One of the most effective methods for healing physician burnout that I use with my clients involves decluttering negative emotions. I call it the spring cleaning process of healing physician burnout.
Spring cleaning doesn’t have to simply be a time to declutter your home and rid it of unwanted items. The whole concept of spring cleaning is about taking inventory of your life and making hard decisions about what you no longer need moving forward.
It’s a practice of releasing everything that is no longer serving you because when you get rid of the old, you make space for what’s new.
It’s about letting go of the things, people, and emotions that are weighing you down.
You can apply the concept to all areas of your life to experience a fresh start and rebirth in the spring time. Sometimes clearing away the old painful emotions can be just as cathartic as taking bins of extraneous belongings to Goodwill.
Why you need to declutter your emotions
Forgiving and letting go of grudges and resentments from your past is a powerful way of spring cleaning your emotional energy. When you refuse to let go of previous situations where you felt wronged, or times when you messed up you are weighed down by heaviness.
Holding onto heavy emotions like blame, resentment and anger can act as a huge energy drain and actually contributes to feelings of burnout and exhaustion.
When you forgive and release the past you open yourself up to deep healing and you clear the way for new, positive energy to infiltrate your life. This whole process can be instrumental in healing physician burnout.
Getting started healing physician burnout
Here’s how to get started. First, make a list of all the people and situations that you need to forgive.
Maybe it’s your supervisor for throwing you under the bus during handoff.
Maybe it’s your coworker for taking vacation and leaving you on call for 7 days in a row.
Maybe you need to forgive yourself for missing something critical at work.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself to identify the areas in your life that can benefit from forgiveness work.
- What past circumstances feel heavy like they are weighing you down?
- What do you not want to think about?
- Where are you thinking “this shouldn’t have happened”?
- What are you refusing to let go of?
Be sure to include yourself somewhere on the list. Most of us are SO hard on ourselves and beat ourselves up for every little mistake- it’s important to extend this practice of forgiveness to yourself as well as other people in your life.
You must be willing to forgive
Once you’ve made your list of the people and situations that you need to forgive it’s time to start the actual process of forgiveness for healing physician burnout.
Begin by identifying your willingness to forgive. You can do this by offering up an intention or a prayer. I usually say something like this:
I recognize that I have been holding onto this and that it’s no longer serving me. I am willing to forgive and release it. Please help me to clear this negative energy.
I think it’s important for you to know that forgiveness does not mean letting someone off the hook. It also does not mean forgetting or turning a blind eye.
Forgiveness is truly just about coming to a place of acceptance. It’s moving from the resistance of of “this shouldn’t have happened” to, “this happened”.
Healing physician burnout requires feeling
Once you’ve identified your willingness to forgive and let go, it’s time to briefly revisit each situation.
Take a moment to read through each memory on your list. Allow yourself to tap back into the feelings you had at that time. Were you angry, heartbroken, frustrated? Spend some time really feeling into that time in the past.
Once you’ve tapped back into the emotions you can recite the forgiveness mantra.
In my own personal forgiveness practice, (which I wrote about here) I love to use the Ho’oponopono forgiveness mantra which is a practice from the ancient Hawaiian culture.
The mantra goes like this:
I forgive you. I thank you. I’m sorry. I love you.
I repeat this mantra out loud as many times as I need to until the heavy, negative feelings start to melt away.
Sometimes, if there is a particularly dense, heavy emotion present, I use this 12 minute guided meditation to help me release more deeply.
Continue this process for every item on the list until you feel lighter and renewed.
Be gentle with yourself during this practice and don’t feel the need to do it all at once. If you can only do one memory at a time, that is perfectly ok. Forgiveness work is ongoing work.
Emotional decluttering and spring cleaning your emotions is just one step of the burnout recovery process. If you are a healthcare worker struggling with burnout, you can download my Burnout Recovery Starter Kit to help you kick start your burnout recovery!
