123 - Why Meditation Might Be the Missing Link to Physician Wellness Plans and 4 Things You Can Do Today to Decrease Stress and Burnout in Medical Practices

🎧 Why Meditation Might Be the Missing Link in Physician Wellness Plans

Feeling exhausted even after a full night’s sleep? Wondering how to manage your stress while caring for difficult patients?

Physicians are trained to manage emergencies, patients, and NOT paperwork — but we rarely taught how to manage mental and emotional health. This episode explores why meditation could be the tool that finally helps you feel focused, calm, and energized again.

• Understand the difference between biblical and secular meditation — and how both can serve physicians.
  
  
• Get practical tips and free tools you can use immediately to reduce anxiety, improve sleep, and stay sharp.
  
  
• Discover the gratitude practice Coach JPMD uses with his team to start meetings with clarity and purpose.

Hit play now to learn how to integrate meditation into your wellness routine and build real mental resilience as physicians.

Discover how medical graduates, junior doctors, and young physicians can navigate residency training programs, surgical residency, and locum tenens to increase income, enjoy independent practice, decrease stress, achieve financial freedom, and retire early, while maintaining patient satisfaction and exploring physician side gigs to tackle medical school loans.

Transcript

Coach JPMD (00:04)
Have you ever wondered why some of your colleagues are not as stressed as you are, or they deal with patients differently and things don't seem to phase them? Well, in this episode, we're gonna talk about stress and things that I do to help decrease my stress.

So in this episode, we're going to discuss the four things that I do related to meditation that I think we should all look to practice because we definitely can benefit from meditation. We'll also find out the types of meditation.

And I'll give you a bonus exercise that I did with my coach that helped me and my team members tremendously.

In the New International Version of Joshua 1-8, it's an Old Testament book. It says, keep this book of law always on your lips. Meditate on it day and night so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful. Now that was written thousands of years ago and I'm a Christian. So I believe in the Bible and I believe what is written is what God tells us. And he's telling us that if we meditate on his word,

then we will be prosperous and successful. So I take God at his word. So today we're going to talk about meditation. And there's two types of meditation. There's a spiritual or biblical meditation, biblical meditation, and there's also secular or Eastern, Eastern meditation. And, you know, both of them have its benefits. And I've done some research on it and found that people who are chronic meditators or people who do it well,

have things that happen in their brain in terms of neuroplasticity and brain structural changes as well as functional changes that occur that have been found on functional MRI studies. And this been also known to decrease blood pressure, decrease anxiety, ⁓ improve sleep. And so there are many benefits of ⁓ meditation. And I'm going to basically speak about

what I think we can be doing as physicians to decrease our stress by meditating regularly. And so I'll describe what I've done and some of the benefits that I've seen in myself. And hopefully this will help you understand how you can push powerfully through your days so that you're not as stressed when you're rounding, when you're seeing patients or when you're doing a podcast or when you're doing other things that require your full attention.

So I can go on about the benefits. can go on about the research, but now we have Chat GPT, we have a co-pilot and you can do the research yourself, but I wanna just give you my take on meditation and a couple of things that I've been sharing with my patients as well. I had a patient recently that came in and ⁓ she was ⁓ anxious about flying. think she was going to Seattle and wanted some volume. And I could tell that she was kind of riled up and her husband was sitting next to her.

And we spoke about things that she can do, ask her if she did any type of meditation, she had no idea. And so I share the website fragrantheart.com, which is a website that I've shared in the past. And what that website does is kind of curates different types of guided meditation to help you decrease stress, improve sleep.

improve your focus. So you have different guided meditations that you can actually listen to. And it's free. It's you can listen to mp3s that are online. And I find it very helpful. And one of things I tell my patients also is that you should stay off social media. And the minute I told her that she should stay off of Facebook, she looked at me like I was crazy. Because apparently she wakes up in the middle of the night and looks at Facebook and checks her social media. And there's some studies that show that

it, the degree of your anxiety and degree of depression that you have is inversely correlated with the amount of time you spend on Facebook. And so we have to really keep an eye on it. You know, I'm, I'm guilty and sometimes I get, get on social media to get a laugh or two and I am trying to decrease that incident so that I can stay powerful and stay alert, stay ⁓

present with what I'm doing during my day. So fragrantheart.com. That's the number one site that I recommend for my patients as well as people who are looking to have some guided meditation on whatever problems that they're having.

Number two is a Hallow app. And Hallow app is a more geared towards a spiritual and biblical meditation. And that is a free app. I use that almost every day, particularly in the afternoons when my energy level comes down or if I'm doing a podcast episode, if I'm interviewing someone, I will take five to 10 minutes to listen to a guided meditation. And usually it's a silent meditation where I'm able to

you know, bring the Holy Spirit or bring the Spirit or bring God into the equation of whatever I'm doing. And it really helps. It energizes me and I can tell the difference. So I encourage you to consider doing that as well as Headspace. I don't use Headspace. I've heard of it. I know Pat Flynn, one of the podcasters that I've worked with in the past. I think he told me that he uses it.

So there's tons of apps out there, but those are the ones I use. ⁓ Hypnotherapy. Now you're going to think I'm cuckoo, but hypnotherapy, I have to say when I was going through my troubles 10 years ago, not many know this, but I did some hypnotherapy. And ⁓ what that does is it dig deeper into the subconscious mind and allows you to uncover things that you may not know that you even have. And so,

If there's something that you're struggling with, is ⁓ bad habits, if it's alcohol, if it's gambling, whatever you might be struggling with, it may be in your subconscious and you may be doing these things ⁓ to help feed something that you may be lacking in. So hypnotherapy is another way of helping you in your stress relief.

journey, I should say, because we all have stress in medicine. And the last thing, that's number four, is a bonus. It's not related to meditation, but it could be somewhat of a form of meditation. ⁓ It's gratitude, gratitude exercises. And I think I've mentioned this in the podcast in the past, all the podcasts in the past. And what gratitude is, is basically being thankful. There's always something that you can be thankful for, whether it be, you know, waking up in the morning.

⁓ being able to walk, being able to see, being able to hear. These are things that that we sometimes take for granted. And so you can be having the worst day of your life. You can be having the worst patient of the day of the year of the month. But there's always something you can be grateful for and thankful for. And what that does is it shifts your mind from that negative thought to a more positive thought.

One of the exercises that my coach a couple of years ago taught me to do was a great red light exercise where at a stop light I start thanking or being grateful for the car, the seat, the windshield, the air conditioning. And I'm thankful for the birds, the stars and the sun. And as I go through the gratitude exercise,

and wait for the light to be green. The green light is an analogy or an allegory of what life is like. You may come across a red light in life. You may come across something that is not working right, but know that there is going to be a green light coming. So, you know, if you go through life being grateful for every single situation that you're in,

knowing that there is going to be a green light coming, then that changes your whole perspective. And we do that exercise, or we do a similar exercise during our team meetings, and we go around the room and we ask each of our team members to tell us what they might be thankful for. And it just sets the tone of the meeting and helps us to really ⁓ focus on what really matters. And so we can always be thankful for something. Consider doing that in your team meetings and ⁓

Let me know what you think. There's tons of research behind this and I don't want to go and bore you with the details, but I just want to let you know what I do and what I've done to help decrease my stress. So that's fragrantheart.com. That's fragrantheart.com. I don't get anything from these websites, so maybe I should. But anyway, ⁓ then there's a Halo app, Headspace, ⁓ hypnotherapy. If things are really, really deep and dark, then you want to...

uncover them and kind of release yourself from from your past issues. And gratitude exercises is a bonus. So let me know what you think about these tools. And if there's something else that you do to help decrease your stress related to meditation, love to hear about it. And we'll see you next week.