Ending Physician Overwhelm

Send us Fan Mail We do hard things. As physicians, we are trained to diagnose and treat complex medical illness and to be present with patients through illness, loss of function and loss of life.  But how many of us are equipped with the skills, grace and compassion to deal with a devastating diagnosis in our own families? Today I’m joined by Dr Crystal Nelson, a board-certified Psychiatrist who s...

Send us Fan Mail Let’s really talk about burnout, shall we? Today I’m diving deep into the emotional exhaustion component of burnout, and centering our conversation around the excellent book, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski, a must-read. If emotions are tunnels with a start and a stop and we are supposed to move through them, emotional exhaustion is us...

Send us Fan Mail “Anxiety is the combination of uncertainty plus our lack of trust in our ability to handle it”                    Becky Kennedy, PhD Clinical Psychologist aka “Dr Becky” Ah COVID, here we are again. Welcome to a very special, (mild) COVID edition of Ending Physician Overwhelm.  But really it’s a perfect background to explore this framework of anxiety, and talk about how instead of...

Send us Fan Mail Does perfectionism bleed over into your physical appearance? Today I sit down with Dr Mary Alice Mina, a double-board-certified Dermatologist and Dermatologic Surgeon to talk about…you guessed it, skin. And appearance, and perfectionism, and how to make it all easier. In this conversation, we talk about how complicated thoughts and beliefs get around our skin, and practical advice...

Send us Fan Mail “I’m so behind” I thought.  Uh oh… Join me today as I dive into a well-worn thought pattern in my mind, and probably one that shows up for you as well. I share a little of how the name of this podcast came to be, my experience of a sensation of chronic overwhelm, and a deeper dive into how to use “The Thought Model,” which is a wonderful coaching tool from Brooke Castillo, the fou...

Send us Fan Mail Have you ever found yourself at the bottom of a bag of chips and don’t know how you got there?  Blame “The Bliss Point;” a high desirability combination of flavors/crunch/textures that make us want to keep eating, without feeling fully satisfied. Sound familiar? Today we talk about how profitable industries manipulate us to keep doing more of what makes them money; for the food in...

Send us Fan Mail Disordered eating, including eating disorders, are more common in physicians than you know.  It’s yet another area of silent, shameful struggle for many people. Today I am thrilled to be joined by a leader in this area, Dr Siobhan Key, a fellow Family and Obesity Medicine Physician, as well as a Physician Coach who specialized in helping physicians end their weight loss struggles....

Send us Fan Mail We’ve all heard of death by a thousand paper cuts; today I’m talking about “papercut” statements from patients. “You weren’t available so I couldn’t get seen” “Why can’t she just order me malaria pills!” “That means I will have been in pain for 16 months” There’s lots of things that patients say/write to us that sting. And, many of us internalize these in such a way that we carry...

Send us Fan Mail Ah, here's an interesting one for you... Another thing you never knew you needed help with? Getting help! We are so used to doing EVERYTHING for everyone. As physicians, we have a lot of work in helping keep people healthy; women physicians are typically asked to do EVEN MORE by our patients and workplaces. That's a separate topic. What's relevant today is that we a...

Send us Fan Mail What is it like to make the decision to leave your physician job without a plan? Today I'm thrilled to be joined by my friend and fellow Family Medicine Physician, Dr Sara Ionescu. She shares her story of being "on the train" from a young age to go to medical school, doing "all the things," and finding herself unhappy. She walks us through her decision-pro...

Send us Fan Mail As I record this in early July, new Residents and Fellows are starting clinical rotations. And over the next several months, recent graduates, new Attendings, are starting their new roles as "the grown up" in the room. What do I wish I understood when I was in their place? Today I'm sharing 10 things that I wish had understood 14 years ago, as I prepared to be an At...

Send us Fan Mail What is YOUR long term vision for yourself? And are you living a life that is aiming in that direction? Today’s episode is inspired by the book, The Infinite Game, by Simon Sinek, and I challenge you to ask yourself what is your big picture? After getting through medical school, residency (“finite games” with a beginning, middle and end), we find ourselves launched into the world,...

Send us Fan Mail Do you struggle when you feel bored? Does it drive you crazy, because you want to rest, but your brain tells you to DO stuff? Creates chores out of nowhere? Boredom/restlessness is what I am calling an "In-Between" emotion. It sits between the usual feeling of busy-ness/hustle/overwhelm and calm. When our bodies and minds are used to being busy and overwhelmed all the ti...

Send us Fan Mail The pandemic changed the lives of all physicians; generally not for the better. For my friend, Dr Sarah Stombaugh, a fellow Family and Obesity Medicine Physician, the pandemic catalyzed a dramatic pivot in her career that she never imagined. Join us to hear more about her journey from employed physician who had to advocate to protect her pregnancy to the owner of her own Obesity M...

Send us Fan Mail Ok friends, here's the list: 10 Shifts That Make My Life Easier: Take 2 minutes now to make it easier later Simplify by deciding once Decide on your own internal policies Don’t overload other people (don’t give others constipation) Allow travel (transition) time Known when good enough is good enough Speak up if you care/have an opinion Trust yourself Write it down You are the...

Send us Fan Mail I really had a hard time naming this episode...a more appropriate title might have been "Those Patients Who Annoy You Just By Showing Up on Your Schedule or By Their Chief Complaint" And yet, that wouldn't have captured it quite either. Today we are talking about the experience of have anticipatory emotions (annoyance, anger, dread, worry) over particular patients,...

Send us Fan Mail I'm weirdly excited to share this episode with you because today I am joined by Dr Christy Gibson, a fellow Family Medicine Physician, Speaker and Change Agent who is on the forefront of advocating for better trauma education for clinicians, and working as a trauma clinician herself. Join us as we dive into how we as physicians experience trauma throughout our work in healthc...

Send us Fan Mail What gets you activated (not in a good way?) Today, we're diving into reconnecting with our human emotions and mammalian nervous systems to recognized when we feel triggered, activated, dysregulated. Please note this is not a dive into deep trauma responses; we are focusing on times when we have a bigger response to something (words someone has said, a text we received, etc)...

Send us Fan Mail Alright, let's settle this right now. We could jump right to feeling like terrible people for feeling overwhelmed and resentful by the work that we do providing care to other humans. We're going to skip that. It's really NOT about the patients. All humans need medical care at some point, and we have chosen to provide said care.  And yet, few of us realize the COST o...

Send us Fan Mail Continuing on my theme for May of "ugh," stuff that we don't like, slowing us down. It's normal to feel doubt; it's a normal human emotion, designed to keep us safe. But crippling self-doubt? Failing to believe that we are capable to make a next-best-step decision? It paralyzes us, keeps us overworking, adds to our cognitive and emotional burdens and JUST...

Send us Fan Mail When it comes to procrastination, we've all been there! It's such a common human behavior, yet it often comes with so much guilt and self-judgement. Why is this? In this week's episode of the Ending Physician Overwhelm Podcast, we're going to be exploring the 5 places where procrastination most frequently shows up so that we can better understand how it manifes...

Send us Fan Mail One of the things that many of my clients and I have in common is that feedback feels really scary, really dangerous, and generally just really difficult to navigate. I know... it might seem weird to some of you, but it's just how I and many others are wired. As a high achiever who had aspirations of becoming a doctor, became a doctor, then started a business, this aversion t...

Send us Fan Mail As physicians, we like to believe that we are fact driven and that we operate based on evidence, science, data, and knowledge. And this is true.... to a certain extent thanks to our training. But as humans, our brains are wired for story. We are meant to connect pieces of factual information with emotional overlay, and use it to interpret events that are going on now or in the fut...

Send us Fan Mail In this week's episode of the Ending Physician Overwhelm Podcast, I had the pleasure of chatting with the always wonderful Dr. Funke Afolabi-Brown. We talked about her journey with burnout, from her rigorous medical training in Nigeria, to becoming a triple board-certified Sleep Medicine Physician in the US, and ultimately founding and running her own practice, Restful Sleep...

Send us Fan Mail At some point in our lives we've probably all felt like we've settled into a groove where everything is comfortable enough and there's nothing standing in the way of life going on like this for a while.  But what if you know deep down that you want to change something about your life? It can be EXTREMELY hard to make that decision to make a change when you know that...