Making Peace with Work Undone
Physicians have prescribed proper diet, hydration, recreation, rest, and sleep for millennia. We all know how critical these homeostatics are for good health.
But we don't have enough hands to help with all the work. The sheer volume of it demands every moment of every day and every night.
We devolve into “heads on a stick.” Our bodies become mere vehicles to carry our brains around in service of the work. Our stressed bodies try to communicate with us. They send us distress signals of dis-ease, but we push on valiantly for the sake of the work. We strain to get every task done by day’s end to fulfill our duty to our patients, literally sacrificing our health for theirs.
But when our physiology can no longer compensate, when our bodies and emotions finally break, we must confront the truth: we just can't dispatch 100% of the work every single day with our health intact. Some things must be left undone for another day.
And here's the problem: some of us are...
You Are Worth More
If you’re stressed out or burning out from your stressful job, you dread getting out of bed in the morning. When your feet hit the floor and you drag yourself into another damaging, poorly malleable day, you are saying “Yes” to something.
Our current healthcare delivery model reminds me of a Netflix series I just watched called Squid Games. These desperate people who were in huge amounts of debt (where the bad guys were gonna take their kidneys and eyeballs if they didn’t pay up) signed up to win an insane amount of cash at the completion of a game.
As you might expect, the game was horrifically violent. And at various intervals the players had the opportunity to stop and decide if they would continue enduring the game’s brutality or free themselves from it. The vast majority continued to play. They continued to say “Yes.”
It made me think of you as a job-stressed physician or clinician.
When you go to work, you're voting with your feet....
