You Were Never Meant to Handle All of This Alone

Let me ask you something you might not want to answer honestly.

When did you last have your own doctor look you in the eye and tell you how you are actually doing?

If you are like a lot of the physicians I know and take care of in my practice, it has been a while. Maybe you have been handling things yourself. Maybe you have been meaning to schedule something. Maybe the idea of being the patient, of being on the other side of the exam room, feels oddly uncomfortable for someone who spends their whole professional life in that room.

I get it. I am a family physician. I have been that doctor too.

But there are things I say to my physician patients that I think more of us need to hear. So this week on Ending Physician Overwhelm, I walked through the ten things I would tell you if I was sitting across from you as your doctor.

Some of them are the things you already know. Sleep more. Eat more protein and fiber. Move your body. Cut back on the caffeine or the wine or the doom scrolling, or maybe all three. You know these. The issue is not that you lack the information. The issue is that you are not letting yourself have these things. And there is a difference.

Number six is the one that tends to land hardest: no one can make these things a priority if you will not make them a priority for yourself. That sounds harsh until you sit with it. Because it is also true that no one else is going to save you from the 10 PM charting session. No one is going to make you put down your phone at a decent hour. No one is going to book the therapy appointment or the coaching call or the vacation days you have been rolling over for two years. That has to come from you.

But here is the thing I want you to hold alongside that, and this is number ten: you were never meant to do all of this alone.

The system was not built for you. It was built for a version of medicine that does not reflect your actual life. And yet here you are, carrying the clinical load, the family load, the community load, the emotional load, running on not enough sleep and a lot of determination, wondering quietly what is wrong with you that you cannot seem to make it all work.

Nothing is wrong with you. The load is just genuinely too heavy for one person to carry without support.

Asking for help is uncomfortable. Paying for help can feel indulgent, especially if you have student loans or a specialty that does not pay what people assume it does. Accepting help, letting someone do the thing differently than you would do it, is its own skill. But all three are worth practicing. Because the physicians I work with who have started to build actual support around themselves are the ones who stop white-knuckling their way through their days and start actually living them.

This episode is worth a listen, especially if you have been pushing through and hoping things will eventually ease up on their own. Tune in wherever you get your podcasts or head to healthierforgood.com.

And if you are ready to stop waiting and want to talk about what support could actually look like for you, I would love to have that conversation. You can book a free discovery call at https://calendly.com/healthierforgood/coaching-discovery-call.

This is the kind of change that actually moves the needle.