Day 2: Is it burnout causing me to hate being a doctor?

Day 2 of the Diagnose Your Career Unhappiness Podcast Series.

Through this series, we will pinpoint exactly WHY you are unhappy in your career, so you can figure out your next steps.

In this episode, we answer the question “Is burnout causing me to hate being a physician, or do I just hate being a physician?”

I share why burnout is actually NOT the cause of career unhappiness but an end-stage presentation…

More content specifically around burnout:
Click HERE to download the bye burnout audio series.
A blog post I wrote about how to secure some time off!

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Life After Medicine explores doctors' journey of finding purpose beyond their medical careers, addressing physician burnout, career changes, opportunities in non-clinical jobs for physicians and remote jobs within the healthcare system without being burned out, using medical training.

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Life After Medicine explores doctors' journey of finding purpose beyond their medical careers, addressing physician burnout, career changes, opportunities in non-clinical jobs for physicians and remote jobs within the healthcare system without being burned out, using medical training.

Transcript

0:04

Hello, welcome back to diagnose your career unhappiness, a free audio series where we will pinpoint exactly why you're unhappy in your career so that you can figure out what to do about it. First we need to get some things out of the way that. Are commonly thought to be the problem, but are not the real problem. So let's talk about that. Number one, is it burnout? So this is a question I got from one of the first students who ever signed up to work with me. She asked me, am I just burnt out that's causing me to hate being a physician or do I just hate being a physician? this is such a common misconception that burnout Burnout is the thing that's causing you to hate your job. I will say, the way I view this whole thing, obviously burnout is very real, and I have experienced it and so many of my clients experience it. And burnout is not the cause of your career unhappiness. Burnout itself is an end stage symptom, right? So if we're thinking of career unhappiness as this disease that you're experiencing, burnout is this end stage presentation of your career unhappiness. What burnout tells us is that there is something off in your career. And yes, burnout causes symptoms like depersonalization and emotional exhaustion, and those can worsen and exacerbate the feeling of hating your job, right? But what's actually true, burnout is not causing you to hate your job, burnout is an end stage symptom of career unhappiness. So burnout reveals That there is something off in your career that is causing the burnout. So let's talk about how we can start to distinguish these things. Because working in a career that is not the right fit for you can cause burnout, That can be something that causes you to experience burnout, and you can also experience burnout while working in a career that is the right fit and the career itself is like the thing that you're meant to do, you can still experience burnout because of how you're doing it, to say this in another way, it could be what you are doing that's causing burnout, meaning the thing itself is not in line with you. It is a misaligned career, when you're in a career that's not aligned with you, that can lead to burnout. So it could be what you're doing, or it could be how you're doing it that is causing burnout. And when I say how you are doing it, I don't mean that to put a blame finger on you, because sometimes it's just how the career is being done. within the system that exists. So it's not, none of this is to say that it's your fault in any way. It's just how the career is being done that can be causing burnout. Let's talk a little bit more about that. So if you're doing work you love, but you're not able to take breaks. And you're just working all the time, you don't have a second to go to the bathroom, you have to see people in this rapid fire setting, that could cause burnout, right? Maybe you love seeing patients, but you'd still need to take breaks, like you're still a person, if you're doing work you love, but then you also have this people pleasing tendency where You don't feel safe setting boundaries. You don't feel safe saying no, and then the systems that you're working in are taking advantage of that and Not encouraging you to set boundaries or not allowing you to have that if you're working and it's fueled by this underlying feeling of not enoughness and that creates this constant frenetic motion where you have to go go go and then again the system is taking advantage of those tendencies and If you've experienced traumatic or stressful events at work, I know so many people experience this working frontline during the COVID pandemic, but in any sort of healthcare setting, You can be experiencing trauma and stressful events. You could have like a malpractice Lawsuit that's put against you. You could have a patient die. You could have any number of things that are happening at work that especially happen in the healthcare setting that cause trauma that are these stressful traumatic events and you haven't had the space to process it. You have not been given the space to process it. You have not been given the tools to process it. You don't know how to process it and nobody is supporting you within that. That can cause burnout because there is this trauma that has built up in your body and sometimes this happens from one event and sometimes this happens from a series of stressful events where it just builds up and builds up and builds up and that can cause burnout. Still, what that means is there's something wrong in the work setting, the work environment. There's something wrong with the how you're doing the career. There's something wrong with the way the career is being done. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's the wrong career. It's could be any number of those things that are causing burnout. But it still is a sign that there's something off. In the career itself that needs to be looked at, examined, and tweaked. So, burnout itself is not a cause of career unhappiness. It is a symptom of career unhappiness. An end stage presentation, if you will. And it represents the fact that there is something off within your career that needs to be looked at. So it could be the what. It could be that you're in, doing the wrong thing entirely, or it could be the how. It could be like the way that you're expected to do it in the system that you're in is not working for you. And either one of those is totally okay, but burnout itself is not the cause. So that's the way, the framework in which I see it, because I find that framework is most useful in moving towards a solution. Now, the next part about burnout that can create a level of complication. That makes it a little trickier, is that the symptoms of burnout, having that emotional exhaustion, the depersonalization, the apathy, the brain fog, those symptoms especially, those can make it difficult to tease out some of the nuances that we're going to cover in the next episodes of the audio series. So if you're feeling burnt out, if you're having this brain fog and this apathy, It could make your judgment a little impaired. it can make it really hard to differentiate. Like what is true for you? Because there's just this layer of apathy and brain fog that kind of sits like a blanket on top of everything. And so as I'm laying out different. symptoms and different presentations and different parts of this career misalignment. If you're really experiencing this deep level of burnout, it can feel hard to have clarity around the nuances. if you are experiencing burnout I would say you can still try listening to this audio to see if it gives you additional clarity. However, if you're listening to this audio and you're feeling burnt out and not getting any more clarity, you're feeling like, Oh, there's still just this brain fog. There's still this lack of clarity. Then what that means is. You need to just work on healing burnout first and foremost. And so I have two things, to help with that. So one, I have another free audio series specifically about burnout to help you understand that even more. I'll put the link to that in this description so you can just download that and then number two is just, Just taking a break, taking some sort of extended leave, extended vacation, extended time off giving yourself a break. Just a moment to sleep, to relax, that's going to be so important. I was in a very severe place of burnout when I was taking my leave of absence from residency. And it took me the first two weeks from that of just Doing nothing, of really just sleeping as often as possible for about two weeks, before I started to have any level of clarity, before the brain fog and the apathy and all of that started to lift. If you're in that place of like just depletion, brain fog, exhaustion that needs to be dealt with first. Cause it's like the sooner we deal with this, the sooner you're going to feel better. And that's so important. All right. So I'll see you in the next audio.