Find your hula hoop

By Nettie Reynolds, MDiv, interfaith chaplain 

Compassion fatigue is often described as the emotional cost of caring for people who are suffering over a long period of time. Many healthcare professionals experience this due to witnessing devastating diagnoses, supporting frightened families, and sitting with grief that has no easy answers over a long period of time. It can make it hard to feel empathy, connect with others, and/or find joy in daily life, and it doesn’t go away with simple rest. What can we do to mitigate this?

Refinding fun 

Like many healthcare professionals, I’m pretty good at choosing activities that are productive, like exercise. A harder workout. A higher heart rate. More intensity. More discipline. But after spending days at work flooded with adrenaline, moving from one urgent situation to another, I began to wonder if the last thing we need is more adrenaline. What if we’ve simply forgotten how to have fun?

Pink plastic hula hoop

For me, fun arrived in the form of a bright pink plastic hula hoop. After discovering that hula hoop classes are offered all over the world (and online), I signed up for one. At first, I wasn’t very good. My body had long since forgotten whatever eight-year-old me once knew instinctively, and there were plenty of dropped hoops, awkward movements, and muscles I didn’t know existed. Then one evening our instructor taught us how to hoop while doing jazz hands. Until that moment, I wasn’t entirely sure what jazz hands were, but it turns out they’re exactly what they sound like. There I was, a hoop spinning around my waist, fingers dramatically splayed in the air, laughing at myself in a room full of people also laughing at themselves.

What surprised me most wasn’t learning a new hobby. It was how freeing it felt to do something with no finish line, no stopwatch, no performance metrics, and no special outfit that somehow promised better hooping. There was just me, a colorful hoop, music, and permission to be gloriously imperfect.

What’s fun for you?

Probably not everyone will love hula hooping as much as me. For someone else, it might be watercolor painting. Ballroom dancing. Kayaking. Gardening. Pottery. Playing the guitar. Learning a language. Birdwatching. Baking bread.

Whatever it is, choose something that isn’t measured by productivity. Choose something that reminds you what it feels like to be curious again. Choose something that makes you laugh. Remember laughter isn’t frivolous, it’s restorative.

Every now and then, before I pick up my hula hoop, I step inside its circle. For just a moment, it reminds me that I have a body, not just a brain, and that before I became a chaplain, before I worked in hospitals, before I learned to chart, document, and carry other people’s stories, I belonged only to myself. Then I turn on some music, practice a trick I’m still trying to master, sometimes throw in a pair of jazz hands, and perhaps most importantly, laugh.

Here are two things I’ve learned from this experience:

1. Find your hula hoop.

Of course, it doesn’t have to involve plastic hoops or jazz hands. Find something with no leaderboard, no stopwatch, no pressure to perform. Find something that invites you to play simply because playing is good for the soul.

2. Help someone else remember who they are.

Ask a colleague what they love to do when they’re not at work. Celebrate the painter, the gardener, the musician, the runner, the baker, the grandparent, the amateur photographer. Sometimes the greatest gift we can offer one another is the reminder that we are more than our job descriptions.

This piece expresses the views solely of the author. It does not necessarily represent the views of any organization, including Johns Hopkins Medicine.