Hi, my name is Dr. Jo Braid and I am the burnout recovery doctor. I help health care professionals overcome burnout and get their energy back. So whether you’re a med student, allied health professional or a doctor who is suffering from feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, you’re in the right place. In this podcast, you will get your energy back through strategies for burnout recovery. This show will give you the practical tips and mindset strategies to help you recover from burnout in healthcare. 

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Speaker 1

Hi, my name is Dr. Jo Braid and I am the burnout recovery doctor. I help health care professionals overcome burnout and get their energy back. So whether you’re a med student, allied health professional, or a doctor who is suffering from feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, you’re in the right place. In this podcast, you will get your energy back through strategies for burnout recovery. This show will give you the practical tips and mindset strategies to help you recover from burnout in healthcare. A ready? Let’s dive in. Well, hi, everybody. I’m delighted to bring to you today on the burnout recovery podcast Dr. Emily Amos. Emily is a wonderful human being who lives in the Melbourne area of Australia. She is a GP who has been through burnout herself, and now runs, retreats for doctors so they can grow their mindfulness and self care skills. Emily lovely to have you here today on the podcast. Tell us a bit about yourself. And what do you do?

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Speaker 2

Hi, Jo. Thanks for having me. It was a great introduction. Nice and succinct. So I am a GP and I experienced burnout for myself a few years ago, I experienced all the Hallmark signs, but I didn’t realise that’s what was happening to me. And I pushed and pushed and pushed as I think a lot of us might do. And I eventually physically fell in a heap and had to step back from work for six full months, before I was even okay to come back and then start working in clinical medicine again. And since then, I’ve also got a background as a yoga teacher, and I’m also a registered meditation teacher. So I like to reflect on the fact that all the yoga in the world won’t actually save you from burnout, because I was doing all those things as I put myself out. And I think in some ways it, it allowed me to push myself further than I really should have been able to. And in my recovery, since then I’ve sort of drawn a lot more on that yoga and meditation side of me, because I’d go on retreats, I’ve been on quite a few retreats, yoga retreats, meditation retreats, and I’d sort of sit there and really worry that people there would find out, I’m a doctor. And I was sort of holding everything in, when I’m sitting on these retreats, thinking, I just don’t want anyone to find out because I’m meant to know all this stuff. I teach other people to take care of themselves, I’m meant to be good at this. And that sort of self criticism was so prominent for me that as I’ve recovered, and now rebuilt myself, after burning myself out, I really felt and you know, I talked to a lot of my colleagues, there’s a lot of us that feel this expectation on ourselves, particularly as doctors that we’re meant to have it all together, we’re meant to be the ones fixing other people. And we don’t have sort of, I guess, the right or the ability to, to put our hand up and say, I’m struggling, and I need help. And so I really strongly wanted to sort of approach that, that part of my awareness and the retreats that are now run, specifically for doctors. So they’re very educational based, but they’re very immersive. We do a lot of meditation, we talk a lot about concepts around self compassion, and mindfulness. And then we sort of integrate that into how can we then take better care of ourselves? And how that then gives us the ability to take better care of others, if we’re actually nurturing ourselves?

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Speaker 1

Sure, yeah. Thanks, Emily. Isn’t that interesting that in our profession, it’s burnout is a condition and occupational phenomenon that we’re not even taught about in our training. So it’s hard to know what we’re actually looking out for, if we do become burnt out. So, you know, how do you think you realise that you really were getting into that state of burnout? What would you do? What came up for you? What did you notice?

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Speaker 2

So I mean, full disclosure, for me, I actually didn’t, you know, their lack of self awareness of what was going on for me. Really, it just, I got to the point where my body physically collapsed, you know, that allostatic load, the constant stress had just become so heightened that I actually was experiencing panic attacks. For the first time in my whole life. I was dreading every work day I was sort of looking ahead in my appointment book and really stressing about what was coming up. I was trying to micromanage things a lot. I was really struggling to let go of anything. And the irony of that, I think, is that to the outward observer, particularly to my patients, it looks like diligence. You know, I was I was that really diligent doctor who was following up results and making phone calls all day and night all over the weekend. But what I was actually doing was I was really struggling to manage the stress of no one carry the constant worry of making a mistake or missing something. And you know, in medicine, it’s the stress of that’s actually something that we have to learn how to hold, because it’s always there. You know, we’re dealing with people’s lives, we can’t take for granted that it’s a mistake in our line of work is actually a huge thing. And I think for me, that stress of the end worry of making a mistake was actually that the stress and worry that was really eating me away and started to mount right up for me.

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Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. And I think that’s a really important point that you’ve brought up there that when when do we get the training? Or where is the training sometimes to understand those human feelings that we definitely have as a human working in the system? And and how do we address them? And who, who do we go to? How can we sort of normalise this anxiety or angst that can happen? At any stage of your career as well, it might not be just at the early phase of your, of one’s career when you’re getting used to so much then. And I

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Speaker 2

think in a lot of ways, it sort of it does mount up, because in the early stages of our career as junior doctors, we’re sort of cocooned a bit. There’s, there’s more support around us, there’s more structure. And it’s when you sort of when you’re in those early years as a junior consultant, I think where all of a sudden, that’s like the training wheels are taken off. And I mean, in general practice, we’re also small businesses. So we’re learning how to run a small business in a in an accounting and financial sense. We’re learning how to manage patients completely independently. And so in those early consultant years, I think it’s really important and medicine probably doesn’t acknowledge the stress that we undergo, while still holding the stress and worry of trying to manage patients independently of fear of making a mistake, all these these sort of intangible things, you know, we learned so much about medicine, how to fix other people. And yet, we really don’t receive a lot in the way of training or support in terms of personal inquiry, self development, and how we work on those skills in ourselves that are independent from our ability to practice clinical medicine.

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Speaker 1

Yes, yes. So true. So let’s, let’s hear about what brought you to creating retreats for doctors.

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Speaker 2

So I mean, I love the retreat format, I think, you know, anyone who’s been on a yoga or meditation retreat knows the transformation that is possible in such a short time when when it’s in that really immersive, nurturing structure. So I love I love the retreat structure. And I was really sort of a really passionate about this idea of bringing doctors together, flattening this sort of hierarchy that’s so pervasive throughout medicine, bringing everyone together, we eat meals together, we spend those four days together, you know, you create this cocoon of space and time, where it’s almost like the world outside stands still a little bit. And it isn’t artificial scenario, you do go back to the craziness of life. But I often say you don’t learn to swim when you’re drowning. And what most of us are trying to do is we’re trying to take better care of ourselves, learn how to meditate, learn how to practice mindfulness, known how to be kinder to ourselves, and we’re trying to just tackle that on to our busy lives and busy days. So by creating this space, in a retreat, what we’re giving you is sort of that nurtured shallow end of the pool where you can learn to swim with your Flow Designer, so to speak. Yeah,

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Speaker 1

Great. Yeah, really good. So a four day, a four day long weekend kind of thing, including Fridays, or Saturdays, or

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Speaker 2

There’s some midweek, there’s some over the weekends, four days, three nights, and you sort of see this really beautiful unfolding of people and their emotions over those four days. And, you know, it’s this is this is typical of most immersive group structures, where you start with that sort of unfamiliar, I don’t know what they’re what everyone thinks, I don’t know what what to say or what don’t want to make a mistake. And then by the next day, if you if you facilitate in a way that sort of helps people to feel safe, you start to see that those personalities unfold. And you realise that these are people, you know, we come together on the first day as doctors, and yet, what we’re trying to do over those four days is help you reconnect with the person who’s behind the doctor, which I think, you know, when we graduate, we put doctor before our name, it becomes so integral to our personality. And I found it I found out firsthand that when you I mean, I burnt myself out, I couldn’t be a doctor in the traditional sense for a very long time and it challenged my identity so much, because I graduated and never stopped to think, am I anything else but a doctor. And so when there’s a problem in that doctor self, which a lot of us experience where we get disillusioned with work We’re wiry, we’d burn out, we finally need to take a career break, you know, all these things happen for us. And if we’re so it sort of deep in that Dr part of our personality, it can be easy to have the wheels fall off a bit, if we don’t nurture who we are as a person as well as who we are as a

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Speaker 1

Doctor. Sure, yeah, that’s such a great point. And identity work is a really important part of self care and looking out for yourself in a sort of sustainable way for the future as well. And also, I think it’s great to have that really safe space for doctors who, or humans, I guess, individuals who come to your retreats who have a persona or a front that they put on, like maybe five out of seven days a week, or whatever their shifts are and to feel safe to peel off the layers and either remember or discover who they are now, and exactly as you say, it could be a decade, it could be a handful of years, or maybe 20 years since they’ve really had that space and that time to look

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Speaker 2

there. Yeah. And I mean, I knew for myself that it was really important to me, that education was a core component of this, as a meditation teacher, myself, I obviously feel very strongly about the benefits of meditation. But I also feel very strongly about staying with that sort of evidence around mindfulness. And it can be it can be difficult because we have these very scientific analytical brains. And what I’m asking people to do is take a leap of faith on the retreats and experience something that may have been uncomfortable for them, or they may have tried in the past with apps or all sorts of things. And I’m asking them to put their faith in me and or, and the facilitators, and just experience it for themselves. And so this, the educational component of those four days, really, I think, helps set that groundwork for then going, okay, it is okay to take this leap of faith, there is a really strong base of education. And I’ve worked really hard to get the retreats, CPD accredited by various specialty colleges, because I just feel like there has to be, in a way a carrot, you know, we’re busy people, doctors are really busy people. And sometimes the idea of actually doing something for our own personal development, self development, it, we just don’t want to do it. So I’ve really tried to lead with that educational base and, and helping doctors to understand that, you know, this line between personal development, development and professional development, we it might not be as black and white, as we’re led to believe, you know, we learn about sort of acid base balance and new drugs and things. Well, that’s clearly professional development. But if we learn about how to monitor our own internal environment, respond in a more mindful way, be more aware of when we’re feeling those sort of rising sense of burnout. You know, these might feel like a personal development. But really, if you are a happy, healthy, balanced human, you will be a happy, healthy, balanced doctor, it’s actually really hard to separate the two and make it black and white, one’s personal one’s professional,

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Speaker 1

absolutely couldn’t agree more so that you’re showing that you’re able to show up every day, and, you know, do the work that you’ve been so well trained to do for so many years. Yeah. Great, great. Good. So I guess there are quite a few changes you might notice in your attendees during the retreat, sort of the befores and afters. Is there anything you’d like to share about that in, in what you see there?

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Speaker 2

Yeah, I mean, it’s it’s such an incredible honour to run these retreats. Every time I sit there, I learned something new, because the participants bring something different to the retreats themselves. But it’s really nice to see that flattening of the hierarchy. You know, we’ve got doctors that are nearing retirement age, we’ve got heads of department, we’ve got lots of well being officers that are coming on retreats, but then we’ve also got doctors in training, junior consultant level, and, you know, hearing someone say, I was I’m always so scared to call so and so and make that referral or to do this or to do that. And I and now I’m sitting here listening to those heads of department, those ICU specialists who I’m trying to get patients into ICU, all these things that we actually worry about, and we feel so alone in that worry. And then he you are sitting next to me on this retreat, saying I have the same worries, I think the same things and that common humanity, which is a really core component to both mindfulness and self compassion. It’s so easy to forget, you know, in medicine, where we’re sort of it’s bred into us in a way it’s quite a competitive world. Getting on to training programmes is quite difficult. We’re all very naturally high achieving people quite perfectionistic in a lot of ways, lots of type A personality traits. It doesn’t necessarily it’s not the environment that that Really natively breeds compassion. So coming in on a retreat and seeing people who you might otherwise look at with their doctor coat on or their doctor hat on and be scared of them, or intimidated by them, and sit next to them and have them say I share those worries, too. I feel like that as well. It just gives me it gives me the tingles every time and I just I love seeing the looks on people’s faces as they realise that that common humanity is just so it’s just there, it’s always there. And I think medicine tries to, in a way, force it out of us, we have to put on that false bravado, I know I’m confident I can make these tough decisions life, often life or death decisions. And it can be really difficult to allow that vulnerability and common humanity to come through. But it’s really nice to to see that at the forefront on these retreats. That’s wonderful.

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Speaker 1

Yeah, such a great example of you know, how history can kind of shape how we then show up. Personally, having recalled finding it often really hard to get a radiology referral, okay, it’s particularly in the UK, I was a junior, and that kind of thing sticking with me for years that I’m sure this is gonna be really hard to get this CT pre judging before I’ve even started to get this request across. And yeah, it’s, it’s that fear sometimes of other people’s opinions that we can bring into our workplace. And what does that stop us from doing? Or who does that stop us from showing up as if, if we’re not so worried about that, or we realise that exactly, as you said, there another human, probably pretty busy in their job as well sifting out all the referrals that are coming their way to

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Speaker 2

Yeah, and really being able to recognise the difficulties in our job, you know, there is a lot of stress in our day to day, and we’re trained to give to other people will give compassion almost endlessly to our patients. And it often will deplete us. And what we talk about on the retreats is this idea of the compassion cycle. And when we start with self compassion, it gives us then the ability to recognise are okay, I’m feeling stressed right now, because this is actually hitting buttons, like you say, from my junior doctor years, where I was shouted at by someone who was also probably having their own journey and issues. If we can show ourselves compassion, we then find it easier to practice our own self care place our place our compassionate boundaries. And once we sort of do that, then that ability to show compassion to others is actually augmented rather than flattened. But self compassion just doesn’t come naturally to most doctors, in my experience.

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Speaker 1

Yeah. And there are even myths that are sort of, there’s research published around it, that there are myths about health, healthcare, self compassion, and being that hero and actually, if you turn that around, the research actually shows healthcare practitioners with self compassion can be better team players, have fewer issues with patients or medical errors and so forth, as well. So it can be such a great tool in such a great collective way to be turning those myths on their head and changing your approach with that. Yeah. Okay, great. So what uh, what about this idea? I mean, I think we’ve been talking around this as well, Emily, but what what do you think are some of the solutions to the problem of burnout and overwhelming healthcare?

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Speaker 2

I think I think it’s, it is a really tough thing to address because obviously, there’s nuances that that even what we talk about on the retreats, that we’re not touching on really deeply entrenched organisational issues, overwork and rostering issues, and I can’t, I can’t address those issues. But what I find and what we do talk about on the retreats is this concept of casting the first stone into the like, you know, the ripples of change, rather than focusing so much on those things outside of our control, we come back into that circle of control where we can say, Well, okay, I can I can do this, this and this. Sometimes it might be as simple as I can actually make time to have lunch, maybe it’s that I go outside and have lunch and actually spend some time in nature sit on the grass, I do really simple things which may seem really trite. When we’re talking about the issue of burnout in healthcare, which is just such a massive issue, that sometimes that might be the only thing that’s in our control. And then as we start to sort of nurture ourselves, we begin to notice those patterns of thought that seem to come up quite quite often, you know, my, sort of the patterns of thought that come up for me quite often. I am a perfectionist at heart, I can be very hard on myself. And so if I’m not doing things perfectly, I can get completely incapacitated because I just feel like it’s not worth doing it all if I can’t do it perfectly. So having some time in my schedule that I need to invent So into personal inquiry, you know, meeting with people who have who are like minded and who are also on that same journey of self reflection, the new CPD requirements coming from APRA for 2023 really emphasise reflective practice in the CPD requirements. So clearly being able to reflect on our our practice, but being able to reflect on our practice compassionately, you know, we don’t learn through berating ourselves. I’ve tried it, I don’t know if anyone else has tried it. But it didn’t work for me. So learning, learning, compassionate reflection, learning how to reflect compassionately is a skill like any other. And yet, we expect ourselves to just be able to do it. So we do need to sometimes say some balls, we need to actually allow them to drop so that we have time to engage in compassionate self reflection, it’s not something you can just do on the fly. And then for me, I mean, meditation is a huge training ground for compassionate self reflection, and personal growth. So I need to make sure that I commit time to that. But what I often hear and I’m sure Joe, you probably hear from your coaching clients as well is I don’t have time, I don’t have time to do any of these things. And I sort of tried to challenge that and say, Well, how much time at the moment, are any of us wasting, worrying about the fact that we don’t have time or that we’re feeling burnt out or so it’s not so much that we’re creating more hours in the day, it’s that we’re repurposing some of those hours and minutes that we waste? I guess, ruminating over how awful things are. And that gives us the ability to start nurturing ourselves first.

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Speaker 1

Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. So yeah, sort of hearing that primitive brain being fearful or, or wanting to avoid pain, save energy. And, and sort of do other perceived pleasurable things rather than art, it’s might be hard to make this time for myself, or, yeah, just really questioning that and just inviting just a little bit of time, it doesn’t have to start with much. You know, I love sunsets, I love looking out for the sunset. So it doesn’t really last very long. And it’s kinda like a few minutes, and it will be gone. So making the time for that can be a lovely, a lovely part of the day to look for if

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Speaker 2

that works. Yeah, I mean, they the individual things, and then hopefully, as each of us are able to nurture ourselves and those small ways it gives us then the capacity to start casting a few ripples and seeing where that change comes from. Because when it comes down to it, I think, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of change makers in the world. And if they burn themselves out, then the change stops happening. So nurturing the changemakers, and medicines full is full of changemakers. Absolutely, yeah, we’re nurturing them, hopefully then on a systemic level, their change will happen. But it’s sort of, you know, mindfulness, we often say the process is the point. It’s not about a fixed endpoint, we’re not sort of trying to get to a certain point, it’s actually about saying, well, there’s a lot of people who are doing amazing things in medicine, there’s a lot of change happening. And right now they need nurturing that’s, that’s where that’s my wheelhouse. That’s where I’m focusing my efforts. It’s about nurturing the changemakers

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Speaker 1

Fantastic, yeah, love it. Is there a part of your self care routine that you really love, or you rarely miss that you’d like to share?

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Speaker 2

Is the meditation it really is I’ve I’ve got to the point in my own meditation practice, where it’s no longer something that I have to force myself to do. It’s something that my body and my brain call me to do. No, I’d notice that when I’m feeling that sort of static nervous energy in my body, and the first thing that I reactively my body says is you need to sit, you need to stop, you need to sit, and it’s not comfortable. You know, meditation is not pleasant, it’s often quite uncomfortable, because I’m doing it in moments, often reactively. And so I just learning to recognise that discomfort means that it’s something that I prioritise because I feel so much better after I meditate. And when I am when I am being good to myself, I meditate, you know, for 1020 minutes in the morning before the kids get up and I try to do it every day. If I don’t do it every day, I find then that I am finding my body’s calling for it. So it’s sort of it makes its way into my my self care routine, whether I’m being good and doing it proactively, or whether I’m you know, I’d say bad because I’m just really busy. And my body then says Come on, Emily, get back on the cushion.

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Speaker 1

Great, great self awareness. Yeah. Sure. Is there anything else you want to add as we’re coming towards the end of this wonderful interviews or anything else you want to add? You’ve talked about changemakers and nurturing them casting the first stone into the pond. lots of lovely analogies that you’ve talked about?

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Speaker 2

No, look, I just I really enjoy this work. I feel so passionately about it because I feel like as I burnt myself out, it’s what I needed. I needed some recognition within medicine that I was a person because I really felt so dehumanised. You know, I was a doctor above all else. And I think I remember the feeling really well of just feeling like I could feel the wheels falling off, I could feel life was falling apart. But I didn’t give myself permission for that to be happening because I was a doctor. And it took me months into my recovery, working with a psychologist working with my psychiatrist working with all sorts of people, meditation teachers, before I actually gave myself permission to say, oh, okay, you have burned out because I still had this no burnouts. What I help other people with burnouts, what happens to other people, I’m just stressed. I’m a doctor, I should know this, I should be able to do it. And that expectation that I put on myself, just because I had a medical degree was so unrealistic. And I felt like it wasn’t talked about back then. You know, sort of four years ago, I’ve just felt like, I didn’t hear other people talking about the who our humaneness it was, we were so focused on our darkness. And I just, I needed to feel like a human again. And I think that’s, that’s really what I try to bring through these retreats, then my work now.

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Speaker 1

Oh, that’s wonderful, Emily. Thank you. So thanks so much for sharing some really personal aspects to your story and also some information on your retreats. Where can people find where you hang out online and

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Speaker 2

So forth. I’ve got I’ve got a few a few hats that I wear online. I’ve got so wholehearted medicine is the business that I run retreats through. So we’ve got Facebook page and an Instagram page at wholehearted medicine. And the website is www dot wholehearted medicine.com.au. And then I do a lot of blogging and social media sort of just under my own hat. And that’s at Dr. Emily Amos or dremilyamos.com.

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Speaker 1

Groups. And are there any retreats coming up that people could look into? 

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Speaker 2

Yeah, so we’ve got how I’ve just got three more retreats for next year going on sale as we speak. They will be on the website in the coming days as well. So there’s always there’s seven retreats next year, lots of them are sold out. But there should hopefully be so there’s always changes. So just keep checking out the website. And then I do talks and workshops as well. So lots of ways to work with me.

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Speaker 1

Fantastic, Emily. Well, look, thanks so much for your time today. It’s been great to have you on the podcast. We’ll put links to your sites in the show notes and till next time, thanks for your time.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Jo.

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Speaker 1

Thank you for tuning in to the burnout recovery podcast. If you liked what you heard, please hit subscribe and head on over to my website at Dr. Joe braid.com. There you can download my free guide with 10 tips to take if you’re nearing burnout. See you next time!