Need a daily reminder to follow the challenge? Add it to your Google Calendar here.
1. ✨ Get grateful: Notice — and share — gratitude
- Why? A gratitude practice, whether for you alone or one that extends beyond you, has been proven to increase sleep quality and decrease depression.
- Take a moment to reflect and share gratitude for a colleague’s or direct report’s work.
2. 📅 Get space: Set a 5- to 10-minute cushion between meetings
- Why? Back-to-back meetings compound stress and increase attention fatigue. The brain’s ability to receive and process information increases when it’s given 10 minutes of rest between “being on.”
3. 📝 Get coached: Seek out career coaching
- Why? Perspective is a powerful tool, and it can be difficult, in the midst of chronic stress or burnout, to see a way to exit the loop. Career coaching is an opportunity to brainstorm and problem-solve with a neutral party.
4. 🗣️ Get chatty: Catch up with colleagues at the start of a meeting
- Why? Phatic communication is the small talk that has been upended in our post-pandemic, hybrid world, but it’s also been found to increase a group’s trust with one another, motivation, decision-efficiency and ability to communicate effectively and collaborate more creatively.
5. 🍕Get away: Leave your desk/office/home for lunch
- Why? It’s hard to “clear your head” when you’re sitting still, but the positive impacts on your mental health when you simply step away are widely known: When our bodies move, our brains move, giving us more clarity, concentration and memory.
HABIT-BUILDING TIP
The book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear uses a framework called the Four Laws of Behavior Change, which breaks down the process of building a habit into four steps: cue, craving, response and reward.
To create a cue, you need to make it obvious — spell out the habit you’re trying to build: “I will [behavior] at [time] in [location].” If the new habit you’re trying to build aligns with a current habit, you can combine them: “After [current habit], I will [new habit].” Lastly, design your environment so the cues for the new habit are visible and obvious.
DIG DEEPER
- Revisit our Mental Health Reset series to address news leadership challenges.
- Here are some ways to navigate burnout as a journalist.
- Need more specific resources? Check out our mental health resource guide.
Share with your network
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We assembled a working group of news leaders determined to find solutions to help their peers navigate the process of building capacity and strengthening cultures of learning.
We should work to become trauma-informed news leaders — no matter where we sit in the shop — and be intentional to practice this when the stakes are lowest.
These programs, both evolutions of long-standing journalism industry efforts, reaffirm API’s commitment to fostering a more inclusive, transparent and accountable media landscape.
