Philadelphia author offers new coping guide for federal employees in these uncertain times

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- Millions of federal employees are preparing for another round of mass firings after directives by the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk, have already led to the departure of tens of thousands of federal workers.

Now, a Philadelphia woman is offering ways public servants can navigate these uncertain times.

In 2020, Dr. Lena Adams Kim launched a podcast called Mindful Moments with Thai Mama. It was born out a program called Mindful EPA that Lena founded for the Environmental Protection Agency at the height of the COVID pandemic.

"Now I'm sensing the same similar sense of uncertainty and fear within my colleagues, not just in the EPA, but other people I know in federal government," she says.

Lena herself is a more than 24-year employee of the EPA and has wrestled with her own uncertainty after she received an email titled "Fork in the Road" from the Office of Personnel Management earlier this year.

She took the option of paid administrative leave, then early retirement.

"So I'm right now in this interesting space of not being retired yet, but not really being an EPA employee, but supporting the EPA employees through advice and feedback," she says.

As Lena prepares to say farewell to her federal position, she is helping her colleagues with a new book, Unshakeable: A Mindfulness Guide for Public Servants.

"It's a guide. It's not a long book, just 14 chapters," she says.

It provides easy, mindfulness practices to help workers find focus, alleviate stress, and perform the task at hand. One example is something called the anchoring breath.

"It is using your breath to anchor your attention and your focus on one thing," says Lena.

She says anchoring breath tamps down the "fight or flight" part of our brain and activates the part of our nervous system that controls our body "rest and digest" response.

"So you might still be stressed, but by focusing on your breathing, you made your body send less cortisol and stress hormones through the body just by doing that," she says.

Lena also suggests mental noting, also known as effective labeling. It's basically pausing to label the individual, stressful thoughts that are swirling in your mind.

"You are, once again, deactivating the amygdala, which is the fight or flight, and activating the parasympathetic nervous response, which is to rest and digest. And what that looks like is, instead of, 'Oh, I'm so stressed, oh I'm nervous, I'm owned by my thoughts,' you notice oh, there's a thought of uncertainty. You're sort of like putting a little post-it note on each thought," she says.

Each chapter of the book provides a workplace scenario and a mindfulness practice to do in response and is named after an employee who helped develop the Mindful EPA program.

"It's an homage to the people whose voices help build that. The book is dedicated to all of my colleagues within the great agency of the EPA," says Lena.

She also reminds us that these practices aren't just helpful for the workplace, but also to do at home or wherever you might be feeling stressed or uncertain.