Three reasons you’re burned out

And two ways to beat it for good

How many of you know exactly how many footsteps it takes to get from your car to your couch at the end of the day? After coming home dead tired from working 18 hours a day on a hospital system project, I knew exactly how many steps — 54. That’s a bad sign, folks, despite my inner pep talk, “Okay, I need to park my car. I just have to walk 54 steps to my cuddly blanket and fall asleep and hope my kids don’t need anything.” I had literally left milk on the bottom refrigerator shelf next to some cereal bowls so they could serve themselves a bedtime snack. I was that tired.

But something strange happened upon pulling in my driveway that diverts my attention — I spy a huge weed growing out of my front garden. I love gardening, so I muster the energy to pull the weed. Three hours later, I’m still in my work clothes and I have a fully weeded garden and not an ounce of fatigue.

What happened to my fatigue? It dissolved as I moved wholeheartedly into my zone. Now this may sound crazy, but a component that we don’t often think about is so many times we’re playing defense, trying to get out of work, and this energy in resistance fatigues us.

It’s not our reality that’s stressful, it’s the story we’ve made up and attached to our reality that generates our stress.

From my experience in, and working with, healthcare leadership, I believe there’s three components to burnout:

First, we are often more stressed from our stories and not our actual realities. Start by separating your reality from your story by focusing on the facts and what you know for sure. It’s not our reality that’s stressful, it’s the story we’ve made up and attached to our reality that generates our stress. The truth is just the simple facts, it sets you free.

The second contributor to burnout is our lack of skillfulness. Many leaders tell me that they believe healthcare jobs are getting too big due to responsibility growth from advancements in regulations and technology. What we don’t think to ask is, “What if we got more skillful? How could new skills help me move through my job differently?” It could be the difference between swimming through mud and walking through air. When we feel burnout creep in, one of the places we can help ourselves is to update our skillset.

Third, when we get busy, we often give up things that brought us energy early in our healthcare careers — like reading and research and community service. It’s a vicious cycle, we being to struggle to get in our CEUs, worry about losing our certification and cite our lack of time as the reason why we can no longer enjoy the perks that filled our buckets like teaching, precepting or taking an intern.

When we feel overwhelmed, we are tempted to cut our contact with the outside world to recharge.

In my work today, I still must manage my energy cycle. If I discover I can’t write because I have writer’s block, it is because I haven’t read enough or taught enough or been exposed enough. When we feel overwhelmed, we are tempted to cut our contact with the outside world to recharge. Our ego takes over to narrow our thinking into, “I’m going to just sit here and cancel all my appointments. I’m just going to sit and think and persist until I solve this.”

Counterintuitively, when I’m feeling stuck it’s because I’m focusing too much on myself. What works instead is to crowdsource, which is looking upward and outward to tap into every resource I have. It looks like asking for help early and often and not focusing on getting the work done, but on finding breakthrough ideas to move through work more easily. When you’re working individually, your energy will dry up quickly.

“If I can’t get out of something, how can I get into it?”

The antidote to fatigue is to stop using our energy to get out of work. Freedom comes from dropping the resistance and getting wholehearted into work. Think about shifting your energy this way, “If I can’t get out of something, how can I get into it?”

Here’s another great way to reflect on the energy sources you can tap into to bust burnout: What childhood activity can you resurrect to infuse more joy into your routine? What hobby can you make a priority? Who are three people you can call this week to help you generate new ideas to get you unstuck in a specific area?