Latest Journal Posts
Self-Care Versus Pampering
I’ve heard many people talk about self-care recently. Frequently, they reference getting the occasional massages, bubble baths, and pedicures to elevate how they are feeling. To me, that isn’t self-care. That’s pampering. And pampering is perfectly lovely, but it differs from self-care in purpose, intent, and individual optimal frequency.
Real self-care is about actively taking care of yourself. It's about the intentional actions and practices you engage in to maintain or improve your body, mind, and spirit in the present. (Bonus, it also takes care of future you.)
How Do You Take Care of Yourself?
You went to medical school to learn how to take care of other people. But you didn’t learn how to take care of yourself. Because medical training emphasized the opposite.
You learned how to ignore your own needs for food, water, and rest. All in service to the patients’ needs and the hospital’s/office’s daily tasks.
Are You Struggling with Work/Life Balance?
We’ve all heard of the elusive work/life balance and maybe felt some frustration about the difficulty in figuring out what that was or how to achieve it.
There’s a feeling among many people I know that our lives are out of balance. For most this feels like work is taking over all of life. For some people it may be that life doesn’t allow for any work, personal or professional.
Stop Being An Emergency
I recently read a story written by a friend and business coach about a time when she volunteered at an event. During the event, she had given away all her food to support others. Now she was hungry and the event was still going on. Instead of being praised (as she had expected) by one of the more senior volunteers, she was told “If you don’t take care of yourself you can become an emergency someone else needs to tend to.”
That’s what has happened to our healthcare system.
It’s become an emergency that someone else has to tend to.
How Are You Breathing?
“Until I know you better, I will be telling you how to breathe!”
It’s my first day at the Pediatric Orthopedic Hand Specialty Clinic on my peds rotation in my third year of residency.
I have just been barked at by the Professor Emeritus, a retired Army colonel, who runs the service.
The Power of Acceptance
Acceptance means taking stock of the situation and not fighting it. Instead of judging it or having a strong emotional reaction to it, take a deep breath. Stop arguing with yourself or others about how it “should” be. You can easily argue that you’re right about how it should be. But being right won’t really help you. It just keeps you stuck fighting an illusion. How it “should” be is a distraction. It is different from the reality you are actually facing.
Subscribe to get the occasional newsletter
That will respect your privacy and time