Being a medical professional places you in the roster of essential workers, many of whom sacrifice a great deal to provide much-needed services. It’s a job you wouldn’t want to take for granted, considering the lives you get to save. However, you can’t ignore the effects that your role has on your physical and mental health. You will feel stressed many times, affecting your ability to perform with the precision and professionalism that’s expected of you as a medical professional.
There’s no such thing as easy work, especially if it involves using your skills and knowledge to help others live healthy lives. In your field, you just have to deal with the challenges of stress and keep pushing forward for the sake of those who rely on your expertise. This guide should help you develop healthy coping strategies and other means to combat the effects of stress so you’re always ready to lend a helping hand.
Reasons Why You’re Always Stressed in the Field
Let’s first look at a few things that contribute to and amplify the effects of stress. Being a medical professional puts you at a greater risk of developing physical and mental conditions that could persist in the long term. This could be due to the following factors:
1. Working long hours and under pressure
Especially if you’re working at the ER, you’re always prone to clocking in overtime and at irregular hours. You may even have to sacrifice your weekends and holidays if the hospital is understaffed. As a general practitioner, you may need to be on call to receive emergency cases. In short, you barely have enough quality time for yourself and your family, and have a higher risk of undergoing burnout.
2. Making critical decisions
Each day as a medical professional, you are exposed to unique cases and problems that require effective decision-making skills to resolve. What makes this stressful is the fact that you need to gather as enough information as possible before taking certain actions or providing information to patients. It’s part of your ethical duty, especially if certain decisions could lead to a loss of life.
3. Dealing with the emotional effects of loss and injury
Your profession exposes you to different scenarios, some of which could involve grieving families and the emotional toll of an injury on certain patients. Even though you’re trained to focus on diagnosing illnesses, taking note of patient histories, and treating disease, you’re never immune to the myriad of emotions you get to witness each day at the hospital or your clinic. You could say you’ve become accustomed to this environment, but you can’t deny that it’s also emotionally draining on your part.
4. Working around administrative constraints
At times, the factors that cause you too much stress don’t just fall under the nature of your role as a medical professional. Being an employee, you will also need to deal with the decisions made by the management of the hospital where you’re working.
If you’re running a solo medical practice, you will need to deal with areas that could only add to your day-to-day workload. You will need to make sure your clinic complies with local and national regulations. Other than that, you will need to keep track of your practice’s finances, recruitment activities, and even the procurement of new tools and materials.
Taking all of these into account, you could say you’re not always at peace. While understandable in the medical industry, stress could still eat into your motivation as well as decrease the level of quality you put into your practice.
Dealing With Stress: The Tips You Should Try
It matters to develop healthy ways to cope with the challenges of your practice. Now that you’ve learned about the main reasons why you’re always stressed, consider these tips for overcoming the physical and mental toll that comes with your work as a doctor, nurse, or first responder. For that, here are a few approaches you might want to try out:
1. Develop coping mechanisms that work for you
Whether you’re a general practitioner or a psychiatric professional, you need to adopt techniques that can help you be at peace amid the chaos you have to deal with each day. Not every coping mechanism will work to your liking, and some may even harm your mind and body. Take the time to explore options that are best suited for your situation.
You can start by committing to a workout regimen that helps improve your flexibility and vitality. Aside from jogging, you can also adopt a strength training routine. Whichever the case, giving your body a good workout can help lift your mood and build your endurance, which could benefit you during high-stakes scenarios.
However, you need to keep in mind that coping mechanisms shouldn’t be limited to exercise. You might want to try other means, such as taking up a creative hobby during your free time or treating yourself to your favorite restaurant, or buying something you like as a form of reward.
2. Listen to your body and focus on self-care
The most important part of de-stressing is knowing your body’s limits and making the most of the free time you have for self-care. What this entails is learning how to take lengthy rests and making the most of the quality time you spend with your family and friends.
Self-care is also making sure that people respect your boundaries. This can be challenging because you are meant to go the extra mile when it comes to helping patients with their problems. However, this shouldn’t keep you from enjoying a well-deserved sabbatical away from your office. Even humans need to recharge, so when you feel as though you’ve reached your limit, take a step back and get as much meaningful rest as possible.
You can also choose different options that can help you prevent the onset of burnout. These days, people resort to ketamine therapy and yoga to deal with their high stress levels. Do the same by looking for other means of keeping yourself grounded, such as mindful meditation, tai chi, and even journaling in the morning.
3. Raise an effective support system
You’re not alone as a professional struggling with difficult and demanding workloads in the medical field. At the same time, this should give you a shred of hope, knowing that you have allies who could support you in your struggles and share what they think will help you overcome stress.
Regardless of your industry, a good support system will make you feel less lonely in your struggles and provide you with a source of comfort and relief, especially if you’ve experienced the most trauma-inducing moments in your career as a medical professional.
Take the time to talk with your colleagues as well as your supervisors and share the things affecting your motivation and contributing to the decline of your drive to help others. What’s more, your support system can help lighten your workload. You only need to delegate the most tedious and less complex tasks to capable staff members on site.
4. Stay organized and focused
Despite all these tips, you can’t help but heed the call of duty when emergencies occur, which can spell the difference between life and death for a patient. While you can always be given time to rest and recharge, you’re still vulnerable to factors that contribute to high stress. The best you can do at this point is to put a system in place. By being organized, you can eliminate redundancies in your practice and make the most of your time to focus on high-impact and life-saving work.
For this, you only need to practice effective time management techniques and harness automation tools that could help speed up time-consuming processes without compromising accuracy and quality. Doing so will help you overcome even the most stressful situations that come your way.
Endnote
You can’t deny the fact that stress persists in the medical field, and you’re likely to suffer from its effects. More so, it’s your patients who will suffer more. By learning how to combat stress, you will be able to perform your role as a medical professional with diligence and excellence.