This week I’ve been chatting with a few of you about being excessively busy and overworked. It seems to be an invidious problem that nobody sought out but that has crept up over time.
It’s the result of running a successful Practice but it is destructive too. Therefore, it’s very important to be aware of the signs that you’re approaching burnout and ill health. Cramming in too many Patients back to back makes it increasingly difficult to engage and, more importantly, disengage from each Patient and their ailments.
Polly Burns FdA Counselling and Psychotherapy; BSc (Hons) Psychology; MSc Business Psychology
And I do wonder what the Forefathers of Osteopathy would have to say about that!
So I’ve asked Psychology expert Polly Burns of Managing Emotion in Business to write a guest blog to explain the problems and risks of ending up working in this way. Here’s what she says:
Are you working too hard? You will know if you are because you will be feeling stressed and overwhelmed. Stress and overwhelm is the result of too many demands being made on the energy you have available. Energy is one of your main resources: and just like other resources it can, and does, become depleted. It is when we have used up our available energy supply; both physical and mental, and when, instead of taking steps to replenish it, we continue trying to run on empty, that we experience burnout.
Like a car that keeps going when the tank is nearly empty the eventual result is inevitable; a break-down. That break-down can take many forms; physical ailments and illnesses; mental and physical exhaustion; stress; and even mental disorders like anxiety and depression.
Would you like to take your pick from that list? OR is now the time for you to take some preventative action and think seriously about proper self-care?
We can’t give others what we haven’t got ourselves- so administering a good standard of care or healing is ONLY possible when we ourselves are feeling sufficiently cared for and well. In my profession – Counselling- practitioners on the whole tend to be aware of the need to practice self-care. (The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy- has Self-respect: which is comprised of self- knowledge and self-care as one of its ethical principles. This means we have an ethical responsibility to look after ourselves as practitioners. How much does your profession encourage self-awareness around the issue of self-care?
Practitioners in client-centred professions do often overlook its importance because believe we are letting people down if we do put our own needs ahead of theirs. In fact the opposite is true: we aren’t doing our clients any favours when we neglect ourselves because we cannot then do our best work- and we might even end up giving substandard treatment.
So if you KNOW that you are working too hard, you are not being fair to yourself, your family OR your clients. And there is only ONE solution: REDUCE your sense of overwhelm by doing LESS ie STOP depleting your energy and START replenishing it through adequate self-care. Start TODAY by identifying one way you can reduce your sense of overwhelm: I’m sure Gilly has plenty of ideas to get you started…
