Personal Care

For author and Slow Stories podcast host Rachel Schwartzmann, slowing down has changed her story in ways she could have never imagined. In this poignant and timely collection, she invites us to step away from the turmoil of daily life and awaken to the pleasures of living and creating with intention.

When Jade Kelly met her new foster mother, she thought her prayers had been answered. Kindly Carol Docherty was everything her violent, drug-addicted mother was not. Loving and nurturing, she fed and clothed 10-year-old Jade and offered a life free of fear from near constant abuse. Or so Jade thought. As soon as social workers in Lancashire stopped their regular checks on Jade’s progress, Carol turned. Over the next six years Jade and three other girls were effectively kept prisoner in a bedroom she called the ‘bad room’ and subjected to unrelenting physical and mental abuse.

Most of the traditional advice about getting ahead focuses on managing other people’s impressions of you. It’s all about how to network with impressive people and accommodate yourself to people with status and power. Executive coach Liz Tran asks you to forget about those people, and instead, train yourself to listen to and be guided by your innermost voice. From tech to spiritual leadership and executive coaching, Tran has charted her own path by learning how to tune into her intuition and be true to her Inner Genius.

Exhausting schedules and a tumultuous work environment have left many nurses feeling burned out. The COVID-19 pandemic only compounded problems that have been plaguing nurses for decades. How can you take care of others when you don't have the time or energy to take care of yourself? In Courageous Well-Being for Nurses, Advanced Practice Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse, psychotherapist, and educator Donna Gaffney and National Board-certified health and wellness coach Nicole Foster provide essential strategies and resources.

Rachael Elmore has been there and knows on a personal and professional level how hard the early days and months of motherhood can be. In A Mom Is Born she takes her expertise as a licensed and clinical counselor and pairs it with her deeply personal story of overcoming postpartum depression after the birth of her first son. She comes alongside listeners with practical tools—such as the New Mom Wellness Plan and a postpartum progress checklist—to help find the balance between taking care of their new baby and taking care of themselves.

Mindful Mamma is a reassuring and practical guide to help you to navigate the life-changing first year of motherhood. You’ll learn quick and easy mindfulness and hypnosis techniques to create moments of calm wherever you need it - even at four a.m. with a restless baby! As well as this, you’ll discover how to use these powerful tools to help with specific challenges along the way, such as fatigue, anxiety around breastfeeding, relationships and the end of maternity leave.

Although many of us prioritize our physical health through exercise and healthy eating, we often forget to spend time boosting our mind, mood, and mental health. It is so important that we focus on mental self-care and reducing daily stress since mental toughness and resilience will get us through difficult times and help us achieve success in every area of our lives. Using the incredible power of our minds, we can persist and grow in response to life's challenges.

For centuries, Black women have been groomed to neglect their emotional health. We are fed with classic anecdotes like, “be strong”, “no pain, no gain”, and so on. This has mentally conditioned us to regard emotions as soft distractions that somehow make us less of who we are. And this has led to the birth of a generation of women who are so broken and damaged that we believe the relationships we cultivate should function in two settings only: ride or die.

A MacArthur Genius Grant recipient pioneers a radical change in how we interact with older loved ones, especially those experiencing dementia, as she introduces a proven method that uses the creative arts to bring light and joy to the lives of elders.

Many of us caregivers face uncertain future, while caring and providing for our elderly loved ones. Being responsible for the needs and care of an elderly loved one can be a difficult role that many of us do willingly, but it requires a lot of patience, time, energy, tenderness, and hard work. We often need to make decisions which are life-altering for our loved ones and for our own selves and, at times, are not pleasant or easy.

The self-publishing queen started this conversation four years ago with Girl Code, her ode to women and their power, a book so successful that it has been translated in seven languages and continues to make a major impact on the world. Girl On Fire builds on this concept and shows you how to blaze your own trail immediately. You don’t need permission from anyone to live fearlessly and start living your dream.

Though the words "foster care" are not in the Bible, the act of caring for the vulnerable is clearly important to God. Perhaps nowhere is that kind of tender attention and care for the vulnerable more evident than in the act of fostering a child. But as foster parents pour themselves into the children God has called them to care for, they may find themselves feeling emptied, in need of being refreshed and reinvigorated for the day to come.

Kate Paris Battaglia, a resilient high school student, has taken advantage of Covid-imposed solitude to author her first book: 101 Tips for Surviving in a Pandemic: A Generation Z Guidebook. Born near 2000, Kate allows listeners to travel into the minds of a generation accustomed to the technology of the internet. However, she surprisingly does not dwell on social media to cure all ills that Covid-19 and its variants have inflicted upon the "zoomers" of Gen Z.

It's all too easy to get caught up in the often monotonous nature of our day to day—moving from one rote task to the next, only to rinse and repeat the next day. Weirdness, however, is an easily accessible antidote to these feelings of languishing. The quirky, eccentric, and peculiar can take us out of our normal habits of thought and perception, surprising us by breaking up our routines and reminding us that there's more to life than the everyday.

Toxic self-care culture tells women that bubble baths and Botox are the route to happiness and fulfillment. Though these types of self-care can fill us up in the moment, they cannot provide long-lasting nourishment. They are empty calories—the potato chips of self-care. And from them, we can never get full. We need the kind of self-care that nourishes. Beyond Self-Care Potato Chips is a call to action for women everywhere to reach instead for nourishing self-care. Though this may sound easy in theory, many women struggle to carry it out.

In Rising Above a Toxic Workplace, you'll learn how to endure, cope, or quit if necessary. Drawing from authentic - sometimes horrific - real-life stories, authors Gary Chapman, Paul White, and Harold Myra blend their expertise to give you practical guidance, empowering insight, and realistic hope. You'll discover: how workplaces can become unhealthy and how to avoid getting wounded; what drives toxic leaders and why they are so damaging to those around them.

Dermatologist-to-the-stars Doris Day, MD, explains how the power of your mind and breakthroughs in anti-aging can help you look and feel beyond beautiful. Do not have another treatment, procedure, or buy another product before listening to this audiobook! Did you know that your mind is as important as any aesthetic treatment to improve the way you look? Beyond Beautiful will teach you how to improve your self-perception, explain breakthrough treatments and products and when to use them, and give you a roadmap to become the most natural-looking, beautiful version of yourself.

After fighting through the medical system and depleting her parents' life savings and much of her own, Marcell solved her eldercare nightmare medically, behaviorally, legally, financially, and emotionally-and shows you how you can too. Elder Rage answers difficult questions such as how to get obstinate elders to: discuss long-term care options, accept cleaning and caregiving help, see different doctors, and and teaches you how to manage stressand grief.

Unfortunately, because of the hectic schedules so many women are shouldering every day, self-care gets pushed to the back burner. But self-care is vital to maintaining your mental health, and there are ways to quickly weave it into your busy schedule.

Harley, 13, has been sectioned under the mental health act after attempting suicide. She was spotted climbing the railings on a footbridge that crossed a busy motorway and pulled to safety by a member of the public. After six weeks in hospital, social services are looking for a short-term placement so she can be kept safe while family therapy takes place. Harley has a family - a widowed mother and an older sister, Milly, who left home with her long-term boyfriend just over a year ago.