Demystifying Physician Mindfulness: A 12-Part Mindfulness In Medicine Series

Does mindfulness in your medical practice seem achievable, or are you allowing “doctor stress”, overwhelm, and burnout run your life?

For many of my readers, the concept of mindfulness may seem out of reach. The term evokes imagery of tranquil monks and mountain tops, existing miles away, both literally and metaphorically. I created this series to bridge this distance, and to introduce mindfulness to practicing physicians as an accessible stress management tool for doctors, and a form of physician burnout treatment.

Each post in this series will examine the relationship between mindfulness and a specific area of a doctor’s day-to-day life. They each include a doctor’s story, and how the rigors of practice hamper their ability to fully enjoy that part of their life. After detailing their situation, I provide guidance for how the doctor can utilize mindfulness to gain fulfillment and mastery in that area.

With each post, I’ll give you an actionable step that will help you integrate the post topic into your daily life. I’ll also provide an exercise that you can practice in your free time that will help strengthen your resilience, calm, and fulfillment. My goal is to transform mindfulness from a daunting, unapproachable ideal into a broad toolkit that you have easy access to. Simply put, I want to help you be a happier, more productive version of yourself, at the workplace and at home.

Without further ado, the inaugural installment of Demystifying Mindfulness!

TODAY’S TOPIC: Doctor Stress, Overwhelm, And Physician Burnout Treatment

Our physician: Dr. P, is a cardiologist in a large Midwestern practice:
“I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’m drowning in my work. Every day of my practice feels like a battle, and when I’m with patients all I can think about is getting to the end of my day. I used to be in love with my practice and I don’t know what happened. Now, my work feels meaningless, and I’m completely overwhelmed. What can I do?”

Dear Dr. P,

You’ve already won half the battle. You’ve noticed that you’re locked in an ineffective pattern at work, and you’re interested in strategies to improve your situation. This realization is no small thing! What I want you to start doing is focusing on your physical experience. You’ve just wrapped up with your last patient of the day, you’re late to make it home for dinner with your family, you still have a half dozen charts to complete – what does your body feel like? Is your heart rate elevated? Are your hands tense? Are you sweating? Get in tune with the physical sensations that accompany the feeling of overwhelm, and you’re well on your way to combating it, and feeling more in control.

Physical sensations often precede feelings of overwhelm; in some ways they’re an early warning system that can help you break the vicious cycle. Once you notice these physical precursors, take a brief pause. If you can take 5 seconds in between patients to take deep breaths and ground yourself, that’s a victory. See how many of these pauses you can give yourself in a workday. While this may seem trivial, over time, mindful pauses will begin to weave together into a calmer day, and a calmer and happier life.

In addition to your feelings of “doctor stress”, overwhelm, and burnout, you wrote that you no longer feel connected to your work. Overwhelm and lack of passion and fulfillment often go hand in hand. Of course, it’s challenging to stay connected to work when it’s so demanding. Reducing feelings of overwhelm by mindfully pausing throughout the day will help you feel more authentically connected to your work, and may revive some of the enthusiasm you’ve experienced in the past. Reciprocally, mindfully nourishing your commitment to patients will shrink feelings of overwhelm.

At the end of every day, I encourage you to write down things that went well in your day. Focusing on what went well can reconnect you to your strengths and your sense of meaning. As doctors, we are trained to focus on what is going wrong. Give yourself structured time to focus on what is going right.

Give this mindful strategy a shot to offset the daily stress in the medical field physicians like you face, and to help reduce the risk of physician burnout as you move toward being more present and fulfilled in your practice

To your resilience,
Dr. Gail Gazelle

Have an idea for a future Demystifying Mindfulness post? Want Dr. Gazelle to help you tackle your problem? Write in at drgazelle@mdcanhelp.com or contact us on the website.

Focusing on Your Weaknesses Won’t Make You Stronger

In this week’s post, I break down why physicians should Stress Strengths rather than Strengthen Stress in order to combat physician burnout.

Last week, I was speaking with a medical director at a large practice who was telling me that he couldn’t understand why the physicians in his group were having trouble getting their charts done on time. I asked him what sorts of strategies he’d employed to try and make the situation better, and he told me he had:

Issued email warnings
told physicians that their pay would be docked if they didn’t do better, and
posted comparison charts of members of the group. He could not fathom why the performance wasn’t improving.

I also recently sat in on a meeting with a client of mine (an internist) and her non-physician supervisor. To my disappointment, the entire meeting was focused on patient wait times, an area where the supervisor determined she was not meeting targets. Not one word was spoken about the internist’s improved Press Ganey scores, the gains she’d made in consistently starting her day on time, and the positive comments staff had made about her performance. At the end of the meeting, my client broke down in tears.

“How can anyone expect me to succeed when all they do is point out my shortcomings?”

Physicians are hyper-focused on their own flaws; we don’t need a supervisor to point them out for us. Negative reinforcement is an old and outdated leadership approach. A person’s path to growth and improvement lies in mobilizing their areas of strength.

Meeting with “the big bully” and seeing the “wall of shame” erode self-esteem and don’t lead to improvement. If you’ve been on the receiving end, you have no difficulty understanding how damaging these strategies can be.

What Research Shows About Negative Reinforcement

Gallup conducted a study when they analyzed over one million work teams. They found that only 9% of employees who are forced to work in an area of weakness are engaged, while 74% of their counterparts who are allowed to work in an area that uses their strengths are engaged. This isn’t a minor difference either; the gap is staggering.

Engaged employees tend to be more productive and happier at their work. One of the easiest ways to increase employee engagement is to help them align with their strengths.

Let’s try a simple exercise:

Think of a task you’ve been putting off completing. Imagine that you’re sitting down to do it right now. For 60 seconds, think about all the ways you believe you’re inadequate to get this task done:

I’m not smart enough
I’ll never get this all done
I’m not as disciplined as others
I’m a great procrastinator

Don’t hold back, pick your poison!

Now, mindfully, check-in with yourself. Rate your level of motivation to do the task on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 = no motivation at all and 10 = let me at it!

Next, switch your focus to all the ways you’re more than adequate:

I’ve gotten this type of thing before
I am accomplished and well-regarded
I’m good at this type of task
Even when I procrastinate, I always cross the finish line

Sweeten the pot a little more by giving yourself an extra 30 seconds to think how good you’ll feel once the task is off your list.

Now check-in with yourself again.

Want to combat physician burnout symptoms but not sure what your strengths are?

While you may be used to focusing on your weaknesses, in your roles of physician and family member I can assure you that you have many. You simply could not have made it this far without them.

An easy way to find your strengths is to complete a basic personality traits test like the one provided by the University of Pennsylvania Department of Psychology.

How this relates to physician burnout combat

I’ve written about physician leadership and burnout in the past, and it’s clear that a deficit, weakness-based focus, and burnout go hand in hand.

If we want to avoid burnout or find out how to combat physician burnout, the strategies I mention in this article are key:

Stop focusing on what went wrong and start focusing on what went right
Help others see their strengths

Want to learn how you can reduce, deal with physician burnout, and promote healthy physician leadership?

Get my Anti-Burnout Physician Leadership checklist for further FREE tips on how to combat physician burnout.

Doctor Stress, Overwhelm, And Physician Burnout Treatment