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Managing Burnout With Anchoring
Online Training in Mindfulness

You've got to stay within yourself.
~ Willie Mays

Many physicians and physicians-in-training experience burnout...
  • Emotional Exhaustion. You feel emotionally drained, used up, burned out, and "gived out." Your well of caring and concern is empty. It's not that you no longer want to give; it's that you don't have the emotional energy to do so.
  • Patients are treated as objects. You see the people whom you normally serve as insatiable sinks of your emotional energy, and you defend yourself by depersonalizing them and being indifferent to their suffering.
  • Feeling cynical, grumpy, sometimes hostile. You get angry at the thought that others want more of you. The anger and cynicism may spill over to professional and family relationships.
  • Lost enthusiasm for work. Work is no longer meaningful; it feels pointless. You feel ineffective and defeated.
  • Fantasizing about quitting.
  • Intellectually and physically exhausted. Symptoms include insomnia, fatigue that does not go away after sleeping, colds, headaches, migraines, and other psychosomatics. Coping may involve overwork and drug use.
The root of burnout is giving to the degree that you lose touch with yourself and important others. The solution to burnout is reconnecting with yourself and important others and taking charge of your life. Mindfulness helps with burnout because it allows you to focus on yourself (in a good way, not selfishly) and to reconnect with your basic goodness -- the well from which you give.

Krasner et al showed that mindfulness training can help with burnout. The Anchoring Tutorial is an online training program in mindfulness. Try it.

References and Resources

Association of an Educational Program in Mindful Communication With Burnout, Empathy, and Attitudes Among Primary Care Physicians...participation of 70 primary care physicians in a mindful communication program was associated with short-term and sustained improvements in well-being and attitudes associated with patient-centered care.

Early Warning Signs of Burnout...video of Prof. Christina Maslach (UC Berkeley), an expert on burnout

Compassion Fatigue...a form of burnout that manifests as physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion; recovery involves taking time for self-reflection and identifying what's important and living accordingly.

A three-year cohort study of the relationships between coping, job stress, and burnout after a counseling intervention for help-seeking physicians....results of a longitudinal study of Norwegian physicians.

Stress, burnout, and strategies for reducing them...a study of Canadian Family Physicians.

Burnout and Suicidal Ideation among U.S. Medical Students...of 4287 medical students at seven medical schools, about 50% reported burnout and 11% reported suicidal ideation.

Overcoming burnout: how to revitalize your career...change thought processes and viewpoints about the people and things that may be contributing to their burnout.

The measurement of experienced burnout...original research developing a tool for measuring burnout (see pg ) consisting of three subscales: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment.





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