Selfless, caring, and heroic are just a few of the words that come up when you describe nurses today. Unfortunately, the words that describe many nurses’ realities are much darker:

Beat down, burned out, and unappreciated.

Yet everyday, these superheroes continue to show up to desperately understaffed shifts which often last over 12 hours, each accepting the risk of exposure to a deadly virus, in many cases without the basic personal protective equipment they need to get the job done safely.

And on top of that, when as many as 38% of nurses report violence from patients at some point in their career,¹ you can begin to understand why up to 33% of nurses are leaving the profession within the first 2 years.²

Despite these devastations, nurses are still the ones who run in when everyone else runs out.

They hold your loved ones’ hands when you can only hold them in your heart.

But what happens when the well of compassion runs dry? What happens when a nurse has no more empathy to give?

You can’t pour from an empty cup.

When healthcare providers feel burned out, overworked, and undervalued, a whole host of things start going wrong, including:³

Increased absences from work and higher job dissatisfaction
Decreased compassion satisfaction (provider’s ability to feel satisfaction from compassionate actions)
Higher risk of malpractice claims
Increased patient mortality rates

With nurses leaving the profession faster than they’re entering, the nursing shortage is growing rapidly across the country.

It’s time to change the narrative.

If you are a frontline nurse, we want you to know that we see you and support you.

That’s why we donate a portion of the profits from everything we sell to a Cups of Compassion scholarship fund for nursing students.

Our goal is to remind you of the transformative power which self-compassion can bring into your life and how being kind to yourself can even change things for your patients.

Nurses who feel valued, appreciated and empowered to truly take care of themselves on the inside and outside become more compassionate caregivers, and we believe that compassion will change the world.

And if all of that could start with a simple cup of coffee in the morning, well...

Wouldn’t that be something?

Sources:

¹https://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/workplace/en/

²https://www.registerednursing.org/articles/why-new-nurses-leaving-profession/

³Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence That Caring Makes a Difference by Anthony Mazzarelli and Stephen Trzeciak, 2018.

Why Nurses?