Understand Stress and Overcome It, Keynoter Advises Listeners

Abstract

Robert Wicks, PsyD, looked out over the large auditorium and warned the long-term care professionals that for every one of them experiencing it, “at least a dozen of you are on the edge of burnout.” A professor at Loyola University, Baltimore, and author of dozens of books on self-care for professionals and the public, Dr. Wicks asserted in the opening keynote address at the AMDA annual meeting that geriatric medicine is particularly prone to stress and burnout because of the many competing demands it entails: frail and dying patients, distraught families, personnel turnover, challenging logistics, and a medical establishment that often doesn't value the specialty highly. “Don't give your joy away to these people,” he said. Instead, he prescribed “mindfulness” to all health professionals. “By that I mean [be] in the present with a sense of openness.” While emphasizing self-care, Dr. Wicks also insisted that avoiding stress requires attention to others. If physicians forget the perspective of patients and staff members “you're lost,” he said. “What I challenge you with today is [to ask yourself], How will people feel when they are with you? Are you a healing presence? Do they feel an openness where they can rest their angers, their disagreements, their burdens, their fears, their shame, their stress? Or do they feel your need to be right, to control the situation? Your need to be appreciated, your need to be seen as attractive or brilliant?” People caring for others must take care of themselves. “One of the greatest things you can share with others is a sense of your own perspective and peace, but you can't share what you don't have. You need to respect yourselves as physicians.” Following the formula he has put forward in books such as “The Resilient Clinician” (2007, Oxford University Press, New York), Dr. Wicks advised “leaning back” and assessing the sources and types of stress affecting us: ▸Failing to distinguish between daily factors ranging from “emergencies” to “not critical.”▸Not knowing how to eschew stress and create a “sense of space in our lives.”▸Picking up the hurt and bitterness of the negative colleagues that “every medical facility has.”▸Adopting the acute stress affecting people you are trying to help, “vicarious PTSD.”▸Allowing the buildup of chronic secondary stress, “so insidious it's more dangerous” than acute stress. “You need to take at least 2 minutes a day in silence … and wrapped in gratitude,” he said. Dr. Wicks didn't give how-to instructions for that quiet time but urged his listeners to search for the method that will work for them, whether they wish to call it prayer, meditation, or something else. “In the end, it's not the amount of darkness in the world that matters. It's not the darkness in yourself that matters. It's how we stand in that darkness that matters,” said Dr. Wicks. Having a self-care protocol “is essential,” he said.