As a massage therapist, you give a lot of yourself every day. Your work requires physical stamina and emotional presence, so your clients leave your treatment room feeling relaxed and renewed. At the end of the day, you may want nothing more than a massage yourself.
But once you finally have a moment to unwind, your phone is full of news alerts, headlines, emails, social media posts, and more. With a constant stream competing for your attention, it can be difficult to find the energy to engage with an advocacy call to action.
But advocating for your profession matters. The challenge is figuring out how to stay engaged without feeling drained. Advocacy fatigue can pop up if you don’t find that balance.
What Is Advocacy Fatigue?
Leadership and communication strategist Sarah Cassim describes advocacy fatigue as the mental and emotional exhaustion that comes from repeated exposure to important issues, especially when they feel urgent and complex. The fatigue isn’t akin to apathy, and it doesn’t mean you don’t care about pressing issues. It’s happening because your energy is already spent and the idea of doing more feels daunting.
So, when you hear about a proposed rule or law impacting massage, it may feel like one more thing added to an already exhausting day. But staying informed and taking action doesn’t have to be intimidating.
Advocacy matters, and so does your energy level. Staying engaged in government relations doesn’t mean becoming a policy expert or reading legalese. Advocacy can be a simple practice you add to your life without burning out. Here’s how.
Make Advocacy Part of Your Job
Massage regulation affects your career from the moment you enroll in school. Program length and curriculum, licensing exams, continuing education, fees, and clinic sanitation are all decisions made by state legislatures and massage boards. These rules are constantly updated and impact how you practice.
It’s normal to feel overwhelmed by that level of ongoing change or worry you might miss something important. What can help is knowing you’re not supposed to carry advocacy alone. ABMP does a lot of the heavy lifting. Let us track bills, interpret proposals, flag concerns, and alert you when your voice will help make a difference. You don’t have to engage with everything; start by prioritizing the policy issues that are most important to you.
Decide What Matters Most
One of the easiest ways to avoid advocacy fatigue is to narrow your focus. While every voice counts, you can’t lend your voice to every issue that crosses your newsfeed if you want to engage in advocacy in a healthy and rewarding way. Some policies will affect you more directly, and those are the ones worth prioritizing.
Often, the issues where ABMP needs your support align with those that professionals care about most, such as:
- Scope of practice expansion or restriction
- Licensing fee increases
- Continuing education requirements
- Deregulation or restructuring efforts
- License portability and interstate compacts
Prioritizing which issues you have the bandwidth for and stepping back to let us and your peers handle the others allows you to advocate effectively without overextending yourself.
Choose Low-Stress Ways to Stay Informed
Just like physical exercise, advocacy doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Sometimes the most effective engagement is from consistent habits. A few practices you may consider incorporating into your lifestyle could include:
- Accessing your ABMP GR emails. We promise, our goal isn’t to spam you. We do the homework for you and send a quick snapshot of what’s happening, how it will impact you, and what you can do to help.
- Reviewing GR updates using our GR Legislative Updates page. This lists all the changes happening across the country in chronological order.
- Following ABMP on social media. Here, we share only the most important GR developments, especially if there is an urgent call to action. Catch up with us on Facebook and give us a follow on Instagram.
- Bookmarking your state board website. Many have a “news” or “updates” section that’s worth checking from time to time. You can also sign up for email updates if you aren’t receiving them already.
Electing to stay in the loop with any of the options above is a way to keep involved without getting information overload.
Redefining Advocacy
To stave off advocacy fatigue, we may have to reframe how we think about engagement. Clients come to you as a form of self-care, and hot take: Advocacy can fit into the self-care category too. Just remember that staying engaged doesn’t require perfection; it needs only presence. When you stay engaged, you help support a healthy regulatory environment for massage professionals. Advocacy allows you to protect your peace by protecting your profession. That sounds a lot like self-care to us.