Each of us knows colleagues for whom medicine no longer holds the aura of excitement and fascination that we assume will last forever. Having faced their challenges and attained their goals, they are unwilling or unable to find new challenges and design new goals. In the modern vernacular, they are “burned out.”
These people are prisoners of the Comfort Zone.
The Comfort Zone is a product of a dangerous state of mind, complacency—the perception of doing okay, of having arrived, of believing it is okay to take it easy.
Complacency triggers the construction of a protective envelope of actions and situations that are familiar and comfortable and do not require any major risks or significant uncertainties. Unfortunately, the human psyche cannot function within the Comfort Zone for any length of time before it starts looking for distractions.
A patient of mine once owned one of the largest and most popular restaurants in northern New Jersey. He had all the wealth, power, and prestige he ever dreamed of. Now it's all gone. He gambled it all away.
I felt I knew him well enough to ask what had gone wrong. Why risk losing it all? Why did he allow such a catastrophe to happen? “Doc,” he replied, “if the game no longer challenges you, you will screw it up—just to have something to do!”
I found this lesson profound and enlightening, and it is a shame that this man had to learn it the hard way, as so many heretofore successful people do.
But if we cannot be happy within the Comfort Zone and have to constantly look for distractions, must the distractions necessarily be destructive? Why not look for constructive distractions? Why not push the other side of the envelope?
That is the solution to the Comfort Zone problem: Constantly expand the zone itself. You must continually incorporate new activities and situations into your envelope, so that you remain interested, focused, and enthused.
What do you look for? Anything that would make you uncomfortable. Such a situation, by definition, is outside your Comfort Zone. Of course, you must screen out detrimental things, considering only those additions to your zone that will improve you personally or professionally.
In your office, this can be as minor as trying a new appointment scheduling method or as major as adding a satellite office or purchasing a new, cutting edge piece of equipment and mastering its use. Rather than perpetuating the old, comfortable, risk-free, mind-numbing routine, conquer the fear and take some new risks. Once your Comfort Zone grows to encompass the new routine, you will be one step further away from burnout.
The concept of enlarging your Comfort Zone applies equally well to life outside the office. Find and seize opportunities to do things your zone tries to discourage but that you wish to learn to do comfortably. It doesn't have to be a life-changing project: Start small. If you tend to avoid talking on the phone, for example, make a conscious effort to initiate a phone call every day. When it becomes part of your zone, those important phone calls will be far easier and more comfortable to make.
“Do something every day that you don't want to do,” Mark Twain once wrote. “This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.”
So the solution to burnout is to recognize that your Comfort Zone exists and must be managed, rather than allowing it to manage you and restrict you. By molding your zone to activities and situations that will keep you enthused, you can keep complacency at bay. Rather than permitting distractions to take a destructive course, look for distractions that are constructive, educational, and pleasurable.
Next month, my wife and I will be leading a group of doctors on a trip to Uzbekistan in Central Asia on the old Silk Road. It will be a new experience in an unfamiliar part of the world, and the decision to take it on was not made lightly. It would have been easy to stay home or to plan a “safer” trip to a more familiar destination, but in settling for a comfortable option we would have missed a golden opportunity to push our envelope in an educational and exciting way.
So if you're burned out, find something uncomfortably new and constructive, and go for it. When you conquer the fear, you'll conquer complacency.