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Stress, trauma, and burnout are hot topics in humanitarian mental health. Humanitarians are at risk for all three.

Understanding the difference between them can help you use appropriate prevention strategies, spot early warning signs, and recognize when you need extra support.

That's why we wanted to share this conversation between Yesim and Gail Theisen-Womersley, Senior Staff Counsellor for UNHCR.

Listen now and learn :

• The difference between stress, trauma, vicarious trauma, and burnout

• Why mutual care matters more than self-care

• How to use the butterfly hug to help yourself and your colleagues

Click below to listen and let us know what you think in the comments.

For most of us, it is difficult to make a request from someone, or to say no to a request. We might feel uncomfortable to say no to an unreasonable request. On the other hand, we might feel anxious to make a perfectly reasonable one.  Because of the discomfort and anxiety, we might altogether avoid these encounters. We then end up not getting what we want and doing things we don’t want.   

However, there is an easy technique that can help us, the DEAR MAN technique .

In this video, we’ll explain this technique step by step.

Watch now and learn:

•         How to prepare for difficult conversations

•         How to mindfully ask for what we want from others

•         How to say no to requests we are unable to meet

When things go wrong some of us become super stressed, ready to blow their fuse or panicky.  Others might respond to crisis becoming shut down, numb or frozen. A few others, when faced with disaster, might keep their calm and be grounded and have a calming effect on everybody around them. Have you ever wondered why?

Window of Tolerance is a way to understand these differences. And, most importantly, how to change them.

In this video, we’ll explain the concept of Window of Tolerance.

Watch now and learn:

•         The differences in our emotional regulation capacities

•         How these are shaped by our experiences

•         How to reshape them the way we want them to be

Humanitarian work can be consuming. The hours are long, the context is stressful, and the work is intense.

It can be hard to disconnect from work.

Learning to disconnect from work is an important life skill.

It allows us to be present and focused in all the slices of our lives - family, physical, spiritual, social, community, and every other part of your life that matters to you.

In this video, we’ll help you build the skill of disconnecting from work so you can be present with your family, your friends, your community, and yourself, no matter what you are doing.

Watch now and learn how to:

• Take advantage of technology to set boundaries around work time

• Identify activities that make it easier to disconnect from work at the end of the day

• Use mindfulness to move your focus away from work

If you find it hard to let go of work and be present in other parts of your life, check out the video and get started.

There is a lot of research showing the benefits of a regular gratitude practice.

There’s also a lot of research showing the benefits of self-compassion.

What happens when you combine the two?

Learning to feel gratitude for yourself - especially your choices and actions - can be a powerful way to cultivate self-compassion and deepen your gratitude practice, if you have one. It’s a great way of calming your inner critic and combating negative self-talk.

In this video, we’ll show you how a simple twist on gratitude journaling to increase gratitude for yourself and quiet your inner critic.

Watch now and learn how to:

• Start a gratitude practice

• Combine the benefits of gratitude and self-compassion

If you’ve got an inner critic voice that just won’t stop, give this a try!

Keeping calm is not the easiest thing to do when we are tired, stressed, overburdened and overstretched. We will be prone to be overwhelmed and it will be difficult not to react with knee jerk responses, emotional outbursts to stressful situations and behave in ways which will end us up with more stress.

It is those moments when we need to be most in control, that we lose control.

If you find emotions hijacking your brain while under duress so that reacting in a calm and thoughtful way becomes tough, then STOP technique might just be the help you need.

In this video, we’ll explain how to use the STOP technique.

Watch now and learn how to:

• STOP spiralling emotions and thoughts when overwhelmed

• Think calmly and clearly in intensely stressful situations

• Take action in a considered way rather than reacting rashly

If you’re one of the many humanitarians who has experienced bullying or harassment at work, you know all too well how damaging that can be. Bullying can impact your mental and emotional health - it’s linked to depression, anxiety, and for some, trauma.

It might feel hopeless to you.

But there are strategies that can help you cope and protect your mental health.

In this video, we’ll talk about what workplace bullying is and why it’s so harmful. And we’ll go over five strategies you can use to help you cope and protect yourself from the harmful effects of bullying.

Watch now and learn how to:

• Validate your experience and your response;

• Use a simple technique called the butterfly hug to reduce the distress that bullying can cause;

• Identify emotional support to help you cope;

If your mental health has been impacted by bullying, we made this video for you.

We all have times when we feel fed up, tired and unmotivated.

When we need something to uplift our mood and boost our energy.

A quick but effective pick me up.

In this video, we’ll talk about this simple psychological and physical wellbeing booster that will instantly improve your physical and emotional wellbeing. It’s so simple that you might doubt that it will work. Well, why don’t you give it a try? It doesn’t require much effort.

So watch our video now and learn how to:

• Immediately fill your body with happiness, love and connection hormones so that you’ll feel happier, calmer and more connected;

• Rapidly lower your stress levels, lower your heart rate, reduce your blood pressure and muscle tension, and enhance your focus and concentration;

• Help others around you to also improve their mood and wellbeing;

I’m not a fan of cold water. If it’s below 25 degrees, it’s not for me.

But I’ll make an exception when it comes to putting my face into cold water. And you should too.

That’s because of something called the mammalian dive reflex.

That reflex helps us calm down quickly because it activates our rest and relax response and deactivates our stress response. And that means our heart rate slows down, our muscles relax, and we start to let go of the tension we’ve been holding.

It’s a pretty cool (pun intended) way to reduce stress and feel better quickly.

In this video, you’ll learn:

• How the mammalian dive reflex works;

• Two ways to use cold water to calm yourself down

• What you need to make the most of the mammalian dive reflex

If you’re not a fan of cold water either, you might be surprised at how well this works. So get yourself a bowl of cold water and watch this video now!

As a humanitarian, you’re faced with all kinds of stress: traumatic stress, chronic stress, and organizational stress.

Day in and day out, these stressors can take a toll, wearing down your resilience and making it harder and harder to cope.

We can counteract the stress we face by taking time to wind down, soothe ourselves, and get back to a feeling of balance and equilibrium.

In this video, we’ll explain what self-soothing is and why it’s so important to your wellbeing.

Watch now and learn how to:

• Identify what self-soothing activities will work for you

• Incorporate self-soothing into your day-to-day activities

• Build resilience through regular practice of self-soothing

If you find yourself feeling stressed and overwhelmed, click play and get started on building resilience now.

You know those moments when your emotions take over and you can’t think straight?

You can get so overwhelmed you end up feeling disconnected.

That’s the perfect time to do a grounding exercise.

Grounding is another way of saying “connected”. When we’re grounded, our minds and our bodies are connected, we’re anchored in the present moment. We feel calm and centred, like a tree rooted to the ground.

When you don’t feel grounded, it can be hard to figure out how to get back to that feeling.

Grounding exercises can help you do just that. They help you detach from emotional turmoil by focusing on something else.

In this video, we’ll show you how to do a simple grounding exercise and give you a chance to practice it yourself.

Watch now and learn how to:

• Get grounded quickly when you feel stressed or disconnected

• Maximize the impact of this grounding exercise using two simple tricks

• Adapt the exercise to your surroundings so you can use it anywhere and anytime you need it

If you’re looking for a simple, do-anytime do-anywhere technique for reducing stress and anxiety, watch this video now.