Physicians and Stress - Highlights and preventions

Signs and Symptoms of Physicians’ Stress:

James Turnbull (4) reported that evidence is usually more obvious to others and specifically in a doctor’s family that becomes repository of his/her signs of stress. Not infrequently, physicians ignore their families and their emotional needs. The following are potential signs and symptoms in stressed or frustrated physicians:

1 -     Difficulty in making diagnosis.

2 -     Neglect of patients as evidenced by poor management, not responding to phone calls, and increased reports of sick days off.

3 -     “Always on the run”. This hurried life style adds irritability to stressed physicians with less time for personal relaxation.

4 -     Avoiding friends and events that were once enjoyed.

5 -     Decreased threshold towards irritability with family members, and usually physicians’ office staff suffer first.

6 -     Alcoholism and drug abuse.

Prevention:

Several causes of physicians’ stress and frustration can be avoided by taking care of ourselves. The following are important suggestions often listed in literature and proven highly effective to prevent the worst effect of stress:

1 -     Maintain a sense of optimism. Some of your colleagues might work as optimistic role models. Try to ask their help to change. (4)

2 -     Work on your friendships. Be an active listener, and don’t neglect friends you’ve once had for years. (4)

3 -      Plan for retirement. It’s important to think how to spend your retirement years. Planning and looking for retirement should not make you postpone enjoying the best of your days waiting for the date to come. (4)

4 -     Look after your own health. Apply your own medicine on your self. Avoid smoking or excess alcohol intake, preserve good weight, exercise regularly, get 7-8 hours sleep at night and three meals/day including breakfast etc. We need to apply what we know. (4)

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5 -     Keep a sense of humor: “Humor is an important element of healthy life”. Medicine is a serious business yet adding a dose of humor to our practice might be all that is needed when things get tough. (4,5,7,9)

6 -     Keep a life balance between professional stresses and your true values. As professional healers, we are highly important. (8) Jennifer Bush included tips from doctors to doctors for maintaining life balance and getting more satisfaction from carrying out their jobs up to their own expectations:

A -  Try not to be always too efficient: Listen at least to two patients daily. This will add to personal satisfaction, and build better rapport with your patients.

B -  At the end of the day, take a lesson from the things that bugged you during that day and leave it at your office.

C -  Sometimes, or occasionally, say: This is not going to be done today. Work on accepting it, yet never get the habit of it.

D -   Make use of your scheduled days off, and never regret not working on those days. Such opportunities can’t be just materialized through equating it with lost opportunity to get more money.

E -   Spend more time with your family to know what they need more of you. It might be something different than you think. Try not to show your tiredness and frustrations always to them. Family members might share some responsibility yet are not to be blamed.

F -    Socialize out with colleagues, yet avoid talking about medical related issues.

G -   Eat at least one meal with your family.

H -   Do something you like: If medicine does not fulfill your expectation at certain time and/or needs, look to explore other professional aspects in your domain i.e., research work, academic or other endeavors. Any  which way can give you self-satisfaction, and might be a way out.

I -      Finally get help if needed; everyone needs help at some point in time.