These 2 Practices Could Be the Solution to Burnout and Compassion Fatigue for Veterinarians

Veterinary Wellbeing

Burnout and compassion fatigue are as simple to resolve as a simple case of superficial pyoderma, and as easy to prevent as parvo. While this may be true, pyoderma would be frustrating to treat without oral/injectable antibiotics or topical treatments, and parvo would be much more difficult to prevent without the parvo vaccine. In essence, they are only problems when there aren’t appropriate tools to manage them with. Let’s make poor veterinary wellbeing a thing of the past!

So it is with Burnout and Compassion Fatigue, and in this article, we propose two tools that are easy to implement and fairly inexpensive. You can incorporate these practices into your life as much or as little as you like; however, the results you achieve will be in direct proportion to the degree of your practice.

Personally, I’ve had experiences with BOTH burnout and compassion fatigue, and I can confidently say that they are only problems when we lack the appropriate tools and strategies to deal with them. By using these tools, we can make burnout and compassion fatigue terms of the past for the veterinary profession.

Before we go any further, let’s quickly define the two of them.

Burnout – physical or mental detriment caused by overwork or stress.

Compassion Fatigue – According to www.compassionfatigue.org – it is a state experienced by those helping people or animals in distress; it is an extreme state of tension and preoccupation with the suffering of those being helped to the degree that it can create a secondary traumatic stress for the helper.” – Dr. Charles Figley.

2 Tools That Can Ensure Veterinary Wellbeing

Tool #1: Personal Development

Personal development is one of the greatest tools to ever exist! In fact, calling it a tool is an understatement! Personal Development can be considered a whole catalog of tools and strategies. It’s a vast world of awesomeness. It’s a limitless storehouse of resources, which has the ability to drastically enhance your life.

Just imagine a videogame, where the purpose of the game is to gain new skills to make beating the game both possible and easier. I view personal development as the skills needed to make beating the game of life possible and easier. Simply put, the greater your personal development, the better your life will be.

To further illustrate, imagine in the video game you start out with no powers, but the only enemies or obstacles you have to overcome are just ants. You can simply squash them, right? Well, what if the ants start breathing fire? Then you would need to find a weapons shop and obtain a source of water to defeat the ants. And if the ants develop cheetah speed, then you merely have to go back to the weapons shop and buy shoes that can give you speed that’s even faster than cheetah speed!

Personal development operates in the same exact way! When you run into situations that are causing you to have compassion fatigue or burnout (or depression, anxiety, or whatever) you reach to personal development for the solutions of all of your personal and professional riddles. It’s really that simple!

Each component of personal development will open a door that leads to dozens of additional doors, and each of those doors leads to even more doors! The key to mastering life is to start opening doors now, so that you can enjoy the fruits of practicing personal development. If you are living anything less than a life of your dreams and complete happiness, my best guess is that your practice of personal development needs to either be initiated or refined.

Through personal development, you will develop or improve your self-belief and self-confidence. Personal development is based around the concept that states you can have the exact life that you deliberately want to live, if you simply do what is required.

While it’s true that some situations in life are more complex and difficult to overcome than others – like a loved one who is battling cancer or a failed/failing marriage, it is still my belief that personal development will be of great use as you deal with life’s greatest challenges – not to mention easier challenges like burnout and compassion fatigue. Furthermore, whether you incorporate personal development into your life or not, you are still going to have to deal with the difficult situation.

It is my belief that if you aren’t practicing personal development daily and deliberately then you are voluntarily putting yourself in the ‘at risk’ category for poor well-being.

“Every time we push personal development aside, we invite personal struggle into our lives.”

Hal Elrod – Author of “Miracle Mornings” and “The Best Year Ever”

“The greatest gift you can give to somebody is your own personal development.”

Jim Rohn – Hall of Fame Motivational Speaker

Tool #2: Mindfulness

Equally as potent as a strategy and tool for preventing and overcoming compassion fatigue and burnout, mindfulness can be considered an aspect of personal development.

While there are many great definitions of mindfulness, one of my favorites comes from www.mindful.org

“Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.”

To me, mindfulness begins with simply paying attention to the present moment and knowing that you are in control of yourself in that moment.

The veterinary profession is filled with many stresses, and being mindful will allow you to catch yourself in stressful moments and use some of the tools and strategies that you learn through your personal development studies.

More specifically, mindfulness has been shown to help people that deal with the following:

  • Worry and anxiety
    • Spending (ruining) your off day worrying about the surgery you did yesterday
  • Criticism of yourself and of others
    • Doctor to nurse: “You never do anything right!”
    • Doctor to self: “I never do anything right!”
  • Feeling irritable, agitated, and easily annoyed
    • Being irritated by poor histories from a nurse, clients that aren’t compliant, or by the Great Dane hiding underneath the client bench.
  • A restless and frantic mind
    • You have a board full of inpatients, and an emergency just walked in. Time to start the juggling act! Keep in mind that it’s better to juggle tennis balls than knives! Mindfulness will help you make every juggling act an act with tennis balls!
  • Being argumentative and defensive
    • Nurse wants to get a fecal sample with her finger. You get irritated and tell her to do it with a fecal loop. In most cases… who really gives a crap (pun intended!)
  • Headaches and migraines – Not much to be said here! I never had migraines, and for that, I’m grateful! But mindfulness has been shown to reduce headaches and migraines.

Mindfulness can be beneficial in the following ways:

  • Boosts Resilience
    • You had a day with many struggles that led you to a roller coaster of emotions à resilience improves your ability to cope and develop emotionally.
  • Reduces Work-related Stress – I don’t need to name the stressors. We know there are many!
  • Decreases Turnover and Burnout
    • If you are a practice owner or manager, these directly affect your bottom line.
  • Increased Performance
    • When you are paying attention to yourself and your surroundings in a more healthy manner, you will be more efficient and deliberate with greater intention – a formula for high performance!
  • Greater Job Satisfaction
    • Helping you to remember the “why” behind jumping through all of the hoops to get into this amazing field!

Where Do You Begin?

It is very important that you take action now! Here are a few next steps to get you started with personal development and mindfulness. It is vitally important that you have a burning desire to live the best life possible. Just doing these things because we recommend them will not be good enough!

Burnout and Compassion Fatigue are certainly challenges that many members of our profession are facing. There’s no doubt about that. Our profession provides the perfect storm for these issues to be prevalent. However, both burnout and compassion fatigue can be prevented and overcome with the adoption of personal development and mindfulness as tools to help you live the life you want to live!

Do you already have a personal development or mindfulness practice? If so, please leave a comment below and share your practices with your colleagues! We would love to hear your thoughts!

Have you already joined the Get MotiVETed community? If not, you can easily do so by clicking here! It’s free, and you will be helping to advance the well-being of the entire profession!

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