How to Decrease Burnout Through Mindfulness

[MUSIC PLAYING]

How can mindfulness help decrease burnout? You know, what's the connection between the two? So mindfulness is helping us see the cause-and-effect

relationship between behavior and the results of that behavior. So, for example, with physicians or any of us in helping

professions, right, if we're empathizing with the patient, we're putting ourselves in their shoes. And if we're putting ourselves in their shoes

and they're suffering, we're taking their suffering personally. So mindfulness can first help us start to notice, oh,

I'm getting burned out because I'm taking my patients' suffering personally. That's the first step. The second step is being able to notice, oh,

I don't have to take this suffering personally. And when we don't take it personally, we can still be with that suffering

but in a compassionate way. So compassion literally means-- you know, [NON-ENGLISH] means to suffer with. So we can suffer with somebody else.

And when we're not taking that suffering personally, when we're bringing awareness in and saying, OK, I'm going to leave that, taking it personally, off to the side.

That's not necessary. Then we naturally have this movement to help. That's where the compassion comes in. We've even done studies of app-based mindfulness-training

programs where we've trained physicians to learn mindfulness, and we've seen a 50% reduction in certain burnout measures with that.

So we can even see scientifically how this works. That's amazing.