1: Pretending as a Doctor. Can doctors really have balance?

Everyone deserves a space in their human lives to be their real human self - even doctor humans.    It's less common today in a medical culture of strict expectations of this controversial thing we call 'professionalism', which can be unforgiving to the human condition.    Life can be simply described a series of joys and dilemmas and there's no human who's exempt. To pretend that our reality is not real makes a challenging job and life even more so.   It's time for doctors to have permission to be more human. You don't need to pretend.   … It's exhausting.   And, there's something better on offer: authenticity.    In this episode, we start with a health-related guilt that plays on the minds of many doctors - that we should be balanced.    The nature of medical training programs in Australia is such that trainees are often left with little time in terms of absolute hours and also little control over their hours.    The irony is, the popular ideas of what it is to be 'healthy' and 'balanced' create a demanding list of wellness activities that we should be doing.    It's easy to look at your life as a doctor and think, "I'm doing it wrong"    And this can lead us to override our actual needs in the name of ticking the 'balanced' box.    And we haven't even started to talk about the effect of the guilt that this 'balance' prescription creates.    We want to relieve you of the idea of 'balance'. Instead of fitting into this idea of what a balanced life looks like, a better question is,    "What do I need right now?"   Leave your expectations at the door. Take your finger off the override button. And trust that you know what is best for you.    Sometimes, we require something that looks less like classic 'balance' and more like 'survival mode'. At those times, the best thing we can do for ourselves is not add a layer of guilt and inadequacy around what we 'should' be doing.   This will likely be a new process for your mind to go through as many of us hold these firm ideas about what's 'balanced' and 'healthy'.    Are you having the battle with balance? Are you done pretending?   We look forward to sharing the conversation with you.

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