Career and Life Planning Guidebook for Medical Residents

Physician Burnout Reflection + Activity Reflect on 3 activities in your life where you find joy. How can you begin to incorporate them into your everyday routine to bolster your immunity against the disease of burnout? In the last 6 months, when did you feel most alive? What were you doing at the time? What would you like to change about yourself? Would you like your life to be different? If so, how? You may discover your heart in origami, hiking, playingguitar, painting, travel, sculpting, meditating, reading, mountain climbing, or a combination of these, but the heart must be found or born again. The soul in search of itselfmust have the head firmly rooted in the heart; chronicling that search can be a helpful adjunct in your journey out of burnout. Writing for me has been restorative, therapeutic, illuminating, informative—and painful. Yet those words seem like trifles indescribingwhat theprocess of writing has meant to me in my soul. There is an inner life we all possess. Reflection and creativity imbued with a sense of mystery flow out and onto the page in writing. In that process the writer and the reader discover things together. It is intimate. In the process of finding our way through that dark night of the soul, to which St. John of the Cross refers in his medieval classic, we discover meaning. Writing is revelatory as much to ourselves as it is to others. 31 WWW.PHYSICIANCAREERPLANNING.COM