Latest / The Hidden Load: For the educators and leaders in medicine who hold everyone up. / The Missing Cup of Coffee: How We Quietly Drop Our Joy
Transcript
- Santina Wheat: Welcome to the hidden load for the educators and leaders in medicine who hold everyone up. We will tackle the hard topics and help you conquer your chaos and get to calm all by starting to acknowledge and remove that hidden load. This podcast is a space for us to name the things that are common, but not normal. Each week, we'll look at the invisible weight you're carrying and explore practical coaching-based tools to help you find more calm, better boundaries, and a sense of purpose that doesn't require you to run on empty. I'm so glad that you've carved time out for yourself today. Let's get into the episode. Welcome back to The Hidden Load. I am your host, Dr. Santina or Tina Wheat. Today I would like to share a small, seemingly ordinary moment that happened to me just last week. This was a moment that hit me unexpectedly, and it opened up a much deeper realization about burnout, focus, and How we all treat ourselves when our plates are full. This started at around three in the afternoon. I happened to be working from home. I was sitting at my desk, deep in focus, pushing through a mountain of work. I felt like I was trying to dig myself out from underneath a backlog that I just really needed to catch up from. But I finally looked up from my computer screen. I rubbed my temples. And realized that I had this dull thumping headache that was making it difficult for me to continue. And I couldn't figure out what was going on. At first, I assumed it was just screen fatigue because I had literally been sitting here all day. I thought, okay, I have been staring at chart notes and spreadsheets and emails for four hours straight. without taking a breath. Of course my head hurts. That makes sense. But then as I sat there trying to figure out why I felt so groggy and depleted. Another real cause suddenly dawned on me. I had completely forgotten my second cup of coffee, and I am always a two cup of coffee girl. I know this sounds like a tiny trivial thing, doesn't it? But then I reflected on why I had missed that second cup. I realized that it wasn't a random accident. I missed that second cup for two very specific reasons that happen to us all the time in healthcare and leadership. The first reason was I hadn't thought through my day. I did not map out a runway or build in a single intentional pause to go and quit. And specifically at home, especially when my husband is traveling. I have to build in a pause to get that second cup of coffee. There is no automatic coffee maker and there is no husband when he's traveling to say, Hey, I'm making another cup. Do you want one too? The second reason was I had so much on my plate that doing one more thing just felt like an impossible burden. Sure, it doesn't take a lot to get the coffee going, to get out another mug, and I make lattes at home, so then to froth the milk and pour it all in a mug. But when you were already drowning in demands. Even a single small restorative act, like walking down the stairs to get a fresh cup of coffee, feels like an administrative task that you just don't have the bandwidth to execute. So sometimes it feels easier to skip it. You put your head down and you just keep grinding. But then you Pay for it. You might, like I did, spend the rest of the afternoon feeling sluggish, irritable, and brain fogged, wondering why you feel so terrible until you finally make the connection. I starved myself of the very thing that helps me function. Now, of course. I realize that I shouldn't feel like I need a cup of coffee to get through my demo. But it's not always about the caffeine. Sometimes it's just about the pause, about the warmth, about that moment of doing something for myself. As I sat there with that three PM coffee headache, a much larger memory came flooding back to me. This moment reminded me exactly of how I felt when I was sinking into deep professional burnout. And it reminded me of what it felt like when I finally started coming out of it. Think about how we lose our joy in medicine and in my case, academic leadership. Nobody wakes up on Monday morning and consciously declares starting today, I am going to abandon all of the things that give me joy. I'm going to abandon my hobbies, stop reading for pleasure, quit exercising, quit hanging out with friends. And give up everything that makes me feel human. That is most definitely not how it happens. Instead, we drop the things that we enjoy quietly, subtly, and incrementally. Maybe we drop the morning walk because clinic is starting 30 minutes earlier, or we feel like clinic has gotten more complex. So we need that time to preview the charts of everyone we're going to see. We give up reading books for pleasure because we have unread journal articles or inbox charts piling up. Something in medicine has shifted and we need to think about that. Or our re-credentialing or our recertification is coming up. And so there's certain things that we just have to get done. Maybe we stop meeting a friend for lunch or cutting off work to spend quiet time with our family because just doing one more thing or stepping away from the desk feels completely overwhelming. And that one more thing initially brought us joy doesn't feel like it's the necessary thing in the endless list of tasks that you have to accomplish. And when we do these things, we tell ourselves that it's temporary. We say, I just need to put my head down through this week, this block, this green, this semester, or just till that other person comes back from leave. We convince ourselves that our joy, our rest, and our restorative habits. are optional luxuries that must take a backseat to our priorities, to our institutional priorities, not even our own priorities. And just like missing that second cup of coffee, you do not always notice the impact immediately. Burnout isn't an instant cliff that you fall off. It is a slow, steady attrition. You push through a day or two on sheer adrenaline, thinking that it's going to get better and you're going to climb out of whatever hole it is you're in. But eventually, That cumulative debt, it catches up with you. You end up living in a state of chronic emotional buginess. You develop a low grade existential headache. Find yourself feeling cynical, exhausted, and detached, wondering why the job feels so heavy, never realizing that you are actually running on empty because you systematically eliminated every source of fuel from your day. Those things that bring you joy, those things that you love, they actually refuel you and allow you to keep going. When I went through the process of recovering from my own mount, one of the very first coaching directives I had to execute was putting back the things that brought me genuine joy. For me, that was reading books for pleasure again. That was protecting time with my family and stepping away from the screen. I have to tell you, it was defty uncomfortable at first. When you have been operating in survival mode for months or even years, which is probably the reality for me, adding a joyful or restorative activity back onto a calendar, sometimes it actually feels irresponsible. Your internal critic screams. How can you spend an hour reading a table that isn't going to help you for that patient tomorrow? Or how can you spend an hour playing with your kids when you have 40 urgent unread emails sitting in your inbox? When truthfully they probably aren't all that well. But here is the critical lesson that I was reminded of this week when I finally went and poured that second kind of coffee. When your headache is all thumping, drinking that cup of coffee does not instantly cure you in five seconds. It is not object pill. You don't take one sip and suddenly feel a hundred percent fine. The headache, it's already there. The psychological debt has already been incurred. But if you sit there, if you drink the coffee and give it a little bit of time, you feel the pressure start to ease. You will feel that thumping stop. The brain fog will start to lift, the grogginess will fade away, and you will notice the difference as yourity returns. It was not an immediate light switch, just like burnout wasn't an immediate breakdown, but it was actually fairly quick. Putting books back on my Kindle and making the time to read them and claiming uninterrupted time with each of my family members worked the exact same way. The first night I sat down at my family or opened a book. My burnout didn't magically vanish in five minutes. Wish it was that simple. My box was still full. My teeth my fatigue didn't completely evaporate overnight, but it made all that long. In just a few short days I started to notice. And in a few weeks, the emotional headache truly began to lift. Felt my perspective returning. I felt my patience coming back. Those joyful activities, they were not unearned rewards to be enjoyed only after all of the work was finished. They were actually the essential fuel. That made the work possible in the first place. Now, if you lead a team, if you reach others, or supervise junior faculty, this metaphor carries immense stakes for your leadership culture. When your team sees you perpetually running unempty, when they see you skipping breaks or bragging about working through lunch. And sacrificing every personal passion for the department, they learn that self-deprivation is the price of it. When we don't protect our own second cup of coffee, our own boundaries, our own joy, our own human needs, we give our teams implicit permission to burn out right alongside us. But reclaiming your joy and act Of institutional leadership. It models for the trainees behind us that high performance and human sustainability must coexist. And they can coexist. But modeling, it's only the first step. True leadership also requires us to open the door for them. So when you do your check-in meetings, your advising meetings, Your precepting sessions, often accustomed to asking the purely operational questions. Are your charts done? How are your procedure numbers looking? Did you log that thing? Did you finish that committee assignment? Did you finish that report? But I want to challenge you to shift that conversation. Of course, you still need to ask those questions and make sure that things happen. But I want you to also start asking your team members gently and truly, genuinely, what is bringing you joy outside of this clinic right now? Or outside of this hospital right now? Are you finding space for the things that sustain you? Or have you quietly dropped your second cup of coffee lately? When you ask that question, You do something profound. You grant them permission to view their humanity as a priority. And it should be. You signal that you care about their longevity as a whole person. You care about their ability to thrive at home and at work. You don't just care about their productivity as a clinical in it. And if they look at you. with a blank stare because they have been in survival mode for six months or a year. You give them the space to realize it without judgment. So here is your Monday morning challenge for this week. First, I want you to look at your own calendar upcoming week and identify what your missing cup of coffee is. And maybe if you don't have one, identify what is the thing that you need to make sure stays. But yourself, what is one small thing? That brings me genuine joy or rest that I quietly dropped because I thought I was too busy to do it. Is it reading 15 pages of a novel? Is it a protected dinner with your family? Is it a 20-minute walk outside without taking a phone call? Is it sitting in silence with your morning coffee out looking at your inbox? Once you identify it, I want you to put it back on your schedule this week and protect it. If you're considering drop dropping, ask yourself that second cup of coffee, and do I need to make sure it stays there? Remember, it might not fix everything in the first five minutes, and it probably won't. That headache might take a little bit of time to hide. But If you consistently supply the fuel, then the pressure will ease and the clarity will return. Once you've looked at this for yourself, I have a second task for you. And that is to pick one person on your team this week. Maybe it's a resident, a junior faculty member, a nurse, a colleague. And I want you to ask them gently, where are you finding your joy right now? into their answer, valid humanity, the member of that second cup. Thank you for joining me on this episode of the hidden load. If reflection spoke to you today, please share it with a colleague who might be running a little too hard on empty right now, and you can figure out your cups of coffee together. Let's lighten the load together. I am Dr. Santina Wheat. I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to The Hidden Load. If today's conversation spoke to you, I would love for you to share it with a colleague who might need to hear it too. It's one of the simplest ways we can start shifting the culture of medicine together. And remember, your time spent reflecting here matters. You can earn free CME or CE credits for listening to today's episode through the Pinnacle app. You'll find that link in the show notes. If you are looking for one-on-one coaching support or want to dive deeper into the resources we discussed today, let's connect. You can find information on how to reach me in the show notes. don't forget to hit subscribe so that you never miss an episode ⁓ and leave me a rating so that others can find me too. and take care of yourself because you deserve to be held up too. And I'll see you next time.