What is Done, and What is Left to Do

It will probably come as no surprise to anyone who reads my blog that I am feeling pretty burnt out at the moment, as the few posts that I've had the mental energy to write over the past few months have been all about work stress and feeling exhausted and being too much of a grouch to even want to buy Christmas gifts.  I think I've done a decent job of hiding my dissatisfaction at work, but my poor partner, M, has had to put up with some pretty spectacular wallowing when I haven't been working.  It is frustrating, and frightening, to have put 16 years into training only to find myself feeling this level of unhappiness with my work.

So I've been thinking a lot (i.e. pretty much all the time) about what to do about it.  I've been reading blogs and journaling and talking M's ears off in an attempt to figure out some way of becoming happier.  (I haven't been exercising or meditating, of course, because those things might actually work.)  I even bought a book about physician burnout, despite absolutely hating the last physician burnout book I read.  And, much to my surprise, the book has been kind of helpful.

One of the ideas in the book is that, as physicians, we are always focused on what remains to be done: how many letters we need to dictate, how many patients we need to see, how many bloody multi-page forms we need to fill out.  By constantly thinking about what still needs to be done, however, we inevitably feel like we aren't accomplishing anything, and we get discouraged by the seemingly neverending to-do list.  Instead, we'd be much better off putting our focus on what we've already done, so that we are positively celebrating our accomplishments instead of always negatively dreading the work to come.

It's a pretty simple idea, and it requires pretty minimal energy and absolutely zero time, so I decided to try it out this week.  No longer was I going to count the patient files on my desk that needed to be dictated (about 20 at current count); instead, I was going to count the ones in my outbox that were already done.  Instead of focusing on the number of patients remaining to be seen, I was going to focus on the ones that had already been dealt with.  Pay attention to the positive, not the negative.

It sounds cheesy to even write this...but it kind of helped.  It made me realize that my list of things that I have already accomplished is pretty enormous, and it dwarfs the few hours of paperwork that I left undone at work on Friday.  It felt surprisingly good to be a bit of a cheerleader for myself, instead of the evil taskmaster who is always yelling at myself to work harder! and faster! and better!

It worked so well that I decided to apply this mindset to an area of my life that causes my unnecessary anxiety:  my finances.  I'm in pretty good financial shape for being 17 months into practice, yet I waste a lot of energy thinking about how far away I am from being able to retire.  This week, instead of constantly thinking about the minimum of 10 years of work that I will have to do to save up a decent retirement fund, I took a few minutes to list the major financial accomplishments I've made over the past 17 months:

• Saved up enough money in my investments that I could pay off my line of credit if I wanted to;
• Saved up enough money that, between M and me, we can make a 20% downpayment on a nice house in our chosen neighbourhood; and
• Saved up enough money in my investments that I could live at my current level of spending for approximately one year (or for a very long time if I stopped eating out so frequently).

That list makes me feel vastly better than saying to myself "I have to work at this miserable job* for another 10 years before I will feel happy again" all the time.

I know that there are still a lot of things that I need to do to feel happier with my work, but I think that changing my mindset has been an important first step.  Despite being on call again this week**, I've been in a much better mood than I have been since my really stressful department meeting.  I now have six weeks of no call, which includes a one-week trip to Cuba, so hopefully there are even better things ahead.

*My job isn't actually all that miserable.  I'm just feeling so exhausted by it that I am having a hard time seeing the good things.  Which I'm working on.

**I sat down this week and figured out just how much call I've been doing lately, and I realized that I've been on call 1/3 of the time for the past 3.5 months.  That's the amount of call that I should be doing in a 6-month period, and it's equal to the maximum amount of call that a resident is allowed to do.  Suddenly I don't feel so guilty for feeling tired!  As a result of this realization, I've reviewed my call schedule for the upcoming year and identified a few similar problem periods that can hopefully be improved by a bit of swapping with my colleagues.

Today's Patient Encounter

The waiting area for my clinic has a big-screen television, and it was of course* broadcasting the inauguration ceremonies this morning while I was seeing patients.  I called a new patient into my examination room just as the swearing in was about to start, and as we were walking away from the waiting area she said:

"Oh thank God you came when you did.  I can't stand to watch that vile man become president!"

My patients are awesome.

*By "of course", I in no way mean that I "of course" chose to show the vile man becoming president.  I share my waiting area with multiple other physicians and sadly have no say over what is played on the tv.

2017 - The Year of Saying No

I suspect that I'm not the only person in medicine who is a people pleaser.  Since elementary school, I've always been very academically successful, and the resultant praise from teachers and relatives has given me a lot of pleasure and personal satisfaction.  Going to medical school and becoming a doctor took this to the next level, as suddenly patients and even strangers were regularly praising me for the work I did. 

The big problem with getting so much validation externally is that you start to be dependent upon it.  You need people to tell you how important you are and how no one else can do what you're doing.  And so you constantly seek ways to keep that validation coming.  You say yes to giving one more presentation or fitting another patient into your clinic or teaching one more tutorial.  Even when you don't really want to be doing any of those things.

Over the past few months, I've been feeling depleted, as I keep telling my partner.  I've been feeling overwhelmed by work; I've been having difficulty sleeping; and I've been hit with a bone-weary exhaustion that reminds me of my residency days.  I had hoped that a recent trip to a cabin would fix things, but four days away just wasn't enough.  I'm tired. 

And despite this, people keep asking for more.  Start a research project.  Do more training.  Teach another academic half day.  More, more, more, when all I want to do is stay in bed with my cats.  It has reached the point where I feel anxious not only when my pager goes off, but also when my inbox pings, signalling the arrival of another email asking for my time and energy.

So this year, I'm going to learn to say no.  Thank you for the opportunity, but that isn't my priority.  My priority needs to be finding balance, a level of work and engagement that I can happily sustain for the next 20 years, not saying yes to every single request that comes my way.  I need downtime and sleep and yoga classes and running and home-cooked food and time with the people I love, not another item on my to-do list.

No.

It sounds straightforward, but it goes against the very essence of medical culture.  Physicians pride themselves on being able to work a 28-hour shift and then go climb a mountain on their post-call day.  Medicine is the North American worship of busyness and achievement taken to the extreme.  Saying no means being inadequate and not measuring up to the standard.

And Medicine doesn't always listen to no.  A few weeks ago, I was emailed a request to help someone out with a presentation.  My stomach sunk when I read the email, because it was something that I really didn't want to do, even if I had had an abundance of time in which to do it.  So I sat on the email for weeks, debating the merits of saying yes versus no, until I finally got up the guts to sent a polite email declining the request.

The response?  Within seconds, a return email that basically said "Can you do part of the work for me?".

No! 

I'm still completely flabbergasted by the response.  Why is my attempt to protect my happiness and my time not respected?  Why am I expected to say yes to every request that comes into my inbox?

Learning to say no isn't going to be easy.  It's going to mean letting go of the need for other people to tell me how wonderful I am and what a good job I'm doing.  It's going to mean letting go of the belief that if I were just better, just like every other physician, that I would be able to say yes to everything.  It's going to mean ignoring the blogs of the overachievers, who have a medical practice and children and exercise daily and cook healthy food, and setting my own standards for achievement.  Because ultimately no one cares about my happiness as much as I do.  And no one else in Medicine is looking out for my well-being as much as I am.