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.
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For many newsrooms, changing the systems that protect unhealthy culture could be a few sustained decisions away from reality.
Don’t forget to reward yourself for building new habits, and think about how you can incorporate these into your newsroom’s workflow.
With all of the demands on a newsroom, how do you make time to build new habits in pursuit of larger goals?
