
Rediscovering friendships: Overcoming loneliness in a demanding medical career
Rediscovering friendships: Overcoming loneliness in a demanding medical career
Laura F. Martin, MD, Associate Medical Director, Colorado Physician Health Program (CPHP)
I miss my friends. How I’ve gotten to this place is a story I have heard countless times told by my patients, peers and loved ones. Prior to medicine, my friendships were typically strained due to geographic moves: best friends in high school dispersed across the nation on the way to college, then again to graduate school. As the intensity of medical training and work grew, my friendships became strained due to neglect given my little time and energy left over after long and hard workdays. I made what I thought was a temporary decision to take my energy away from strengthening my social connections to focus on work. Rather than a temporary imbalance, however, my energy remained inordinately focused on my work and family for almost two decades. I’m feeling particularly unbalanced now that my youngest child is leaving for college. This feeling of imbalance and impending loneliness has prompted me to re-prioritize my social connections to prevent the development of more isolating alternatives such as overwork, alcohol, television or shopping.
Isolation and loneliness have impacts on not only our behavioral health, but also our medical health. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD, has shone a light on our nation’s epidemic of loneliness in his book “Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.” As a solution, he emphasizes spending undistracted daily time with loved ones, undistracted time with ourselves to understand how we are doing and connect with our world, and being of service to others. His office has made the antidote concrete through the creation of the 5 for 5 Connection Challenge and resources such as the simple and powerful Made to Connect Cards. If you are in a medical leadership role, please also consider introducing evidence-based practices that can improve wellbeing and social connectedness among employees, such as COMPASS groups (Colleagues Meeting to Promote and Sustain Satisfaction) or other reflection-based groups.
Surgeon General Murthy also notes that receiving help strengthens social bonds. Strong social connections can help the phone feel less heavy when we need to reach out for help. For physicians, however, the phone can feel heavier if they struggle to recognize they need help, minimize their need for help when considering that it might reduce their time to help others, worry about appearing imperfect, can’t find the time, can’t share their stress due to patient privacy concerns, or worry about scaring a loved one with their pain. If this is the case, know that you are not alone and that there are great resources. Physician groups in the workplace or having a work friend for these moments can be a huge help, as can a therapist.
At CPHP we also have the Doc2Doc Wellbeing Consulting program (720-810-9131) which is a free and confidential way to connect immediately to one of our clinicians and then have up to three free and confidential sessions with one of our medical directors to talk about anything you wish. We don’t have to wait until something bad happens to us to make a change or to find out how many people love and support us. We only need to pick up that phone to connect.
Thank you so very much for everything you do for others and please find a way to do something to take care of yourself today.