Friday evening – you’re leaving late after a long day in-clinic and you’re mentally juggling work, family, friends, your fitness resolutions and relentless admin. An email notification pops up from a patient that you treated yesterday. Your pulse quickens as you immediately assume that you have another urgent problem to deal with. Sound familiar? Perhaps it’s time to address the stress.
Whilst astute at recognising physical and emotional suffering in our patients, we are often inattentive to our own stress as healthcare practitioners. Long-term stress can lead to ‘amygdala overload’, sympathetic nervous system over-stimulation and eventual burnout.1
By recognising our individual stress responses, we can begin to identify the causes and develop personalised strategies to regulate the nervous system and perform better in the workplace.
In response to perceived threat, the amygdala in the brain sends a distress signal which triggers the hypothalamus into activating the sympathetic limb of the autonomic nervous system, releasing…
