GRATITUDE IS GOOD MEDICINE

nected from patients so their work isn’t as meaningful. Most healthcare workers care about people. They want to help patients and want to feel connected, so that disconnection is harmful to them and to their patients who don’t feel seen or cared for.

At the opposite end, some healthcare workers take on their patients’ suffering, bringing it home and obsessing about it. The idea is to find a balance—remaining open enough to connect, but not seeing yourself as the sole responsible person for a patient’s recovery. You’re not entirely in control, so realizing there are other forces at play when things go wrong, even if you made a mistake.

by Madiha Saeed

What coping strategies can help practitioners?

It’s essential that healthcare administrations provide space and time off for staff to heal and grieve, encouraging staff to speak with chaplains or therapists—normalizing mental health care—and ensuring that therapy is covered by insurance and widely available in safe and confidential settings.

Jonathan Bartels, a nurse in Virginia, came up with The Medical Pause—a moment of silence after a patient dies to honor their life, think about what they meant to you and understand you did everything you could to save their life. Honor walks for organ donors are where everyone lines the hallway and watches as a patient is wheeled into the operating room after they’ve died and are going to have their organs transplanted into others. Stepping back for a brief moment of mindfulness is a powerful way to set down emotions, rather than letting them lodge in your body.

Self-care—things like yoga, exercise, journaling, taking walks—and peer support are important, but administrations need to make time for them to happen. At Johns Hopkins Hospital, a project called RISE [Resilience In Stressful Events] allows practitioners to page a peer after a bad outcome. Sometimes, talking to someone like you that has been there themselves can be more helpful than a therapist.

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Stress, work and family routines can trap us in a pattern of negative thinking that feeds on itself and creates stress and unhappiness. With our internal and external worlds being bombarded these days with negativity, being optimistic is more important now than ever before.

Gratitude is not just a feel-good word. It is an emotion expressing appreciation for what one has—a universal concept in nearly all of the world’s spiritual traditions. Practicing gratitude daily is proven to have actual physiological consequences. It helps lower inflammatory markers, influences epigenetics, improves the immune system and even helps the heart, adding years to life.

Optimism has been found to correlate positively with life satisfaction and self-esteem. “Heartfelt” emotions like gratitude, love and caring produce coherent brain waves radiating to every cell of the body, as shown by technology that measures changes in heart rhythm variation and coherence.

Our subconscious governs 90 percent of our thoughts and actions. It shapes our every behavior. But the subconscious mind is nothing other than neural pathways that have been established in the brain as a result of past beliefs and conditioning. Our subconscious does no thinking of its own, but rather relies on our perception of the world around us, interpreting verbal and nonverbal cues.

When we consciously turn negativity to positivity from the inside-out, the neural pathway associated with negativity will take time to come down fully, so it is critical to practice gratitude regularly. Upon waking in the morning, say 10 things that you are grateful for. Keep a gratitude journal. Put sticky notes all over the house with gratitude messages—on photos, light fixtures, fans, exercise equipment—to create a zone of subliminal positivity.

Remember that our perspective can reflect either our pain or our power. That choice is in our hands. Know what you are grateful for each day.

Sandra Yeyati, J.D., is a professional writer and editor. Reach her at SandraYeyati@ gmail.com. Madiha Saeed, M.D., ABIHM, is the bestselling author of The Holistic RX, an international speaker, founder of HolisticMomMD.com and director of education for KnoWEwell.