My horoscope beautifully reminded me recently: “One small act of self-care can be clearly beneficial, boosting your overall well-being and creating space to allow energy in and out in a positive way” (Miller, 2026). What a powerful nudge.

It’s a reminder of several critical and often overlooked things:

While we may think that our capacity is unlimited, it really isn’t. 

Energy needs to be replenished.

Perhaps most importantly, self-care is deeply critical to functioning in an intense world.

We know this intuitively. And yet, in a fast-paced, high-intensity environment like camp, it can be remarkably hard, for staff and leaders alike, to create genuine moments of self-care.

Throughout the summer, we encourage our campers to express themselves, to engage in moments that bring out their best selves, and to learn coping mechanisms and self-care techniques that will serve them long after they exit our gates. So, why aren’t we building those same opportunities into our own daily camp lives?

Self-Care Is Inclusive

It’s not just frontline staff who need this. The reminder that self-care matters is all-inclusive. It translates all the way up from the least-tenured counselor to the owners and directors of camp, who carry the weight of hundreds of young lives on their shoulders every single day while simultaneously fielding calls from parents and guardians that require patience, empathy, and energy that must, by necessity, be replenished.

Self-care is not a luxury. In the camp world, it is imperative.

The Core Elements of Self-Care for Camp Professionals

Practicing the following seven acts of self-care can ensure that all camp pros remain firmly focused on ensuring that camp is a safe and happy place for campers and staff alike.

1. Calm the Mind, Body, and Spirit

The camp environment is relentless. There is rarely silence, stillness, or a moment that isn’t already claimed by someone or something else. That is precisely why intentional calm must be built in, not simply stumbled upon.

Whether it’s five minutes of quiet before breakfast or morning activities begin, a short walk between programming blocks, or responding to parent phone calls, deliberately choosing to slow down is a form of professional discipline. A calm mind makes better decisions and has greater patience. A calm body is more physically resilient. A calm spirit is more available to the campers and fellow colleagues who need it.

Encourage your staff to identify their personal reset and to protect it throughout the summer.

2. Replenish Social and Emotional Energy

Camp is, by its very nature, an intensely social environment. For many staff members, especially introverts or those who are newer to the community, the relentlessness of that social energy can be quietly depleting, even when they love every minute of it.

Leaders should normalize the need for social and emotional replenishment. This doesn’t mean disappearing or being unavailable. It means recognizing that a staff member who steps away for 10 minutes to decompress is not shirking responsibility; they are preserving their capacity to show up fully when it matters most. Create physical spaces on campus where staff can retreat briefly. Consider building short, protected breaks into schedules. Model this behavior from the top down — practice self-care so the staff sees that everyone, including leadership, needs to recharge.

3. Take Time for Yourself — Really

Days off exist for a reason. And yet camp culture, with its deep sense of mission and community, can create subtle (or not-so-subtle) pressure to always be present and engaged. No need for that pressure to deter staff members at every level from taking their well-earned and needed days off.

A staff member who returns from a day off genuinely rested is exponentially more valuable than one who spent their free time halfway at camp anyway. Encourage your team to actually disconnect. Go somewhere. See something outside the gates. Sleep. Laugh with friends whom they’ve met at camp, or with those who have nothing to do with camp. Remind them, and yourself, that rest is not a reward for hard work. It is critical to enabling the hard work to be sustainable.

4. Develop Interests and Connections Outside the Bubble

One of the great joys of camp is also one of its risks: it becomes the whole world. For staff living and working on campus for weeks at a time, the bubble can close in quickly. Interests outside of camp, friendships that exist beyond the staff roster, and a sense of identity that isn’t solely tied to a bunk, a program, or a title are not distractions. They are anchors.

As leaders, we can support this by celebrating staff members as whole people. Ask them about their lives. Encourage them to pursue a hobby, even in a small way, during their time at camp. A staff member who feels seen as a full human being, not just as a counselor or a specialist or a group head, is a staff member who stays grounded, engaged, and well.

5. Feel Good — And Mean It

This one sounds almost too simple. But it bears saying: how your staff feel about themselves, their work, and their place in the community has a direct impact on the quality of care they provide to campers.

Recognition matters. Acknowledgment matters. A director who notices effort, names it specifically, and expresses genuine appreciation is doing self-care work on behalf of their team — creating an environment where people feel valued enough to invest in their own well-being. Feeling good is not vanity. It is fuel.

6. Stay Hydrated

Physical self-care is self-care, and hydration may be the most overlooked piece of it in a camp setting. At least one camp has hydration monitors posted in the dining hall bathrooms, a simple color chart so staff can check in on whether they’ve had enough water that day. It’s a small, almost funny intervention. It’s also necessary.

Camp professionals spend their days outside, in motion, in the heat, fully focused on the kids in front of them, which means the basics are often the first things to slip. Staff don’t skip water because they don’t care. They skip it because everything else feels more urgent.

Leaders can build hydration into the camp culture the same way they’d build in any other form of care: make water visible and accessible everywhere staff are working, talk about it openly, and model taking water breaks themselves. It’s a small thing, but a dehydrated staff member is a depleted one, and depletion shows up in patience, mood, and the quality of care campers receive.

7. Step Outside the Bunk — Mindful Breathing

When a staff member feels a situation start to overwhelm them, the most powerful tool they have is often the simplest; put a few feet of distance between themselves and the moment. Take 10 slow, intentional breaths.

Deep breathing works because it interrupts the body’s stress response before it escalates, giving staff just enough space to respond thoughtfully instead of reactively. It also valuably models for campers watching that stepping away to reset isn’t avoidance; it’s a skill.

Leaders should explicitly give staff permission to take this kind of pause, not as a last resort, but as a normal, expected part of the job. Practice taking such breaks during training so it’s already familiar before the moment that calls for it arrives. The goal isn’t to eliminate hard moments. It’s to give staff a reliable way through them.

Mindful Self-Care Practices Worth Building into Camp Life

The following are techniques are simple, accessible, and genuinely effective:

• Speaking Up When Support Is Needed. This may be the most important practice on the list, and the hardest one to normalize in a culture that rewards strength and selflessness. Create explicit, shame-free channels for staff to say: “I need help. I’m struggling. I am running on empty.” The staff member who asks for support before reaching a breaking point is doing something courageous. Treat it that way.
• Morning or Evening Movement. A short walk, a stretch, even a few minutes of yoga before the day fully begins or after it ends can do remarkable things for mood, focus, and physical resilience. Encourage your staff to find their version of this — whatever form movement takes for them. And make sure you move too.
• Daily Connection with Trusted Colleagues. Not every conversation has to be about a problem. Encourage staff to check in with one another simply because they value each other: brief, human moments of connection that aren’t transactional. These micro-interactions build the relational fabric that makes hard moments easier to navigate.
• Genuine Rest, On and Off Duty. Self-care isn’t confined to a day off campus; it’s how staff spend the in-between moments too. A real lunch break, sitting down instead of eating standing up. A few minutes with a book, music, or silence before lights-out rounds. And yes, when the day off comes, making it count by actually going somewhere and doing something fully disconnected. Rest in small doses sustains people; rest in large doses restores them. Staff need both.

Challenges to Watch Out For

Even with the best intentions, self-care culture can be undermined. Watch for these common patterns:

• The Martyrdom Trap. Camp culture celebrates sacrifice. When exhaustion becomes a badge of honor and rest becomes something to feel guilty about, self-care quietly disappears. Name this dynamic explicitly and push back against it.
• Leadership Not Modeling Self-Care. If owners, directors, and senior staff are visibly running on fumes, missing meals, and never stepping away, no amount of messaging about self-care will land. The culture is set from the top.
• Inattention to Follow-Through. Good intentions without built-in structure rarely survive the camp schedule. Where possible, protect the time. Put breaks on the calendar. Make rest an operational reality, not just an aspiration.

The Long-Term Payoff

The campers in our care are watching everything. They are watching how we handle pressure, how we treat our bodies, how we ask for help, and how we recover when things are hard. When we invest in the self-care of our staff, beyond just protecting our team, we teach every young person in camp what it looks like to be a healthy, sustainable human being in an intense world.

Self-care is good care for the mind, the body, and the spirit. And its value does not end at the camp gates. The question is whether we build environments where acting on that need is not only possible, but actively encouraged.

Step outside. Take the breath. Count to 10. Ask for help. Rest. It is not weakness. It is the whole point.

Photos courtesy of Camp Kippewa, Monmouth, ME.

Reference

Miller, S. (2026, June 10). Aquarius Daily Horoscope. Astrology Zone. Astrologyzone.com

Lauren Breitman Tanen, Esq., is a management-side employment lawyer and workplace trainer who has spent over 20 years helping organizations build inclusive, high-performing cultures. For nearly two decades, she led employment law and employee relations teams in-house at companies including Spotify, Shopify, GIII, and PVH. Today, through her employment advisory law firm, LBT Advisory, LLC, Lauren advises and strategically guides C-suite executives through career transitions, coaches leadership teams through complex workplace challenges, and designs and delivers training on respectful conduct, belonging, allyship, and employee morale. She has a particular passion for the camping world, where she advises camp owners, directors, and educators on the unique challenges of residential and day camp environments. Her practical, high-impact approach to workplace culture and inclusion has made her a trusted advisor to camps and camp leaders. A regular presenter at the Tristate Camp Conference, Lauren brings both deep employment expertise and a genuine love of the people, culture, and community that make camp so special.