The Worthy Physician

Surrender. The Strength in Letting Go.

• Dr. Sapna Shah-Haque MD

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We rethink surrender as a skill for physicians: not quitting, but aligning with reality to protect energy, clarity, and compassion. We share the serenity prayer, simple pauses, and the “just be” mindset to loosen the grip of control and reduce anxiety.

• redefining surrender as strength, not defeat
• the serenity prayer as a practical lens
• medicine’s culture of control and its costs
• how overplanning fuels anxiety and fatigue
• micro-practices to pause, reflect, and reset
• accepting limits, asking for help, resting without guilt
• moving from comparison to presence and alignment
• stillness as a gift that restores focus
• choosing ease without abandoning effort


Though I am a physician, this is not medical advice. This is only a tool that physicians can use to get ideas on how to deal with burnout and/or know they are not alone. If you are in need of medical assistance talk to your physician.


Learn more about female physicians' journey through burnout to thriving!
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SPEAKER_00:

Surrender. Surrender is not giving up. It's giving in to the flow of life. Welcome to another episode of The Worthy Physician. I'm your host, Dr. Supna Shawhawk, reigniting your passion for humanity. So today I wanted to talk about something that can feel uncomfortable for many of us in medicine. The concept of surrender. Not in the sense of defeat, because we're not on a battlefield. We could use a proverbial discussion that, yeah, life, life is a battlefield. And no, I'm not quoting Pat Benatar. That's love as a battlefield, but that's another subject. But the concept of surrender as an actual act of strength, of release, and of trust. What I'm going to challenge you today is to give up the idea of control. Why? Well, first off, there's no mathematical way to control everything. It's not possible. It's not even probable. The other thing is that I look back to the serenity prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. And it's not ironic at all that AA meetings usually start out with that prayer. Also, it's a great prayer or reflection to go back to. Why? Because we're giving up control over trying to manage every millisecond, every everything on our to-do list. That's different than prioritizing. We're not going over that right now. But just surrender. We're trained to control variables. We go in, we plan the day, we double check, we anticipate, we try to scrub our schedules, we try to plan out every half hour segment, or sometimes shorter or longer period of time, from the time we wake up to the time we go to bed. Medicine certainly rewards certainty, but life, and the key word here is life, rarely does. In our family, we have a saying, man proposes, God disposes. So we want things to go a certain way, but a higher power says, watch out. So control feels like safety. But when we try to control everything, we end up gripping so tightly, we lose our sense of peace. We start to worry, we start to anticipate, we try to predict what's gonna happen next. And quite frankly, we can control certain things, but other people's reactions. Life happens, schedule changes, uh, a sick kid, a sick family member, you, the physician getting sick. We can't control that necessarily. We can take measures to try to prevent it, but again, we cannot control it. I've noticed that in moments when I resist, the unexpected delays, the unanswered questions are often the very moments in life in which I need to surrender. Surrender to the universe, surrender to the moment, surrender to God. Use whatever word makes you feel warm and cozy inside, but that's when I need to surrender. And it's not saying I don't care what happens, it is not saying whatever is gonna happen is gonna happen. I'm not going to try and put my best effort forward. I'm simply acknowledging I cannot control everything. I can prepare, I can try to anticipate, but at some point that has to stop. I have to keep my brain from overreaching, and that is when I surrender. I give it up to a higher power, I give that burden up. So, one question that I have for the listeners today, where are you holding on to tightly? And if you loosened your grip, not on everything, but on maybe the things that occupy your mind the most, you know that you've done as much as you possibly can. Or maybe you've hit your limit. Surrender. Pause. I get for me this this is really personal because there's always that inner struggle to get more work in. Oh, just another half an hour or more. There are always deadlines. And shout out to Dr. Shabir, who gave a very nice um historical breakdown of deadline. Or actually, not deadline, but priorities. Priority to priorities. My mistake. When things don't go as planned, we double down, don't we? We push harder, think longer, lose touch with rest, we get lost in thought. And what was supposed to be 20 minutes may easily become two hours. Because we're simply lost in a rabbit hole with our thoughts, with our feelings, with our anticipations. We push and we push, and that's the paradox. The harder we try to control, the more it moves further away, and the more out of control we feel. Surrender invites us to stop wrestling with reality to say the moment is here, I don't have to like it, but here it is. I'm going to shut my mind off. Or I'm going to leave it here. I'll pick it back up when I can, when it's necessary, or if I even have to. And yes, I do know that that takes time. It takes time and patience and practice to be able to know that, acknowledge it, and to surrender that idea. So when I approach the concept of surrender, I'm planting a seed. It's not something that is so simple and it'll happen overnight. Surrender has a bad reputation, though. It sounds passive, it sounds like giving up. But I would say it's more alignment. More alignment and the fact that I am human. I have a finite capacity for thought, for feelings, for energy, for analysis, for worry, whatever emotion, feeling, or resource you want to attach to it. It's acknowledging what already exists at that point in time. It's not always palatable, but it's acknowledging reality. And also saying, hey, I'm gonna give it up. I'm going to to surrender it to a higher power. And maybe at some point it is admitting you need help, and that's okay. And maybe letting go of what appears needs to be perfect, or finally giving yourself permission to rest without guilt. Surrender is saying yes to what already is by Eckertoll. So when we surrender, we stop trying to control the uncontrollable, and instead we begin to accept what's real, and maybe even asking for help. And quite frankly, personally, when I get to that point, sometimes it's multiple times a day, which it really should be. Um, I use it as a moment for reflection and prayer. I ask God for guidance. I go back to the serenity prayer many times. If I'm a lot at loss of words. At any point in time, if you find yourself in a moment of silence or stillness, accept it. It's a gift. It's a gift to calm your mind. It's a gift to remind yourself. You don't always have to be producing. Sometimes it's okay, many times it's okay. I think we need to remember this, myself included. It's okay to just be. It's not the end of effort, but it's the beginning of ease. It's knowing when to push and when to let go. You don't need to prove yourself to anybody but yourself. What does that mean? Well, I think in medicine we're always caught up in comparing ourselves to others. Stop. Stop. Just let it be. And I'm gonna refer to some of my favorite lyrics by DJ Tiesto from 2006. Just be. I was lost and I'm still lost, but I feel so much better. You can travel the world, but you can't run away from the person you are in your heart. You can be who you want to be, make us believe in you, keep all your light in the dark. If you're searching for truth, just look in the mirror and make sense of what you can't see, just be.