Otherwise

- Jane Kenyon

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

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:

Putting pen to paper in a personal journal is a powerful burnout prevention tool for doctors ...

- and the research says a keyboard is not a substitute for pen to paper.

The unexamined life is not worth living ~~ Socrates

The palest ink is better than the best memory ~~ Chinese proverb

One of the best ways to step out of the whirlwind of your daily life is to develop the habit of journaling about your experience.

Like the layers of an onion, physician burnout is often wrapped in layers of negative emotions. In this post, let me show you a simple technique - it only takes 15 seconds - to release negative emotions as they arise and become the authentic eye of the storm in your practice day.

Peeling back the layers of the onion of bad feelings

If you find yourself overwhelmed, exhausted and out of balance with your practice -- after all your years of training and hard work, and this isn't anything like what you dreamed of back in the day ... well that recognition just feels bad.

And then you notice that the fact you feel bad about your career - well that feels bad too.