Burnout Has its Roots in a Choice You Made a Long Time Ago ... You Chose to Be a Lightworker

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This is Blog Post #283
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Remember back when you decided to go to medical school?

Remember that fork in the road? 

You could apply to medical school. OR you could do literally anything else.

You looked in the mirror and recognized you were not like a lot of your friends in school.

• You are smart, quick and enjoy challenges.
• You had really good grades and knew you could work harder than almost anyone else.
• As you contemplated the challenge of medical school, you felt you've got what it takes.
• And you felt called to make a difference; to be a helper and  healer.
• You knew this was an extraordinary choice, because so few people came with you to a career in medicine.
• You hoped this choice would enable you to have an extraordinary life.

You chose to be a LIGHTWORKER and here we are

A LIGHTWORKER:
From that choice point forward, you allied your professional life with the forces of LIGHT in the universe, as we battle specific forces of darkness:

• Illness
• Suffering
• Death and dying
• and family member's crazed attempts to deal with those things.

No matter what stage of your career you are in now, we can agree the choice to become a doctor had a life-long series of unintended consequences. We had only a small understanding of what was in store for us. 

In this blog post let me show you
1) A deeper understanding of some of the most difficult aspects of being a doctor 
2) And six of our most popular tools to maintain your energy, faith and empathy when things get tough.

An anchor, a tether, a life line and a way back to yourself

All doctors - everyone who sees patients for a living - need a solid anchor.

If / when you fall in, you can pull yourself back to shore hand over hand, make it to dry land and catch your breath.

The conversation about physician burnout is often dominated by the term RESILIENCE. We doctors need to be tougher, more elastic, stop complaining. 

I ran into an alternate way of looking at this issue via a blog post by Brenda Osieyo

Here is the quote that inspired her and me; about maintaining an anchor and a way back to yourself now that you have chosen the Lightworker's Path - working with sick, hurting, scared, dying patients and their families.

Since the 1970's, studies have shown that Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is an effective tool to lower the stress of the practice of medicine and prevent physician burnout.

Jon Kabat-Zinn and the pioneers at U Mass have proven that physicians who take their eight week meditation and yoga training have superior resilience skills and subsequent studies over the last 40 years have repeatedly confirmed their initial observations. 

In reviewing this literature, three big questions come to mind for most doctors.

1)  What is mindfulness anyway?

2)  Just how does mindfulness cause its therapeutic effect?

3)  Is eight weeks of meditation training the ONLY way to be mindful at work?

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Let me share my answers to these questions, coming from three different levels of experience:

A recent study reported in the NEJM reveals the Dose-Response Curve between hours worked by resident interns and depression prevalence. 

This was a huge study, over an 11 year time span, showing a powerful dose response curve between hours worked as a physician and depression prevalence. Said another way: too much time spent as a "provider" inside the healthcare delivery system is bad for your mental health.

I deliberately did not write, "too much time seeing patients" in the sentence above,  because we both know the "job" of being an intern or a practicing doctor is so much more complicated than just patient care. 

This is a massively important fundamental observation for all practicing physicians and for US national healthcare policy. 

Let's take a quick dive into the details.

Physicians have three sources of energy to draw upon in practice and their larger life

In this post you will learn:

• The differences in these 3 distinct types of energy
• The symptoms that arise when you are in the negative in any individual account
• How you fill each one to the brim

These simple principles will supercharge your ability to recognize and prevent your own physician burnout.

The Battery Fallacy is one of the great myths of Physician Burnout. 

The Battery Fallacy

When I deliver a training at a Med Staff Meeting, I always ask, "Raise your hand if you have ever said, 'My batteries are run down, I just need a recharge'. All the hands go up. 

The batteries-run-down is the most common metaphor for burnout and it is TOTALLY INACCURATE.

The Battery Theory of physician energy management is a myth, a fallacy.

It is a blind spot.

It is a barrier to recognizing and preventing physician burnout. 

Our work with over 40,000 doctors in the last 12 years has revealed a working model of physician energy that provides:

An accurate representation of energy balance in doctors

The energetic source of the symptoms of burnout 

Burnout treatment and prevention mechanisms you can put into place today

In my work with over stressed physicians I have noticed a consistent misunderstanding of the pathophysiology of burnout – the hidden methods physician burnout uses to sap your energy and steal your passion for medicine.

In this post I will show you how Physician Burnout does it’s dirty work.

Once you clearly understand how physician burnout operates, you will begin to see the simple ways you can keep the normal stresses of being a doctor — from crossing the line into threatening your career, your marriage and even your life.