Doctors are just ordinary people with ordinary problems who can make mistakes and who should look after themselves. Working as a doctor can be very stressful. Doctors normally just keep on working. Run from the first to the next problem without paying attention to their well-being. But what is the result? Most jobs entail some degree of stress; especially medical jobs which are more stressful than most other jobs. There are many factors for this stress like; long hours working, frequent call duties (night call or weekend call), high patient volume, methods physicians use to deal with patient death and illness, making life-altering decisions, patient expectations and financial issues. Stressed doctors may have personal characteristics associated with this stress like being self-critical, over commitment, perfectionism, work-life imbalance, having no spouse or children. Thus, these stress factors and personal characteristics may result in physician’s emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, substance abuse, depression and suicidality. Also lead to severe professional consequences that contribute to the failure of interpersonal relationships, increased medical errors, reduced patient satisfaction and the quality of care outcome. Some doctors think that they don’t have much to deal with at work. Others think that their stress is relieved by getting everything done. So the two kinds continue to work in spite of their stress. In this way they think that they cope with their stress. But the fact is that they are denying response to stress. A better strategy to cope with stress is talking to co-workers for emotional and informational support, using humor and joking with staff about stressing incidences. But it’s much better to cope with stress outside work through spending time with family and talking to spouse. It’s also better to practice physical exercises or see a psychiatric. And it has been shown that time away from work, switching off mentally and enjoying a psychological detachment from work during off-job time, and other leisure activities that allow recovery in between work periods result in positive benefits.
