Nupur Garg: Kindness, Boundaries, and Self-Awareness

Nupur Garg has spent her career navigating complex systems where resources are limited, expectations are high, and people are often at their most vulnerable. Trained as an emergency physician and later expanding into lifestyle medicine and entrepreneurship, she continues to care for patients in the ED, in her own practice and as a primary care physician while also building companies directed towards patient care. Throughout those experiences, she has developed a nuanced view of kindness that emphasizes empathy, non-judgment, self-awareness, and the importance of healthy boundaries.

Nupur grew up in New York and Florida. She attended MIT, where she studied chemical and biological engineering, double majored in biology, and completed minors in biomedical engineering and management. She then attended Yale School of Medicine. After training in emergency medicine at Mount Sinai in NYC, she later expanded her work into lifestyle medicine while continuing to practice emergency medicine. Today she operates her own clinic, authored a study guide for physicians preparing for the lifestyle medicine board examination, and founded Pro-Patient Tech.

Growing up in a South Asian family also influenced how Nupur thinks about kindness. Hospitality is highly valued, and she described situations where someone might offer something out of a sense of cultural expectation while the other person feels obligated to accept for the same reason. Reflecting on those experiences helped her recognize that kindness is not only about the intention behind an action; it also depends on how it is received by the other person.

She also spoke candidly about the challenge of balancing kindness with self-preservation. Earlier in her life, she often found herself people-pleasing and over-giving, dropping everything to help others and placing their needs ahead of her own. Over time, she realized that this pattern was not always sustainable. Time, energy, and attention are finite, and she came to see that kindness must include consideration for oneself as well as for others. Rather than viewing boundaries as unkind, she now sees them as necessary for maintaining the ability to continue helping people over the long term.

Nupur reflected on how long it can take to understand your own needs. She recalled arriving at college and realizing she did not know something as simple as her favorite ice cream flavor. Having spent much of her early life focused on expectations and responsibilities, she realized she had rarely stopped to consider some of her own preferences. That experience became part of a broader realization that self-awareness requires intentional effort. Understanding how to care for others, she learned, also requires understanding yourself.

In the emergency department, time and resources are finite, and decisions often come down to prioritization. She described wanting to spend longer with every patient but not being able to. In those moments, kindness is about doing what matters most, not about doing everything. As she explained, sometimes care must be delivered efficiently, even when patients expect more reassurance or attention. She shared an example of a resident she had encouraged to join her training program who later told her, “I feel like the only thing I've learned is how to be less kind.” What he was experiencing was not a loss of values, but a confrontation with reality. In resource limited environments, kindness must be adapted to what is possible.

Nupur also highlighted neurodiversity as an area where kindness is often misunderstood. She described working with an employee on the autism spectrum whose strengths became apparent once she adapted her communication style and created space for him to work in ways that suited him. Although there were occasional misunderstandings, patience and flexibility helped build a strong working relationship. For Nupur, experiences like this reinforced the importance of meeting people where they are rather than expecting everyone to communicate or think in the same way.

Nupur approaches the topic of kindness with careful consideration. Her experiences in life, medicine, and business have taught her that kindness matters deeply, but that it also requires balance. For her, kindness is about understanding limits, respecting boundaries, and making thoughtful decisions about where to invest time, energy, and attention, rather than giving endlessly.

“Kindness is non-judgmental, constructive considerations for others.”

Nupur Garg is a physician, entrepreneur, and lifelong learner who sees kindness as effortful understanding of ourselves and others to make the right choices at the right time for the right people. Keep an eye out for more interviews.