Now that summer has arrived, many physicians who spent the past decade or so getting increasingly specialized education have completed their various residency and fellowship training programs. If they are anything like I was 12 years ago, they are excited to have some sense of autonomy in their lives.
Between actually caring for patients and studying the information necessary to be of best service to them, most of your time is not your own as a trainee. Many forces outside of your own control take a toll on the mind, body and spirit during the process of learning to be a good, or even just decent, physician.
It’s a challenging road that we trust will totally be worth it in the end. Unfortunately, there are a few common pitfalls I’ve noticed that keep many young physicians from designing the fully satisfying and functional lives they desire after training is over.
Part of it is residual from the mindset we develop during our years of medical school and post-graduate medical education. We accept certain dysfunctional habits as normal simply because they are typical among physicians. This leads to us trying to work within the dysfunction rather than doing our best to change it.
I invite all physicians to acknowledge the reality of these abnormalities in order to be as successful in taking care of ourselves as we are with caring for others. It is my firm belief that awareness is the first step toward taking the appropriate actions for one’s own well-being.
To promote that awareness, this is the first in a series of blog posts about what I’ve noticed prevents many doctors from moving from surviving training to thriving in their post-training lives.
Excessive fatigue.
Medical training requires a certain amount of exhaustion in order to get the work done. There are only so many hours in the day to master the fine dance between learning and doing as a medical student or physician-in-training. No matter how quickly we get the hang of it, there are always more tedious tasks to get done and fewer people to assist us when we are not at attending physician level.
This time management issue requires us to develop skills that allow us to function on little to no sleep. I consider the ability to provide excellent service in the face of exhaustion to be a super power. It is what allows physicians to perform surgeries or write appropriate admission orders for critically ill patients when we aren’t at our peak physical state.
The problem arises when we overuse that super power. We actually forget how well we function after adequate physical restoration because we have adjusted to operating with sleep deprivation during training.
We enter our first jobs out of residency and decide a good night’s sleep isn’t necessary because we are capable of doing without it. None of the high-achieving individuals we know are well-rested so we feel like only slackers desire better. We work ourselves into the ground on a daily basis with the mindset that if we can hold it together until vacation we are doing well.
This attitude is the complete opposite of what we tell our patients. We roll our eyes at the diabetics who feel like everything is great as long as they aren’t on dialysis or blind from the complications of their disease. We explain to them that daily attention to managing blood sugars is what is going to keep their overall health where it needs to be.
The same principle is true of physicians. Being altruistic, highly educated and specially skilled doesn’t make us any less human. No matter what we tell ourselves, exhaustion is not normal in a sustainably satisfying life. We have to be awake and alert to put the proper amount of physical and emotional energy into our relationships outside of work.
I encourage my fellow physicians to assess your current state of fatigue. What choices are you making that perpetuate the exhaustion unnecessarily? What can you change to make it better? To what beliefs are you clinging that make that change more challenging than it has to be? How can you thrive?
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Dr Jattu Senesie is a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist, certified success coach, physician satisfaction specialist and speaker. She blogs about issues of self care and well-being in an effort to help her fellow altruistic high achievers find satisfaction in their success as early in their careers as possible.
