Kristin Neff who's kind of the, well, she's not kind of, but she's the premier researcher of self-compassion and developed a lot of programs, one which I'm certified through. She's done this little activity with many people and on average about 73% tend to treat another person much nicer than they treat themselves when they're experiencing suffering. And there's only a very, very small fraction of people who treat themselves nicer, maybe like six or so percent and the rest of the percentage is people who are about equivalent. And so regardless of kind of where you fall on that scale, we do this exercise because understanding how we treat a friend can be a roadmap for how to treat ourselves when we're suffering because a lot of time, well, first of all, kind of our culture doesn't really respect that you should treat yourself kindly. It's kind of on board with you, like being really hard on yourself and super critical, right? And so oftentimes we don't have a roadmap for how to be kind to ourselves, especially when we're really having a hard time. And so just considering what would a friend say in this moment? And not only like what would they say, right, but how, so like what could I say to myself in this moment that I might say to a friend, right? And then also, can I use a tone of voice that feels comforting, that feels, that makes me feel safe and held or strong or whatever it is that you want to feel, like this is personalized, right? Not everybody is going to use the same voice or be comforted by the same voice. Some people find the kind of the grandmother voice that I use as patronizing. And so their voice sounds more like, oh, here, I got another one for you. Their voice sounds more like the cheerleader, right? Where it's like, you can do it. So this exercise is really helpful to be able to tell not only, you know, if you treat yourself well or not, but how to take that next step and actually treat yourself well. See, is there anything else on that one I need to talk about? I guess the thing to kind of normalize the experiences, if you were doing this visual racing, it was very easy for you to find, you know, to come up with somebody in your life who was suffering and how you kind of helped, right? That's probably easy. That's what we do all the time. For me, when I first did this exercise, there was a few things that were really hard. One was even finding a place where I was suffering. Primarily because I've been taught that my problems are not that big of a deal, you know, or that, you know, it's like, well, I'm not sick in the hospital dying of coronavirus, so I'm not really suffering. So my suffering doesn't count. And so some people kind of need to get past that hurdle. You know, if you are experiencing difficult emotions right now, you're suffering and that's okay. There's nothing weak about suffering. It's just part of being human. Another thing that I noticed when I did this exercise the first time was that I couldn't really come up with any language that I talked to myself with. I almost like didn't have language. And if I did, sometimes it was really harsh, like get over it or, you know, something along those lines, like, oh, you're not allowed to have these problems or your problem's not that big of a deal or, you know, it could even be as harsh as name calling, like, ah, you're such an idiot. I can't believe you let that happen or something like that. And so, you know, you might have had some challenges with trying to do this exercise. And I mean, that's okay. For me, when I first came into this work, I first found it, I was very, very low on the self-compassion scale. And if you are curious, remind me at the end, and I'll give you the link to actually test your own levels of self-compassion, because that can be, give you kind of a useful starting point if you want to kind of explore this anymore. But I was really, really low. And so I had everything to learn and I had no language for self-compassion. And so that's actually the final thing that I am going to help you with today. And it's the last thing, well, one of the last things on your handout, and it's called the self-compassion break. And this is like a three-part tool that has all three of the parts of self-compassion in it to help you practice in the moment when you're having some kind of a struggle or a situation where you're feeling uncomfortable emotions. And, you know, a lot of times I can show up as anger, frustration, you know, even though maybe underneath it's disappointment or sadness and things like that. So the self-compassion break is three parts. The first one is mindfulness, kind of because if we're not paying attention into what's going on with ourselves, we've got zero chance of being able to do anything to help ourselves in the moment, right? So mindfulness is just the recognition that you're actually suffering. And if you don't want to use the word suffering, guess it's annoying, you can use the word struggle or whatever works for you. You know, I help people kind of modify the stuff so it really works for them. And so the first part of the self-compassion break is just saying this is suffering. Or you could say this is struggle. One of my friends is like, this is crap. However, it works for you, right? The second part is common humanity. And this is literally just recognizing that humans suffer. And you were born human. And so you shall suffer as well. And so human, like it means that we're really all in this together and really know better time for us to be really embodying that as we have a global pandemic that we're really all in it together, right? And so you can just say to yourself, everyone suffers. So mindfulness, ah, and usually I like to say, ah, right? Because it's like, I'm always kind of surprised when I'm suffering like, like, oh, oh, right. Ah, what am I experiencing is suffering? Ah, this is suffering. Everyone suffers. And then the third part is the self-kindness. And so this is really like an invitation. And the phrase there is, may I be kind to myself? And so it's not I am kind. It's not forceful. It's not designed to kind of instantly make your life better. It's nothing more than an invitation to maybe practice self compassion during a time of suffering when you might not have otherwise thought about to do it. So may I be kind to myself? Or you could even say it as, what do I need in this moment? Right? Because that's that that part of action, the compassionate action. You know, like I said, like, what did you say? What tone of voice did you use? Did you take any action, right? Because compassion is very action oriented. We want to relieve suffering. That's what we do. And so this is a compassion break. These little phrases, I like to actually put them on like three by five cards, and then stick it in my wallet, I kind of cut a three by five card in half. And when I work with my students, they get lots of three by five cards, and we stick them all over the house and so that they can begin to kind of integrate these tools into their lives. And so this is a moment of suffering. This is suffering. Everyone suffers. May I be kind to myself? It's really simple, but what this little mantra, this little set of phrases does for you is that it helps you to stop in the moment and just take a breath and to open up to the possibility that you could be kind to yourself in this moment. And maybe there's something that you need in this moment to take care of yourself so that you continue to be strong and really take care of others. Because, you know, right now, the work that you do is more important than it ever has been. And your work in the community has always been very important. So we want you to be safe. We want you to be healthy. And I want you to have some of these tools so that you can be emotionally strong. And so, you know, just to kind of review, there is the stopping and taking a breath, you know, any of the soothing touches, you know, just a small moment to take a breath, like, just that can change the course of your day and can change how you make decisions about how to care for yourself. I mean, only you know what you need in the moment. You are your own expert. And so these kind of soothing touches moments that you can have with yourself, these reminders that it's okay that you're suffering, that everyone suffers and you have the possibility to be kind to yourself. This is just some simple tools that you can use on the fly when you're out in the field or even at home with your family or whatever it is that can be challenging in your life. So at this point, Sonia, I'm going to switch over to you. And do you have some questions for me? I do. And I want to just reiterate how important this is today. Dr. Phelps, being that all of our CHWs are truly trying to manage their own homes and their own scenarios as well as continuing to reach out to our hub families, you know, continuing to be a support for the community while, you know, kind of holding down the fort in their own arenas at home. So this is just so important. I'm so glad that you were able to speak with us today. So relevant. But yeah, let me let me pull over to some questions. So somebody had commented on guilt, guilt while having self compassion. And how do we stop those pervasive thoughts? How and in the question, the participant even kind of touched on early in the presentation, you said that that they can feel self indulgent. And so that's that's something that the participant, it looks like experiences, but then also once, I guess, maybe they're able to overcome the self-indulgent feelings, then there's the guilt. Do you have any thoughts on overcoming the peace on guilt and really allowing yourself to to be self compassionate? I mean, it's it's those feelings are going to come up, right? So it's not that we need to kind of stamp those feelings out. You know, in the guilt in particular, you might have heard the term survivors guilt. And so, you know, if you were in, you might have read about people like who were workers in 9 11. You know, maybe they were the hospital workers or maybe where they were the rescue workers. And, you know, maybe they were one of the people who ended up without any long term damage. You know, their lungs are fine, their health is fine, they're still alive, right? They can very often have something called survivor skills. And so that is a response to going through a traumatic event. And so compassion is an antidote to that. Giving your giving yourself compassion. It's kind of like, I want to distinguish because sometimes so often we're used to like having an illness and then we take a pill, right? It's like, how do we fix it, right? So self compassion and compassion in general is not always necessarily about fixing it. But it's about providing comfort and service in the time of suffering, right? And so when you feel survivor's guilt or guilt for even taking care of yourself, that is a moment for you to stop, you know, and just when you put your hands on your heart and take a deep breath in. And you know what, I love the idea of permission. And so you can say to yourself, Dr. Phelps said I have permission to take a deep breath at this moment, right? Because, you know, if you look to society, you know, it's not that people, people don't encourage that, right? You're just supposed to like work until you're burnout and then fall over and then, you know, then you're no good to anybody. But all of the research into self compassion shows that the more self compassionate, you can be the more resilient you're going to be. And that's what we need in a crisis is we need resilience. We need that ability. It's not that the world will never knock us down is that when the world knocks us down, we can pick ourselves back up. And part of that process is this kindness and this caretaking of ourselves, how we treat ourselves. And what we know from the research is that the more that we can be compassionate to ourselves, we end up being more compassionate to others. It improves our interpersonal relations, work relationships and romantic relationships. And so you the feeling of guilt, either survivor's guilt or guilt for taking care of yourself is normal. But it's just not aligned with the fact that you shouldn't do self compassion. You should. I think that's so valuable. And along those lines, somebody commented here about would this be good information for, you know, our community health workers to share with caregivers of children or parents and grandparents who are experiencing stress and feeling overwhelmed. And I think absolutely, yeah, what I guess, what are your thoughts on this HW is kind of taking this into the homes and into the families where parents really are maybe not being self compassionate, you know, they're they're like you were saying very hard on themselves, you know, why how am I in this situation? How am I, how am I here? So what do you think about that? I mean, turns out parents are human, right? So it's kind of the same thing that put your mask on yourself first before you can put it on the other person, you know, you're if you have children at home that you're having to try to take care of on top of and maybe at home school and other things, right? And maybe even taking care of illness or elderly people. It's so important that you take care of yourself and you can model that behavior. You know, when I teach this stuff at a corporate venue, a lot of times I say like, just go to the bathroom and do your soothing touch, right? You know, because it's kind of, you know, it's not super socially acceptable. But in your home, you can be the leader and you can model these techniques and kids love this stuff, right? Like kids love to be petted. And if you could teach them to do it to themselves, that's great. Yeah, I think that if you can teach it to your family, absolutely, everybody's going to benefit. Everybody's And what you'll notice is I noticed this, you know, I the first time when I started teaching self compassion. And you know, I was like, I couldn't show up about about self compassion, because it's so awesome. And I was with my family one time and I said something and my dad's like, well, that's not very self compassionate. And I was like, you're right. And so it's kind of what you notice when you actually start to practice is how frequently in our culture, it's accepted for us to self deprecate or to not take care of ourselves or to just be harsh or critical on ourselves. So yeah, the more we can role model this for our families and kids and even the older folks that we take care of the better, absolutely. And I saw somebody popped in a question about compassion fatigue. And absolutely self compassion is one of the tools that you need to prevent compassion fatigue. Oftentimes people that go into helping professions like yourselves have a high level of empathy. And so empathy is like, I can feel in my body what you're feeling in your body, right. And so there's these things in our brain called mirror neurons where we see each other. And I feel what you're feeling. And some I'm very empathetic where it's easy for me to tap into that. But we all do it to a certain extent. And so oftentimes caregivers even more. And what can happen is that we get exhausted from feeling other people's emotions so much. And so self compassion can be a way to kind of fill yourself up. Because we don't want to stop feeling other people's emotions. Because that's not that's not healthy either. And so you have to bring yourself into kind of a healthy medium. And so if you have some of these tools, like say that you had to talk to a particular client and they were going through a really hard time. And then you had you felt all those feelings in your body and you really felt bad for them. You know, when you hang up the call, you can take a moment to take take that breath, do a little soothing touch, you know, acknowledge for yourself. I'm suffering. Everybody suffers. Now what do I need right now to take care of myself? Thank you, Dr. Phelps. That is so helpful for for where we're at, as you know, the health pandemic. And as I bring that up with COVID and self compassion, how do we how do we link those to get about five more minutes? How do we how do we navigate COVID and self compassion and, you know, being there for our families being there for ourselves? Well, I just want to acknowledge that, you know, it's challenging. Oh, yeah. I feel very grateful because I had a chance to learn some of these tools to help myself, you know, before the whole thing happened. And I'm so grateful to be able to give these to you today. I think, you know, one of the most important things is I really want to give you permission to do a few things. The first one is, you know, permission to feel whatever you're feeling, because this is a very challenging time, obviously. But for some reason, we kind of have this inner dialogue that might sound like, well, yeah, it's another it's a challenging time for other people, but I need to have it all together. And I need to help my family. I need to be the best homeschooling mom and I need to and I need to and me meaning, you know, so it's like, even though we acknowledge the fact we're in a global pandemic, for some reason, we have different expectations for ourselves. So the first thing I want to do is give you permission to actually have bad days and to feel difficult emotions, right? Because that's a thing that is a normal response to a pandemic. I mean, it doesn't feel good to have a bad day, you know, do I still have bad days? Yeah, I do, I still have bad days. But the way I respond to them is different. And I try to keep track of how I'm feeling. And then what I'm doing for myself to find, you know, to basically mitigate some of that, you know, like, for me, I actually manage a chronic disease. And so I have a self care calendar that has little stickers. And so I get one for doing mindfulness, one for movement, you know, one for checking things off my list of health stuff that I need to do, one for delight. And so I actively manage how I take care of myself. And so that is super important, because you definitely need permission to feel your feelings, and you definitely need permission to have a bad day. You have permission to go to bed early, you have permission to take a nap, you know, you have permission to take care of yourself. And, you know, I want you to really consider what you, you know, go to what you know works for yourself, right? And then add some of this thought process to that. You know, just that contemplation of, may I be kind to myself? You know, it's like, it's like, it just opens the door to the possibility that you could speak to yourself in a different way, live in a different way. You know, another thing too, like along the lines of survivor's guilt. It's okay for you to have an excellent day. It's okay for you to be happy. Those things are also good and fine. And you don't need to feel guilty about having an excellent day. You don't need. And so really, I just want to give you permission to be able to accept yourself where you are in the moment in this global pandemic. Dr. Phelps, thank you so, so much. This is a message that needed to be heard, loud and clear by our participants, by our CHWs. I can't thank you enough. And any additional questions, of course, we'll get those to you via email and make sure we're communicating with you about any follow-up questions that there are. So thank you. Thank you for being part of this. Thank you for your knowledge and expertise, Dr. Phelps. Dr. Phelps, my pleasure. Bye, everyone. Have a fantastic day and take care of yourself. Thank you.