Healthcare Burnout Quotes

The entire belief was insulting to many of us, but nonetheless, the term “top trained,” which would come to be regurgitated with great regularity by hospital administration and by Dr. Kowatch, would eventually evolve to become what I would describe as an unhealthy infatuation, one that I now understand represented the developing disconnect between the majority of the Heart Center team and hospital administration, which would ultimately have detrimental effects on the program, which would become visible to all in the near future.

They remained imprisoned in the CICU, kept alive in physicality by mechanical devices and medicinal support, inexorably suffering. I revered their resiliency, though I struggled to understand whether they were truly resilient or if this was a descriptive term I used to assure myself that what we were doing was just. Could they merely represent physical beings at this point, molecular derivatives of carbon and water, void of souls that had moved on months prior once the universe had delivered their inevitable fate, simply kept alive by us physicians, who ourselves clutched desperately to the most favored of our prehistoric binary measures of success: life?

Dear Stress, I would like a divorce. Please understand it is not you, it is me. –Thomas E. Rojo Aubrey

Dear Stress, I would like a divorce. Please understand it is not you, it is me.

It's a bitter irony, since in-home healthcare is enormously cheaper than hospitalization--and good home assistance can prevent the falls, injuries, or infections that could easily land a fragile patient right back in the hospital.

It is common for healthcare professionals to be able to maintain a demanding work schedule, coping well with frequent medical emergencies and tragedies—until something falls apart in their personal lives.

Mindfulness is about stepping out of mental stories and filters that too often obscure our view. It is about questioning our thoughts and assumptions, our beliefs, and our fixed ways of viewing ourselves and others.

Medical training tends to be somewhat black-and-white. Students learn that there can be only one right answer, often with little credit given for applying yourself, doing your best, or trying your hardest.

Every time we are kind to someone, we build kindness in them.

With a pause, we’re creating that all-important gap between ourselves and our thoughts and emotions.

Mindfulness helps us gain agency over what we think, feel, and do. For those of us struggling with the ways control in healthcare has been wrested from us, this agency (read: autonomy) is critically important.

Pain is part of life. None of us get through life without some measure of pain—physical or emotional, minor or intense.

Utilizing mindfulness is a powerful antidote to burnout—one that gives Mindful MDs true autonomy over our own minds and the stories that only serve to multiply the difficulties we’re facing in our lives and careers.

A fascinating part of physician burnout is that without realizing it we can find ourselves stuck in a Groundhog Day–like pattern.

You can truly become the master of your fate, your happiness, and your well-being.

As Mindful MDs, we can be happy today, not with what we wish healthcare was like, but with what is.

I am good. I do my best. I cannot control all the rest.

Perfectionism is the enemy of ease, presence, resilience, and well-being.

With self-compassion, we’re shifting the lens from outward to inward caring. We are including ourselves in the group of people who receive care, love, forgiveness, and attention.

Mindful awareness can help us restore that sense of openness, curiosity, and interest many of us shed long ago.

When we employ mindful awareness to work with that almost continuous flow of judgment, we very naturally make room for greater kindness and compassion.

When we can begin to view those around us as partners on this journey called life and recognize that they are just like us, we can move past a scarcity mentality and zero-sum games.

In truth, we can’t ever truly know what the future will bring, and we can’t know whether what our mind is telling us will make us happy will truly do so.

When we move from fear to compassion, we thrive mentally and physically.

When we can see our emotions for what they are, we can watch the chemical storm generate and pass through without being as caught in it.

But when we replace these negative patterns with a focus on compassion, purpose, and positive self-talk, we quickly find greater energy, emotion, and fulfillment than we could possibly imagine.

Our minds can grow many wonderful things... Will we grow love, kindness, and compassion? Alternatively, will we grow anger, vengeance, meanness, and greed?

Each and every day, we have a choice over which seeds we water.

Mindfulness is all about having choice and recognizing the ability to change. It helps us have agency over ourselves and actions.

Mindfulness and emotional management can help us overcome burnout and regain our autonomy and power within a broken system.

When one lacks control over their circumstances (or believes they lack control), one falls into learned helplessness, thinking that there is no point in trying to escape the painful stimulus.

Mindfulness provides exactly what we need to free ourselves from the trap of never-ending pressure and ever-increasing demands that keep us running, running, running.

True power comes from within... Awareness of where our true power lies means that we can mindfully modulate the lens through which we view our experience.

Stepping out of the stories our minds are so adept at creating is the second way mindfulness restores your autonomy and cures healthcare burnout.

With mindful awareness, we see that the human mind is a master storyteller, spinning stories about who we are, what we do, and the world and people around us.

Our emotions can definitely feel like more than blips. And our emotional responses are often seemingly rational responses to what we experience.

A key aspect of mindfulness is realizing that our stories can cause more suffering than the actual difficulties we face.

With mindfulness, we are cultivating the ability to be present and satisfied here and now, in the moments that are actually occurring in our lives.

Mindfulness is our capacity for awareness—conscious, open, receptive, and purposeful awareness—of what is occurring in the present moment.

With mindfulness, we are training ourselves to become the master of our minds, a skill that is especially important for physicians.

Mindfulness invites us to experience life without all the automatic judgment. It invites us to see that these judgments are simply the mind’s attempt to make sense of the world around us.

By developing a mindful approach, you can recover a sense of true autonomy even when much going on in healthcare is well beyond your individual control.

With consistent effort and mindfulness, you can regain the life and career that you’ve worked so hard for.

Without mindful acceptance we can unknowingly be the ones contributing to the very difficulties we so readily lay blame for on others, and on a highly dysfunctional healthcare system.

For longevity in a stressful career like medicine, it is vital to learn to work with your own mind—it is truly the most important instrument you’ll ever operate.

The more we focus on what we’re doing wrong or poorly, the less energy we have to actually go and fix it. Perfectionism and the excessive focus on problems keep us from acknowledging what’s going right in our lives and serve to deplete us of our energy.

Because Obligers are so susceptible to burnout, the people around Obligers—family, friends, colleagues, health-care professionals, and so on—all have a role to play in helping them to avoid that state. We