What You Will Learn

• Emotional boundaries help protect your mental health by separating your feelings from those of others.
• Establishing emotional boundaries fosters healthier communication and strengthens relationships.
• There are three types of emotional boundaries: diffuse, rigid, and flexible, each affecting relationships differently.
• Developing emotional intelligence enhances your ability to recognize and respect your own boundaries and those of others.
• Self-care and validation are crucial for maintaining emotional boundaries and overall well-being.
• Cultural perspectives significantly influence how we perceive and establish emotional boundaries.
• Understanding emotional labor can help you identify when your boundaries are being compromised and take necessary steps to protect them.

We Want to Hear From You!

How do you navigate emotional boundaries in your own life? We’d love to know your strategies or experiences! Share your thoughts below:

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Recap of Key Points

Here is a quick recap of the important points discussed in the article:

• Emotional boundaries protect our mental wellbeing by separating our feelings from others’.
• Establishing boundaries fosters healthier relationships and effective communication.
• There are three types of emotional boundaries: diffuse (over-involvement), rigid (difficult to connect), and flexible (healthy give-and-take).
• Healthy boundaries are vital in romantic partnerships, friendships, and professional settings.
• Emotional intelligence aids in recognizing and respecting boundaries in ourselves and others.
• Self-care and validation are essential for maintaining emotional boundaries.
• Cultural perspectives shape our understanding and practices around emotional boundaries.
• Awareness of emotional labor helps in recognizing when our boundaries are being compromised.

As a high-performing entrepreneur, I always prided myself on pushing through anything. Long hours, tight deadlines, constant demands: I saw it all as part of the job. I built a couple of thriving businesses, including one of the largest facility management companies in the U.S. Northwest, raised children as a single mom and did everything “right.” Until one day, my body forced me to stop.

A sudden diagnosis of hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), a rare and potentially fatal immune disorder, changed everything. I went from boardrooms to hospital beds, from conference calls to critical care. The timing could not have been worse, as it came just four months after launching my latest venture, Legacy Leader. It was the hardest leadership lesson I’ve ever had to learn: You cannot be a great leader if you abandon your own health.

Health was never the priority, until it had to be

As leaders, we often push our well-being to the back burner. We’re taught to be resilient, to show up no matter what. We wear our exhaustion like a badge of honor. But here’s the truth: Leadership doesn’t mean sacrificing yourself for the mission. It means feeling good enough to sustain it.

In the months leading up to my diagnosis, the signs were there, but I brushed them off. Persistent fatigue, trouble focusing and digestive issues that just wouldn’t go away. I chalked it up to stress or “just a busy season.” I kept telling myself, “I’ll rest after this project,” or “I just need to push through a little longer.” But HLH doesn’t wait. And it doesn’t care about your to-do list.

That diagnosis forced me into a new kind of leadership. One that required listening to my body, honoring my limits and choosing recovery over performance. And, more than that, it forced me to confront something deeper: I had attached so much of my identity to my ability to perform that I didn’t know who I was without the hustle.

You can’t be indispensable, and that’s a good thing

One of the first fears that hit me in the hospital was, “What happens to the company if I’m not there?” Like many business leaders, I had built something that, in some ways, depended too heavily on me. That fear taught me to embrace a new truth: The best leaders build organizations that thrive in their absence.

I began putting systems in place so my team could make decisions without me. We mapped out contingency plans. I trained team leads to run key meetings, gave them real authority and practiced letting go. What I discovered surprised me: The more I empowered others, the more confident and capable they became.

That experience showed me that delegation isn’t just efficient. It’s an act of trust. And trust is one of the most powerful currencies in leadership. Your legacy isn’t what happens while you’re in the room. It’s what happens when you’re not.

Don’t come back too soon

After the worst had passed, I wanted to jump back into work. That was my default setting: show strength, bounce back, don’t miss a beat. But this time, I paused. I realized that rushing back wouldn’t help my team. It would only model unsustainable behavior. So, I chose to rest. And, when I did come back, I chose to take breaks often.

That choice wasn’t easy. I wrestled with guilt, fear and the nagging belief that I was falling behind. But I came to understand something I wish I’d known earlier: True leadership isn’t about always being “on.” It’s about making smart decisions, even when they’re uncomfortable. And, sometimes, the smartest choice is to heal.

Taking care of myself wasn’t selfish. It was strategic. It allowed me to come back stronger, clearer and more connected to my purpose. It also gave my team permission to care for themselves too.

A few things I wish I’d known earlier

If you’re a business leader reading this, let me offer a few practical things I’ve learned the hard way:

• Treat your annual checkups like board meetings. Put them on the calendar and make them nonnegotiable.
• Document how your company runs. Train someone to take over core responsibilities in case you’re out unexpectedly.
• Schedule recovery time, not just vacation. Plan actual days where you unplug, whether it’s time outdoors, time offline or time with no obligations.
• Pay close attention to physical signals. That recurring headache or chest tightness isn’t just “background noise.” Get curious.
• Set limits with intention. Saying no to one project might allow you to say yes to your long-term health.
• Create a written plan, both for your absence and for your return. Make resilience part of how you build your business.

We can no longer afford to see health as something we address only when it breaks down. Prevention isn’t a luxury. It’s leadership.

The real ROI

HLH changed my life. It stripped away the illusion that I could keep going forever and replaced it with clarity, purpose and peace. Today, I lead differently. I live differently. And I share my story in the hopes that others won’t have to learn the hard way.

In my book, Your Way Back to Happy: How to Turn the Pain of Your Past Into a Future of Freedom, Purpose, and Peace, I write about how to reevaluate what success truly means and a new way to live with intention, peace and joy.

Don’t wait for a diagnosis to start leading differently. Your health isn’t a distraction from your goals. It’s the foundation that makes everything else possible.

Photo courtesy of Janelle Bruland

Comfort takes priority this morning as the Moon continues its slow and steady glide through Taurus. Prioritize activities that make you feel calm and even pampered before you get started on your to-do list.

This afternoon’s energy is supportive. Receive kind gestures without questioning if you deserve them. Make someone feel seen. The moon harmonizes with compassionate Jupiter and dutiful Venus in quick succession, creating a perfect window to invest in your relationships or a little mid-day self care.

Trust your gut when wise and mature Saturn grounds the moon this evening. Your feelings tonight aren’t fleeting; you can trust they’ll stick around. Express your honest intentions, affirm your commitment, or gently reinforce boundaries.

For more, check out your tarot reading.

**This post contains a giveaway. Scroll to the bottom to learn more!

Burnout has been on my mind a lot lately, and that’s saying a lot since my burnout brain has trouble focusing these days.

Between working from home while raising two young kids and traveling back and forth across the country to spend time with a sick loved one, I’ve felt stretched in more directions than I thought possible. I know many of you can relate to the constant push to keep going even when your body and mind are begging for rest.

That’s why I’m excited to share a resource that feels both timely for me personally and, I think, deeply valuable for this community.

Therapist Morgan Johnson’s 8 Keys to Healing, Managing, and Preventing Burnout is part of the long-running 8 Keys series, which focuses on a variety of mental health issues.

What sets this book apart is its broad perspective: it doesn’t just talk about work stress, but also acknowledges the toll of caregiving, parenting, social pressures, and cultural systems. And it offers a wide range of practical, research-backed exercises to help us move through burnout and start to heal.

Instead of quick fixes, it gives you ways to reconnect with your body, your emotions, and your sense of meaning—so you can feel less depleted and more alive in your daily life.

I’ve chosen three exercises from the book that stood out to me as especially powerful. Each one is simple, actionable, and surprisingly effective. I hope you’ll find them as helpful as I did!

ACTIVITY 4B: Name It to Tame It

When you experience significant internal tension and anxiety, you can reduce stress by up to 50% by simply noticing and naming your state.
—David Rock

Goal
To get familiar with interpersonal neurobiologist Dan Siegel’s technique “Name it to tame it” (Siegel, 2013) to downregulate—calm—the threat detection centers in your brain and help decrease distress. This can be used both individually and in relationships and families.

Side quest for parents: Search “Dan Siegel hand-brain model video,” which helps kids as young as 5 begin to understand how their brain works and impacts changes in emotions.

Instructions
Please read Siegel’s (2023) description below and the example that follows. Then, complete the subsequent prompts to help you think through how you might use this in a practical way in your own unique context.

In the brain, naming an emotion can help calm it. Here is where finding words to label an internal experience becomes really helpful. We can call this “Name it to tame it.” And sometimes these [automatic] states can go beyond being unpleasant and confusing—they can even make life feel terrifying. If that is going on, talk about it. Sharing your experience with others can often make even terrifying moments understood and not traumatizing.

For example, imagine you’ve arrived home from work—which already felt like one of the longest shifts in recorded history—and you are exhausted and overstimulated. Today, you helped everyone and their dog, just not really yourself. When you walk in the door at home, your toddler is having a meltdown on the floor, screaming bloody murder. Your partner gives you the “S.O.S.” look.

Even if you do need to lend a hand in the moment, you can quite literally calm your body in this moment of stress just by naming it, something like, “I’m feeling overwhelmed.” If your partner then says, with a supportive tone, “You’re overwhelmed—was it a long shift?”, that’s even better, because now the primitive parts of your body sense, “I’m not alone here.”

Other Examples of Naming Your Internal Experiences

• I’m sad.
• I’m feeling stressed about work.
• My face and ears feel hot, I’m so angry right now.
• The thought of ___ (concern/worry; e.g., not having a break this weekend) has me feeling really anxious right now.
• I’m feeling a bit defensive right now. The story I’m telling myself is it’s not okay to make mistakes and that what I do right won’t be noticed.
• When I hear you say ___ (repeat the exact words they used), I notice that I feel ___ (emotions/feelings or sensations; e.g., lonely, stressed, sad, my heart start to race, my stomach drop).

Please note: Depending on the situation/context, you can name things in many different ways:

• Aloud to yourself
• Internally to yourself
• Written out journaling style
• Aloud to someone else (e.g., partner, therapist, therapy group)
• Internally to someone else (e.g., prayer, connection with ancestors, loving-kindness meditation)

In your life presently, if you wanted to practice naming things aloud, who might be a safe person/people to try this with? Who might not be a good candidate?

If sharing this way is not something you’ve really done before, what might you say to recruit someone you trust? (For example, “I’ve read that just saying out loud how I feel might help with my stress. Would it be okay if sometimes I let you know that I just need someone to listen and not give advice?”)

How was talking about feelings modeled in your environment growing up? Are there any parts of you that feel like this is a bad idea or like it would not be helpful to name things?

Feel invited to design your own experiment! Perhaps you let your partner know that you’re going to “name it to tame it” when you come in the door at the end of the day. Notice what it feels like before and after you put words to your state. Does it work better if you write it in a journal? If you say it out loud? If you name it to a friend? Everyone is different, so give yourself some grace and permission to try multiple approaches.

ACTIVITY 4C: Joyful Movement and Exercise

Peace is joy at rest, and joy is peace on its feet.
—Reverend Veronica Goines

Goal
To assess your current physical activity level relative to your abilities and to think through some ways to keep your body moving while minimizing/removing body negativity.

Instructions
Read through the following brief definition of joyful movement, some examples from me, and then respond to the prompts that follow, jotting down any notes that feel helpful.

Joyful movement: movement that is fun and enjoyable, not punishing or for the sole purpose of making/keeping your body smaller. (Tribole & Resch, 2017)

Potential sources of joyful movement include:

• Gardening
• Gentle stretching
• Playing with kids
• Taking a pet for a walk
• Swimming or gently moving in water
• Activities adapted for disabled people, like wheelchair basketball or water skiing
• Trying a trampoline park
• Dance or gently moving part of your body to music
• Horseback riding
• Dodgeball
• Yoga
• Intimate activities or sex
• Hiking
• Tai Chi
• Cycling or social biking
• Paddleboarding

Please note: Be aware that emotional and mental wellness can be negatively impacted if movement is motivated solely by self-critical thoughts, fear, or punishment. Workouts that have an exclusively brutal, self-punishing feel confuse the primitive parts of your body into thinking you’re not safe. Joyful movement, in contrast, gives your body signals of safety.

Do you already have an intentional routine including physical movement or exercise? How consistent is it?

What do you notice about your thoughts about yourself when you’re about to move, exercise, or work out? While you’re active? After you’ve finished?

What kinds of physical activities/movement have tended to make you feel joyful, during and after? If it’s been a while, think about what you liked to do as a kid or in school (e.g., walking the dog, playing outside, taking a hike, biking to work).

If you don’t already have a routine that includes a little joyful movement at least once a week, what is one way you could add in half an hour, even 10 minutes, without significantly disrupting your schedule?

If you frequently think, “I have no free time!” or feel like, “When am I supposed to do more things?!”, please know that small things daily often have the biggest impact. Where are there some small moments in your day-to-day when you could move your body in a way that feels joyful (or distinctly not awful)?

Hint: Clients often report that transitions, such as going from work to home, provide solid opportunities for a little focus on joyful movement (e.g., getting in/out of bed, walking to the car, going to the grocery store).

ACTIVITY 4D: Coming Up for Air

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It’s self-preservation.
—Audre Lorde

Goal
To get familiar with some ways to feel refreshed and reinvigorated and to come up with some ideas for how to use your precious free time in ways that are actually renewing.

Instructions
Read through the brief summary of research findings from the 2021 study by Clément Ginoux, Sandrine Isoard-Gautheur, and Philippe Sarrazin on activities for renewal from burnout, and then complete the prompts that follow.

Ginoux et al. (2021) found five characteristics of activities that most impact renewal and recovery from burnout:

1. Detachment (e.g., not doing work-related things on the weekend, reading things unrelated to work, practicing redirection/distraction when thoughts of work arise)
2. Relaxation (e.g., solo, with your partner/family, or with a group of friends)
3. Mastery (e.g., doing things in your free time that allow you to notice your talents and appreciate your skills)
4. Control (e.g., working to influence groups that contribute to your sense of meaning or identity, or doing activities where you have a felt sense of control)
5. Relatedness (e.g., connecting and collaborating with others, spending time with loved ones)

When you think about your free time, which of these characteristics already describe the activities you engage in? How consistently do you have these experiences month to month?

If you haven’t been doing much with the little free time you have, which characteristic(s) might be the easiest to increase in or add to your present life? Which might be more challenging?

If you have very little free time and you wanted to curate an activity that includes two or more of the above characteristics, what might be some possibilities? What would absolutely not work?

If you draw a Venn diagram in your mind of your social connections—those associated with work and those outside of work—how much overlap is there?

If most of your social interactions involve people from work, how much time do you spend talking/thinking about work together outside of work? You need to spend time together that has absolutely nothing to do with work. How might you let a colleague know you’re working at this? Do you have any friends outside of work you haven’t seen in a while who might be fun to reconnect with? It can be worth checking out some meetups or local community organizations and events, if you are at this point thinking, but . . . I have no friends.

Positive social connection completes the stress cycle, as you know, and we’re healthier, medically and emotionally, when we sense that someone has our back when things get tough.

Relational Activity Add-On: If you work with your partner or loved one and it’s hard for you to spend time together without bringing up work, brainstorm one thing you could try together at least 30–60 minutes each week to disconnect from work. If you try it and like it, how can you carve out time for it regularly?

Reprinted from “8 Keys to Healing, Managing, and Preventing Burnout” Copyright (c) 2025 by Morgan Johnson. Used with permission of the publisher, Norton Professional Books, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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If you found these exercises helpful, I highly recommend grabbing a copy of the book. 8 Keys to Healing, Managing, and Preventing Burnout is full of practical tools you can return to whenever you need them.

You can order your copy here—and get 20% off and free shipping!

To enter to win one of THREE FREE COPIES (US only), join the Tiny Buddha mailing list here. I’ll email the winners on Monday, October 6^th.

Care for yourself! Nowful founder Angélica Fuentes shared her personal wellness rituals with ET while celebrating the launch of her brand and Hispanic Heritage Month.

The 62-year-old businesswoman swears by simple, consistent habits to stay grounded — and rejects the idea that self-care has to be extravagant.

“We are told that in order to be well, we need to go to expensive spas, book exotic retreats, or meditate for 20 hours in a Buddhist temple in Nepal. That is not true,” she explains.

Instead, Fuentes relies on daily practices that reconnect her with her body, mind, and soul.

Her mornings begin by sipping a cup of hot water with lemon, followed by two capsules of Nowful MindThrive Mushroom Complex, before pulling out a Nowful Smart Affirmation Card for prompts that shape her mindset for the day ahead.

“They’re packed with hidden magic — technology that instantly connects with your phone and helps supercharge your confidence, strength, and self-love,” she shares.

From there, Fuentes lets it all out.

“I journal in the app, and sometimes just vent. … I also use this time to stay conscious of my breathing, something I’ve learned through short daily meditations.”

Next, it’s time to work her body — which in turn, further works her mind.

“Exercise is a non-negotiable in my life. It grounds me emotionally and gives me the energy to show up fully.”

After her gym session, the entrepreneur is all about hydration and appreciation.

“I’ll drink my matcha or my green juice with collagen peptides and protein and practice gratitude. … On the way to school with my daughters, we each name at least three things we’re grateful for,” she notes.

To maintain the good vibes, the philanthropist reaches for the NOWFUL essential oil to refocus, and winds down with a massage using the brand’s magnesium balm before bed.

Her go-to essentials now come together in the Nowful Wellness in Action Kit, which includes four core products.

“The kit is an invitation to return to yourself,” Fuentes says. “It is more than a set of products — it’s a system, with each element designed to work together so you can carry wellness with you from morning to night.”

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So…what is the Monday Poll?

Excellent question! It isn’t, contrary to its name, an actual poll, like with little clicky buttons. It’s just a list of more or less random questions I’ve been posting on this blog every Monday morning for the past quadrillion years (since 2007).

1. Did you wear lipstick today?

Nope, today was Laneige Lip Balm in Vanilla. I had grand plans to wear a bright lip but at the last minute went super low key.

2. One beauty-related task you’d like to get better about?

I haven’t been doing a great job at keeping up with upper lip and chin hair removal. In my defense, my near vision is crap these days, so half the time I can’t see those pokey things growing out the side of my face, haha!

3. Your thoughts on ramen?

Love it but so much of it depends on two main things for me: 1) the broth and 2) the texture of the noodles. If either of those are off, then I’m out.

4. One nice thing you’ve done for yourself today?

I watched the sun rise while treating myself to an early morning walk. It was glorious!

5. Can you roller skate?

Sure! I learned back in the ‘80s way before knee pads, helmets and parental supervision, hahaha. It was you versus the pavement. Admittingly, I learned REAL quick!

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

P.S. Here are the questions to copy/paste with your answers in a comment. Talk to ya soon.

1. Did you wear lipstick today?
2. One beauty-related task you’d like to get better about?
3. Your thoughts on ramen?
4. One nice thing you’ve done for yourself today?
5. Can you roller skate?