What is Scaling Burnout?
Scaling teeth is a term for cleaning teeth. Using scalers means using hand instruments as opposed to a “water-scaling” instrument (Cavitron, Piezo, etc.).
The term Scaling Burnout can be used in two different ways. Scaling burnout can be physical exhaustion from skillfully removing calculus deposits in a workday or week. The other meaning, and what this book refers to is climbing (or scaling) out of a burnout cycle and getting back to a healthier state. I came up with this term to express my burnout experience in dentistry. I share my experience of overcoming burnout and returning to the dental profession in Scaling Burnout: Navigate the Emotional Side of Dentistry and Prevent Burnout.
How do we begin to scale burnout or get out of our burnout cycle?
We need to identify ways we can help ourselves.
Taking a look at the mindset challenges of self-criticism, perfection, people pleasing, and over-empathy and also solutions to shift into a healthier mindset to overcome our fears and improve self-confidence. We can help ourselves by focusing on our Internal Foundation such as the state of our mindset, perspective, emotions we have, how we deal with emotions (well or not so well) and how we can start challenging old beliefs about ourselves.
Having a better understanding of how we treat ourselves in stressful situations and how we can improve, allows us to change how we view ourselves in those situations. It will become easier to establish healthy boundaries for ourselves so we can help our patients without sacrificing our needs.
What is burnout?
My definition of 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. You might also lose your zeal about your career and lose sight of your values or feel bored.
Resentment might set in about your work situation or patients. Physically, you may notice fatigue and feel you want to sleep more and avoid your usual routine. You may turn to alcohol or drugs to cope with your overwhelmed and emotional state. Burnout sets in when you don’t have a healthy balance of work and home life, rest, and play. You seem to have larger problems and can’t find solutions. You might even see yourself as the problem and not a solution. Burnout can be associated with feelings of hopelessness, inferiority, low self-esteem, and low self-confidence.
Over time, too much stress with no recovery or enough rest and play can eventually lead someone to experience burnout where they don’t want to fight anymore and even give up all hope.
The dental profession is a demanding career, usually involving long hours, fine motor skills in a small space, and helping patients with dental fear, all while maximizing production. It is easy to take work stress home with us if we aren’t careful about creating healthy boundaries for ourselves and practicing self-care.
If we don’t use self-care daily, we may eventually experience burnout. We need to know that burnout can be experienced in different degrees, and some of us may never experience it. Each of us might need different strategies to help us avoid it all together. The sooner we address signs of burnout, the better and easier it is to treat. Left untreated, burnout can lead to crisis mode, which could leaves us traumatized, depressed, self-isolated, and potentially developing suicide ideation, which is what happened to me.
My burnout and the neglect it caused increased over six years to the point where I became ill, mentally and physically. By implementing self-care every day, my goal is to avoid burnout and enjoy life. Using the metaphor of our minds being like engines helps explain how we can approach our mental and emotional health. It can help us identify that we are stuck and how to shift into a better gear to get ourselves unstuck. After all, burnout can alter our mindset, which alters our thoughts, which alters our emotions and our actions. Having an awareness of this shift can allow us to better identify solutions to burnout.
Feeling stuck and like I was in my own way, I created a diagram to help myself understand how I was dealing or not dealing with anxiety-inducing situations. Using what I refer to as Fear Gears, I was using a Conditional Mindset. This anxiety was filling me up on the inside and I didn’t know if it would ever be any different. These four Fear Gears, helped me to realize that altering my perspective could help me shift gears and approach situations that were typically stressful for me into Drive Gears which allowed me to work beneficially for both my patients and myself. This helped shift my mindset over to a Developmental one and reduced my anxiety-inducing patient scenarios.
What is Self-care?
Self-care is about maintaining ourselves. It is the opposite of getting bogged down and overwhelmed because the stress is just too much. Self-care gives us the ability and awareness to choose how we will react instead of having an emotional reaction that has been learned and practiced many times. Giving ourselves love and kindness when we make a mistake helps so we can learn from it without punishing ourselves, and is a form of self-care and prevention. We need to practice self-care every day by staying in a Developmental Mindset and using our Drive Gears so we can learn and grow instead of creating avoidance and worry.