If you are feeling miserable in your medical career, you may need some help decoding physician burnout symptoms. Generally, with feelings of burnout, comes a whole host of confusing questions.
One of my physician coaching clients recently asked me this question, which I think effectively gets to the crux of the issue.
She asked:
“How do you know if it’s burnout causing you to hate being a physician or if you just hate being a physician?”
Whew. What a question.
It really struck me that THIS right here, is probably one of the core driving questions when it comes to burnout among physicians.
Why am I so miserable right now in this job?
Is it the job itself, or do I need to restructure my work so I can do the job in a different way?
Is it one BIG change I need to make, or a dozen tiny tweaks?
Do I hate WHAT I am doing, or do I hate HOW I am doing it.
This whole series of questioning can also present a bit of a chicken and egg dilemma.
Which came first, the burnout or hating the job?
In this post, I will walk you through how to get started answering all of these questions.
But first, if you want to leave clinical medicine but feel trapped- I’ve got a FREE training for you.
Physician burnout symptoms can look like “hating your job”
Dealing with symptoms of burnout and emotional exhaustion can absolutely make it feel like you HATE your current job. It might be more accurate to say that the symptoms or burnout can look an awfully lot like the symptoms of hating your job.
3 Core Symptoms of Burnout
So what exactly are the symptoms of burnout?
There are three major dimensions of burnout as measured in the MBI is a psychological assessment that can help to measure burnout and is commonly used in scientific studies and across various organizations.
The 3 core burnout symptoms, as described by the MBI are: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and decreased sense of accomplishment.
When you are experiencing these symptoms, and still showing up at work everyday, you will absolutely feel like you hate your job.
Let’s walk through what it looks like to experience each of these dimensions of burnout.
Emotional Exhaustion
Emotional exhaustion happens when stress accumulates overtime and causes you to feel completely drained. If you’ve ever gotten home from work feeling depleted to the core, like you have nothing left to give, that is emotional exhaustion.
The problem with emotional exhaustion is that it essentially zaps you of motivation and causes you to go into couch potato mode as soon as you get home.
Even if you have some personal time in the evenings after work, you don’t feel motivated to use that time to do things you enjoy.
It seems that work is ruining your personal life. A feeling of resentment towards your career starts building.
Maybe you really do hate your job, or maybe you just hate the helpless blob you’ve become.
Depersonalization
Depersonalization is the experience of becoming more negative, cynical and impersonal.
In medical school, you used to be an emotionally involved, Izzy. You spent hours sitting with patients, listening to their sob stories and being their shoulder to cry on.
Now, you are a stone, cold Christina. Making insensitive jokes in the physicians lounge before rounds.
In other words, it feels like you have no fucks left to give.
When you have a hard time actually CARING about other people, but you are in a job (like healthcare) that constantly requires you to do so, you end up pretending to care.
Somewhere deep down inside, you wish you could care, but summoning up the ability to care feels impossible. There’s a will, but there’s legitimately not a way.
Then on top of that, you feel guilty for NOT caring.
Why do you feel annoyed at the homeless diabetic patient who can’t reliably afford insulin and keeps winding up in your ER?
What is wrong with you? You should feel sympathy or empathy? But instead, you just feel disgusted.
You feel like a bad person for not caring, but it seems like your “give a damn” button is broken.
As a healthcare professional, a huge part of your job is to CARE about people.
Because of your burnout, you literally cannot find a way to care about people.
As a result, you walk around at work all day feeling like you are a bad person and a BAD doctor.
When you are constantly playing the mental tapes of “I’m bad at my job” and “I’m a bad person”, you aren’t going to enjoy being at work.
On top of that, you will feel an immense pressure to pretend to care, because you don’t want anyone to know how cold blooded you are.
When you pretend to care, it feels like you are “putting on a mask” or “being fake” at work.
This can be so exhausting and deplete you of even more energy thus further exacerbating the feeling of burnout.
Decreased sense of accomplishment
Another symptom of burnout is feeling a decreased sense of accomplishment. In the book I mentioned earlier, Burnout, the Nagoski sisters define this as “the unconquerable sense of futility, feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.”
Who hasn’t felt this way working in healthcare?
There are so many situations that feel out of your control and even when you try your best, it can feel like nothing you do is making a difference.
- You educate your pregnant patient about how important it is to stop smoking during pregnancy. They keep smoking anyway. At 34 weeks they end up in the emergency room with a placental abruption and a poor outcome.
- You prescribe a birth control pill and counsel the patient on how to take it. A month later, they end up in your office, distraught, with a positive pregnancy test.
- You want to give your patient a certain screening test, but their insurance continuously declines to cover it. You spend time you don’t have filling out a prior authorization, presenting an evidence based argument as to why the test is indicated. Insurance declines it anyways. What a waste of time and energy.
Working in healthcare can be frustrating AF. On a good day. When you have all the energy in the world.
Now add in some burnout which causes this decreased sense of accomplishment. Imagine how crappy this can make you feel.
Most of us went into healthcare because we wanted to help people and make a difference, when it feels like we aren’t actually doing either one, it is incredibly discouraging.
When you are experiencing these physician burnout symptoms, it is highly likely you will also feel like you hate your job.
But there is something else to think about as well.
What’s the underlying cause of your physician burnout symptoms?
What is it that led to your physician burnout symptoms in the first place?
It is absolutely possible to get burnout while working in your ideal, dream job.
But working in a job that is NOT the right fit for you can CAUSE burnout.
When you are doing work that doesn’t align with your values, this WILL inevitably lead to burnout.
Especially if the job is highly stressful and time consuming.
So how in the world do you start to tease this out?
How can you figure out if burnout is causing you to hate your job, or if you just truly hate your job?
It’s a pretty daunting question, and there isn’t necessarily a simple or straightforward answer.
Start with what you DO know
Whenever I am trying to answer a difficult question, I start by focusing on what I DO know.
In this situation, what DO you know?
You know that you currently feel like you hate your job.
You know that you are feeling burnt out.
This is a great place to start.
Regardless of WHY you are feeling burnt out, you can start by taking some steps to heal from burnout.
Make burnout recovery a top priority.
When your mind, body and soul start to feel better, you will likely have more clarity regarding what to do about your career?
Take some time off work to REST
Taking some truly restful time AWAY from work is hugely beneficial. This may require you to have some hard conversations with people in charge, but you HAVE to become an advocate for your own mental health.
It may be uncomfortable AND it will be so worth it.
When I was in residency, experiencing my healthcare burnout symptoms, I had to talk with my program director about taking a 5 week leave of absence.
Taking this time off felt embarrassing to me at first.
I felt like a failure.
In the medical field there is a large emphasis on the hustle culture. Our self worth is wrapped up in how long and hard we can work. Taking these 5 weeks off made me feel all kinds of guilt and shame.
Why couldn’t I work as hard as everyone else? Was I just lazy? Does this mean I can’t cut it as a physician?
Even though I had all these feelings of unworthiness swirling around, I took the time off anyways.
I recommend you do the same.
There are always going to be reasons you feel that you “shouldn’t” take the time off.
You don’t want to make other people cover for you.
You don’t have the paid leave.
You don’t want to use up all your vacation right now.
There’s a patient surgery you have scheduled on this date you don’t want to miss.
You have a talk that you are scheduled to give or a research conference to attend.
Blah. Blah. Blah.
At some point, you have to make a decision. What’s more important to you: taking care of yourself, or running yourself into the ground trying to prove that you’re good enough?
Healing from burnout is absolutely essential in gaining clarity on what to do next.
When you are in a state of burnout, you are in a sort of haze. A brain fog. You aren’t thinking clearly and you don’t feel like your best self.
I wouldn’t trust myself to make any major life decisions in this state. Therefore, if you want to make any sort of changes in your life, it’s important to do that from a state of rest, not exhaustion.
Start the work of soul searching
Once you are taking some initial steps to heal your physician burnout symptoms, you can move on to answering some other questions.
Instead of continually asking yourself:
Why do I hate this current job? Why am I so miserable and unhappy?
Try asking some different questions.
Ask yourself…
- What would I LOVE to be doing?
- How would I love to be spending my time?
- What would I love to help people with?
- What energizes me?
Use the answers to those questions to continue to guide your inquiry into what could be next for you.
When you experience physician burnout symptoms
When you are feeling burnout and unhappy in your career, it can be very confusing to figure out what is going on.
Is it the burnout that is causing you to hate your job?
Is it hating your job that caused you to experience burnout?
It’s crucial to accurately answer these questions, because the answers will drastically impact your course of action.
If you are in a job you really do love, but are just burnt out and exhausted, making some smaller tweaks to restructure your career will go a long way.
Getting more support at home.
Reducing your work load.
Putting solid boundaries in place.
Practicing in a different setting.
These smaller changes can monumentally improve your quality of life and can allow you to keep doing the work you enjoy.
If you are in a job that is not the right fit for you, it is likely going to require some bigger changes to more permanently improve your quality of life.
Either way, it is important to dig deep to get clear on what is really going on for you.
If you want additional support on your burnout recovery journey, you can consider getting a burn out coach. Read my post to see HOW burnout coaching can help you fast track your recovery.
We get clear on your values, your strengths, and your passions/ interests. We use this information to understand why you are currently unhappy with your work and to inform your next steps. It is only when we do this deep work that we can make changes that actually make a difference.
And if you are really struggling with healthcare burnout symptoms, be sure to download my #Burnout Recovery Starter Kit. This will help you identify your top energy drains so you can make an action plan for burnout recovery.
I’d love to hear from YOU.
Have you ever experienced burnout in your work? What changes did you make to help you recover?
Are you currently experiencing burnout in your work? What do you think is causing it?
Comment below and share your experiences with burnout and healing from burnout.
XO, Coach Chels
