Have you ever had burnout to the point of thinking about leaving the dental hygiene profession? I have. My name is Kristin Maxwell and I have been a dental hygienist since 2009. By 2014, I experienced burnout that nearly turned into a life ending event.
“Burnout is a decrease in resilience to stressors in life emotionally, mentally, and physically. Life is made up of good and bad stress. How we perceive scenarios, and their outcomes, determines the amount of stress we feel. Burnout sets in when you don’t have a healthy balance of work and home life, rest, and play”(1). While in burnout, your problems seem bigger than they really are, and solutions are hard to identify. You might even see yourself as the problem and not a solution. Burnout can be associated with feelings of hopelessness, inferiority, low self-esteem, low self-confidence and more. I did not know I was experiencing burnout as it was happening. I felt like I was unable to deal with stressful situations with patients. I seemed to soak up their emotions like a sponge, letting them mix with my own. I did not know how to break this burnout cycle, until I felt defeated and walked away from my dental hygiene career, thinking I would never return.
Turns out, my biggest challenge with my career in dental hygiene is with the emotional side of dentistry. The emotional side of dentistry has to do with the emotions we encounter from our patients such as dental fear, low-trust, their own anxieties, as well as other emotions depending on what they are going through in their personal lives and how we let these emotions impact us as well as the emotions we have. As dental hygienists, we spend an hour or sometimes more with the emotions of others. With a tight schedule, we need to quickly get ready for the next patient and all that we are required to do while they are in our care. With dental fear and dental phobia, we may see several patients back to back working through their own fears. If we aren’t keeping their emotions separate from ours, it can be overwhelming and cause dysfunction for us clinicians if we don’t address how it makes us feel.
For some more than others, the emotions of others can be a challenge to work around and keep them separate from ourselves so they don’t influence how we feel. Emotions can have a powerful effect on us if we let them. As I became familiar with the patients in my care, I would often remember their negative emotions from last time and would start to worry about having to work around those emotions again. I had anxiety about social situations to begin with and started to get anxious with working with certain emotions and beliefs of patients such as lack of trust, fear, low-value in dental care, lack of care for themselves, etc.
I felt like I was the only one struggling on this emotional level and felt like I could not ask for help. After two years of decompressing away from dentistry, and an emotional reset, I found myself returning to this career that I once loved. This took learning what self-care was and realizing that I was not taking care of myself and my emotions at all.
Thankfully, I got the help I needed.
Self-care is making time for yourself and balancing work and personal life, all while having an awareness of your feelings and fulfilling your needs. Self-care is the ability to recognize when you need help and keep yourself moving through fear to grow into the person you want to become. Incorporating self-care daily can restore and refresh our perspectives on life’s situations so we can seek fulfillment and prevent burnout(2).
Many activities and strategies can be considered self-care and can vary with each individual.
Feeling like I was out of burnout, I was curious if I could return to dental hygiene successfully without repeating another burnout cycle. Working full time with patients, I quickly realized that my old coping mechanisms did not provide long lasting solutions that avoided burnout. This got me reviewing my burnout from a different perspective and seeing these old coping mechanisms in a new light.
My old coping mechanisms which I refer to as Fear Gears, contributed to my burnout by: focusing on being perfect, the less mistakes I make the better I will be. To be more tough, I would talk to myself with the voice of a harsh inner critic. I would be overly empathetic with my patients yet ignore my own feelings. I lost sight of what was important to me as I was a people pleaser through and through. The coping mechanisms that I thought were helping, only made the burnout I had worse and brought on life ending thoughts, anxiety, and stress. I found myself in a very conditional mindset where my circumstances were dictated by the day’s patients, if my boss was happy with my production and if my co-workers liked me.
Perspectives are like gears in our mindset of the transmission of our mental engine. As I discovered what made me prone to burnout, I was able to identify Four Fear Gears that can keep us stuck in neutral or wanting to avoid scary situations and take us in Reverse of where we actually want to go. These Fear Gears are Over-Empathy, People Pleaser, Inner Critic, and Perfection. The counter to those gears are the Four Drive Gears of Compassion, Personal Integrity, Inner Coach, and Excellence, and help drive us forward in challenging situations.
Coming from either a Developmental Mindset or a Conditional Mindset affects how we navigate the emotional side of dentistry and which gears we use that determine our behaviors, and influence our emotions and actions. Understanding these different Fear and Drive Gears can help us realize how to get to a Developmental Mindset so we can do a better job sticking up for ourselves and improving how we work through anxiety-inducing scenarios.
I now use strategies to help myself to remain in a Developmental Mindset using what I call Drive Gears. Drive Gears allow me to strive for excellence in the moment instead of pressure from perfection so I can perform better. I understand my own personal integrity so I can understand what it is I want to accomplish instead of trying to not disappoint others as a people pleaser. I learned how to work with my own emotions and not mix them up with others while providing compassionate dental care.
I ended up writing a book of how I overcame my burnout, sharing self-care strategies that help me stay proactive against burnout so I could successfully return to dentistry and enjoy a career in dental hygiene once again.
References:
Maxwell, RDH, Kristin, 2024. Scaling Burnout: Navigate the Emotional Side of Dentistry and Prevent Burnout. Kindle Direct Publishing. Second Edition. Page 19.
Maxwell, RDH, Kristin, 2024. Scaling Burnout: Navigate the Emotional Side of Dentistry and Prevent Burnout. Kindle Direct Publishing. Second Edition. Page 7.