Taking care of your patients is obviously your first priority. But while you’re working to improve the lives of people in your community, don’t forget to take care of yourself.
After all, you can’t treat patients effectively if you’re not treating yourself well.
Stress, burnout, and day-to-day hassles can take a toll on your physical and emotional well-being. But good self-care will help you manage stress, focus better, and improve your overall mood.
Here’s a simple way to diminish stress: Take a few breaths and then ask yourself a few questions the next time you sit down to eat.
- Where did the food you’re eating come from?
- Did it come from the farmer’s market or your garden?
- Breathe again, and before you take the first bite ask yourself the harder question: Why are you eating now? Are you responding to an emotional want or to your body’s needs?
Mindful eating simply is paying attention to what you’re eating and how you are eating. Sounds simple enough, right? The truth is, just like anything else, it takes practice, and the benefits of practicing outweigh the restrictiveness and cultural conformity of dieting. According to a National Institutes of Health study, mindful eating techniques could help eating disorders.
If you want more information and tools to help you focus on caring for yourself, the Texas Medical Association’s Committee on Physician Health and Wellness has created the following CME courses:
- What’s In Your Refrigerator? Learn how to interrupt the social, cultural, and economic factors that influence unhealthy eating.
- Self-Care: Your Daily Affirmation: Learn how to apply wellness concepts in order to care for yourself and recognize the role of healthy behavior in managing the challenges of a medical practice.
- Reset Your Circadian Clock: Understand how fatigue can affect your performance and learn how to create a fatigue management plan.
- The Communication Paradigm in Medicine: Learn how behaviors at any level can affect communication exchanges in a negative or positive way. Collaborative care requires self-awareness to successfully enhance patient outcomes and allows physicians to provide the best possible care.
- Aging Physicians: Practice Dilemmas: Learn how to identify considerations related to continued professional involvement of older physicians.
Also, check out these health and wellness strategies and tools to help yourself and others
Need ethics CME? TMA Physician Health and Wellness is your No. 1 stop. We are committed to providing health and wellness education accessible online, virtually, or live.
Choose from these free one-hour programs to be held at your facility.
As part of your TMA membership, hundreds of CME and ethics hours are now available at no cost to you, compliments of TMA Insurance Trust. This is just one of the ways we are working to support you and thank you for all you do. Not a member? Join today for access to dozens of free CME courses from TMA.