147 - 4 Proven Life Hacks Physicians Can Use Today to Power Through Their Medical Practice and Cut Stress

If your afternoons feel like a phone on 1%, this one’s for you. 

Today I’m handing you my four daily, physician-proof habits that keep me calm, clear, and effective when the day gets heavy:

• Gratitude on wake-up: Prime your nervous system before your feet hit the floor.
• Scripture touchpoint: A quick verse to shift focus from overwhelm to purpose.
• 50–100 raised pushups: A fast strength primer to lift energy, posture, and confidence—no gym required.
• 5–10 minute midday recharge: Simple prayer/meditation to recover from emotionally taxing encounters so you finish strong.

This is a zero-fluff, plug-and-play routine built for real clinical life—short, sustainable, and repeatable. Whether you’re still in residency or rounding at the hospital, you’ll walk away with a mini-system to reduce stress hormones, prevent decision fatigue, and reclaim your afternoon focus.

Listen now and share this episode with someone that you think might be stressed (hint…likely every physician around you)

Resources:

https://hallow.com/

https://www.fragrantheart.com

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 (00:00.078)
By the end of this episode, you will learn four simple things you can do to build resilience and decrease your stress. Welcome back to another episode where I help younger physicians decrease stress and increase income by transitioning from corporate to independent practices, even without any business experience. In this episode, you're going to learn at least four things. Two of them are the mental things I do every morning. Number two is how I keep my man boobs in check. And number three,

the best way to recharge your battery. Thank you for listening to the Independent Physicians Blueprint with your host, Coach JPMD, and we're back. We're back for another episode. So in this episode that I titled, the four proven life hacks physicians can use today to power through your medical practice and decrease your stress. And it's really rooted in resilience. And these are things that I do on a daily basis.

And I wanted to share them with you in this episode because I think it's helpful to understand what I do and what I've researched and what my coaches have told me to do in the past. And last week we heard an episode on Coach Jay Pubba who has helped me with some of these things. And so I'm going to go through them today. And also I of mentioned how I came up with this episode.

One of the things I did and I like doing is speaking to residents and I have the opportunity and the privilege to speak to the medical residents at Trinity Hospital in the Tampa Bay area. And we talked about stress and many of the residents there looked stressed and they were trying to find ways to beat stress. And one resident told me how he deals with stress is by remembering that residency is only temporary and that it's a finite thing.

And we just have to power through it. And I thought that was admirable. But there are other people in the room that I don't know could build that, that resilience, resilient thought process. And one of the things I told, or I mentioned to the group was that we need to have the tools in our shed to be able to handle the stresses coming by and knowing that, yes, it is finite, but while we're stressed, what if we can make that time pass with just

Coach JPMD (02:24.664)
just a little bit more ease. So what do do? So, you we can, we, can go online and research tons of things that you can do to de-stress. And, and, one of the things I wanted to kind of go over was what I do in every morning. And, that is I wake up in gratitude and there's some research that says if you wake up and as you're waking up, your, your brain waves are receptive to things more.

more so than if you're fully awake or during the day and distracted. So as I wake up, I am grateful. I'm thankful that I was able to wake up. I'm thankful for my bed. Thankful for the home I have. Thankful for my spouse. Thankful for my kids. Thankful for hot water. Thankful that I have clothes to wear. And so if you wake up in gratitude,

There is a mind shift that happens. And yeah, there are lots of things that are happening in the world that we could say we're not grateful for. But if you wake up in gratitude, there's a shift that can occur and that does occur. It lowers your blood pressure, decreases stress hormones. And so that's what I do. And I try to do that every morning. Second thing I do is I read a Bible verse every day. So you know, I'm a Christian and I've, I try to follow

Tenants of the Bible had an episode on love and loving our neighbors and loving, loving God as he commands us to do. And so the Bible verse that I read is comes from the you version app that I have. And every morning that app serves up a new Bible verse. And so, you know, I haven't tried to memorize the Bible verses, but what it does is it refocuses my attention on something bigger than me. And that's on the daily teachings of either

you know, a, apostle or a spiritual leader or a situation that, that, is described or told in the, in the Bible. And so that's my spiritual practice in the morning. Number three is, and I mentioned this in the intro, I try to do 50 to a hundred raise pushups before getting in the shower. And so, you know, I've mentioned my man boobs, not sure if this is going to be

Coach JPMD (04:49.654)
Explan explicit episode, but probably should mention that too often But you know, this is something I found that is so helpful in building my upper body strength But also, you know as I get older things kind of sag down So doing push-ups it definitely helps and but that is a routine that I do every morning and so it helps me stay in shape and at least Keep things somewhat upright as we we push through the morning

Obviously working out is another thing that you can do in the morning. I have a sauna at the house. three or four times a week I get in the sauna before I get out. not part of the life hacks, because I don't do it every morning. But definitely the pushups I do every morning and it definitely helps me. And number four, recharging my battery. So what does that mean? We all, I love the analogy of the phone.

And this is something you read in coaching books and leaders who describe our lives as a phone. And if you have an iPhone, if you have a Samsung or whatever phone you have, if you have apps that are open, if you have multiple apps or you're streaming audio or you're doing multiple things on your phone, your phone is going to burn up its battery. things that can be analogous to

multiple apps being open and heavy resources being used by your phone is, it's heavy conversations. Conversations of loss, conversations about abuse, depression, loneliness. You know, if you're in the hospital and you're dealing with cancer patients who may not have family, these are draining things that happen almost every day in medical practice. And so how do we deal with these things? I know for me, by the end of the day, I am tired. I run a geriatric practice.

and mainly see patients 65 and older. And many of them have multiple conditions, some of them dealing with metastatic cancers, stage four cancers. Some of them don't have any family near. And so I don't know about you, but for me, it can be draining. And by one, two o'clock in the afternoon, I'm pretty much drained. And so what I do, and sometimes it happens around lunchtime. And you know, I

Coach JPMD (07:15.734)
I tried to open up a meditation app. The app I've been using recently is Hello app. I have no affiliation with Hello, but it is a great app and some of the meditations are free. And one of the things I do on a pretty regular basis is a five to 10 minute silent meditation. And it's a company with some prayers, but it is something that I highly recommend.

for those that are working in the hospital or if you're in a high stress environment, the emergency room, you know, anywhere where you're going to be draining your battery, I highly suggest you take five to 10 minutes, which everyone can take it. It's just like, you know, if you have a phone, you're going to charge your phone when it's dying. Why not charge yourself? Another thing I sometimes do is a guided meditation that I've had for a while now, and it's a focus guided meditation.

There's some hypnosis apps that are out there. I'll put some links to some of them in the show notes. And so these are the four things that I do on a daily basis. Wake up in gratitude. Program my brain to be thankful for everything that's around me, near and then far. I read a Bible verse every morning. I think if you look at my Bible app, there's a counter. I'm on the 34th day.

Opening up the Bible app and reading a verse of the day. Sometimes I skip sometimes things get in the way but Highly highly highly recommended number three the raised push-ups to help improve my chest wall and number four Recharging my battery meditate pray five ten minutes. It doesn't take that long do it. It will definitely help you. I hope

This helps and I hope that, you know, if there are some other things that you do on daily basis that you can do pretty consistently to decrease your stress, go ahead and do it, but don't make it too much because sometimes when you do too much, you do nothing. So pick three, four things that you do on a regular basis. It's going to help your spiritual, mental and physical health. Hopefully it will help you decrease your stress and live powerfully in this crazy world we're living in. See you next week.

Coach JPMD (09:42.574)
Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you'd to hear more, subscribe, follow your favorite podcast app so you'll never miss an episode.