How To Deal With Burnout While Running Your Own Practice

Burnout is a plague no matter what industry you’re in.

If you’re an entrepreneur and running your own practice, it becomes so much more vital to ensure that you take care of yourself in order to avoid burn out.

It’s not only for your sake, but for the sake of your entire practice.

After all, you are the foundation of it.

We understand this here at Symbiosis and offer a wide range of services that can help you to take care of the day to day responsibilities of your practice, so that you can take the time to take care of yourself in order to minimize the potential for burnout.

Now, let’s dive in.

What Is Burnout?

Broadly speaking, burnout is a state of exhaustion caused by a prolonged period of high stress.

It happens in just about every industry, but in healthcare we get a unique type of burnout often referred to as “compassion fatigue”.

Compassion fatigue has two parts.

The first is burnout, which includes symptoms such as emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and a low sense of professional accomplishment.

The second is secondary traumatic stress, which occurs when an individual hears about the firsthand trauma another has experienced.

The symptoms of this secondary traumatic stress are similar to what you would see in those with PTSD.

If untreated, burnout can lead to poor job performance, careless mistakes while working, and sometimes suicide.

How To Recognize Burnout

In addition to those listed above, the symptoms of burnout can commonly manifest as fatigue, dreading the coming work day, consistently feeling overworked and feeling under appreciated.

These symptoms have a tendency to occur when a healthcare professional’s job mentally and physically demands too much for too long.

That’s why it is important to be self-aware in order to monitor for symptoms like this and to take the time to care for yourself if you start to feel any of these symptoms.

How To Deal With Burnout

If you start to notice yourself experience the symptoms of burnout, there are a number of steps that can prevent the condition from escalating.

Of course, they are all different strategies for self care.

Taking care of yourself is the ultimate key to avoiding burnout.

1. Keep Yourself Healthy

Practicing self care and mindfulness is a great way to keep yourself healthy and prevent burnout.

It can be as small as regulating your work schedule (if possible) in order to make the time to eat healthy, well balanced meals and regularly exercise for roughly 30 minutes a day.

These two changes are great for your overall health and go a long way when fighting against the symptoms of burnout.

It’s also important to prioritize your mental health and to take time off when you need it – this includes taking sick days if you are not feeling well mentally.

Sick days are sick days, they don’t have to be focused on physical symptoms like a fever or cough.

2. Get Enough Sleep

We all know sleep is important, but sleep also helps to avoid burnout.

Getting the recommended 8 hours improves concentration, stamina, mood, alertness and motivation.

It will make your job easier and more enjoyable if you are able to be fully present at work.

3. Rely On Your Relationships

Building a network of relationships both within and outside of the workplace is crucial for avoiding burnout.

It’s important to be able to speak to someone about the pressures you face as a medical professional and to receive emotional support.

Having that emotional support is also helpful when dealing with high stress situations because you are less likely to be overwhelmed.

4. Make Downtime A Priority

It’s also important to make downtime a priority in your fight against burnout.

The goal is to be able to fully relax during your downtime, so that you can turn off your brain to fully be at ease.

If this is a struggle for you, consider beginning your downtown by practicing daily meditation.

Meditation is associated with a wide range of health benefits physically, including a lower heart rate, decreased blood pressure, less anxiety, and less stress.

It gets easier the more that you practice it and the benefits are worth the investment of time.

Especially because once you’re able to quiet your mind, you can really make the most of your downtime, which is important in order to ward off burnout.

5. Streamline Your Processes

Finally, we recommend streamlining your processes wherever possible in order to take some tasks off of your plate.

Healthcare professionals – especially those with their own practices – spend a significant portion of their time on administrative tasks.

This can include streamlining your finances, data entry, email response, booking appointments, and dealing with insurance.

You can alleviate these extra work load stresses, which goes a long way in protecting yourself from burnout, by joining a medical co-working practice.

Symbiosis’ Practice Accelerator program gets you access to highly competent medical receptionist staff who will take care of a large portion of your administration, allowing you more time to focus on your practice and yourself.

Contact Symbiosis Today

At Symbiosis, we specialize in offering a variety of services to support your medical practice.

This includes offering a medical co-working space that would streamline many of your processes by removing the administrative tasks from your plate.

Burnout is a real problem in the medical profession.

But, there are numerous strategies you can take in order to protect yourself and your practice from it.

Contact Symbiosis today to find out how we can help with running your own practice and help to protect you from burnout at the same time.

It’s what we do.