The Best Way to Manage Stress

Laura Casey is a doctor of internal medicine with her own private practice—which demands lots of time and attention. After years of rigorous training, demanding hours, and emotional labor, she’s begun to feel continually exhausted and, at home and with her patients, emotionally distant. She’s feeling less passionate about her work, forgets to complete paperwork, and struggles to connect with her staff. 

Dr. Casey, in short, shows classic signs of job burnout, a problem that has become pervasive. Burnout?—which The World Health Organization recently classified as a medical diagnosis—can affect both physical and mental health. People experiencing burnout—like Dr. Casey—may struggle to concentrate and find motivation, experience insomnia or fatigue, and feel disillusioned or disconnected.

Helping professionals—including doctors, nurses, teachers, and social workers—whose work requires emotion management, can become particularly susceptible to burnout. The demands of the working world also contribute to increased burnout. Access to technology—including email, text messaging, and Slack—can create the expectation that we must always be available and accessible, with no boundary between work and the rest of our lives. This makes it difficult to find work-life balance, let alone recharge our energy outside of work.

One solution: get a coach. In a recent clinical trial of 88 physicians, researchers at Mayo Clinic found that participants who received professional coaching reduced their emotional exhaustion and lessened symptoms of burnout. And their overall quality of life improved. In contrast, physicians who were not coached reported more burnout during the same period of time—a sign they may be heading for worsened emotional exhaustion.

Take Dr. Casey, who sought help from a coach. With her coach’s help, Dr. Casey reincorporated painting and swimming into her life—hobbies she had once enjoyed but had stopped making time for. She also reconnected with her passion for medicine by journaling regularly, reaching out to colleagues with whom she had lost touch, and more intentionally connecting with her patients.

There are, of course, many ways to fight burnout. Among them:

Develop the Foundational Skills. The Foundational Skills of Emotional Intelligence, which include self-awareness, focus, emotional balance, adaptability, and empathy, give us the tools to understand and navigate our emotions and show up at our best throughout our lives. The ability to focus our awareness on the present moment—with a practice of mindfulness—underlays all of these skills.

Reconnect with personal purpose. Amid our busy lives, filled with competing priorities, we can lose sight of our purpose and what we find meaningful. It helps to pause and take the time to reflect on the state of various aspects of our lives (career, relationships, friendships, hobbies, etc.), and realign our intentions as we move forward.

Find sources of renewal. Sources of renewal can include the kind of creative pursuits that helped Dr. Casey (such as writing music, painting, or photography), spending time in nature, or playing a sport. If you’ve fallen out of practice with an old hobby you used to love, consider picking it back up. Give yourself the space to spend guilt-free time on activities you truly enjoy.

Relax. For many of us, changing our mindset around productivity is central to minimizing burnout. We don’t have to work so hard all the time—it pays to take time to relax, too. With emotional intelligence (EI), we can learn to let go of the negative mindsets that keep us stuck.

Get a coach. EI coaching enables clients to draw on their existing strengths and values in order to find opportunities for growth, reconnect with purpose and meaning, and develop their EI. Clients both experience greater motivation and self-determination and let go of stress over what lies beyond their control. Both of these elements play a key role in alleviating burnout.

If you’re interested in guiding others through this transformative process, consider applying for the Goleman Emotional Intelligence Coaching Certification. Applications are now open for the first 2020 cohort, which will include short residencies in Orlando, Florida. You can also join the interest lists for the other 2020 cohorts in Asia and Europe. And if you want to develop your EI, but aren’t interested in becoming a coach, you can explore 1:1 coaching, online EI courses, and more at golemanei.com.