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Puzzles! I could work on puzzles for hours! When I'm building puzzles, I forget about everything else. I find myself humming, singing, or "dancing" in my chair (really it's just moving to the beat of whatever I'm singing). Working on puzzles gives me a feeling of tranquility and calm!

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Family time is always the best! Spending time with my daughters in activities as simple as movie nights and baking to getting away for the weekend to recharge always help me feel rested and thankful for what I have. This feeling of gratitude helps when I'm feeling overwhelmed or defeated due to busy days at work and deadlines.

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I love walks and hikes in nature! I always get a feeling of peace and it gives me the opportunity to think and gather my thoughts. When I return home from walks, I always feel more positive and I feel like a better person altogether.

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As mentioned in several of the articles, counselors and other "helping" professionals have an innate nature of being empathetic, nurturing, compassionate, and helpers. Often times resulting in feeling drained. Dedicating time for self-care makes a tremendous impact in how we feel and in turn how we're able to support others. "You can't pour from an empty cup" is a great analogy for this. If we are empty because we're feeling drained and defeated, we have nothing to give. Self-care has been determined to make such a major impact on us and our role as counselors, that the ASCA Ethical Standards for School Counselors has deemed self-care as an ethical mandate.

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My biggest take-away is learning about Secondary Traumatic Stress. I wasn't aware of what STS or compassion fatigue was. Like Baiker mentioned in her article, symptoms of STS "mirror the emotional burnout" we feel in our workplace. We dismiss it as being normal fatigue from a busy day at work, but in reality we're experiencing the start of burnout. I have felt this before and accounted it as just being tired. I can recall many of the symptoms described in the articles. thinking back, I strongly believe it was STS. Dedicating the time for self-care is crucial in helping us be the best version of ourselves so that we can support others adequately.