What this showed is that there’s a limit to that ability to perform miracles when the system isn’t working. People in medicine are expected to perform miracles under the most difficult circumstances. What can you tell health professionals about how to handle that loss of control? We just feel the world is spinning out of control. On top of that you’ve got this divisive political climate. Layer on top of that the racial justice reckoning. You layer on top of that, if you’ve got children, they’re not in school, you’re not sure what’s happening with child care, their activities are shut down. Layer on top of that, economic downtimes and fears.

And for workers on the front lines, for health workers - doctors, residents, nurses - it’s created this additional level of intense stress that, by going to work, you are literally putting your life on the line.

Your message about stepping back from stress about work and things we can’t control is even more relevant now - certainly for medical professionals. When you published Overwhelmed, you couldn’t imagine that within just a couple of years, Americans’ feelings of being overwhelmed would be even worse. Below are excerpts from the conversation. Now the director of the Better Life Lab at the New America think tank in Washington, D.C., she talked with AAMCNews about how her findings apply to medical professionals. Schulte will discuss her observations in a dedicated one-hour session at the AAMC’s annual conference, Learn Serve Lead 2020: The Virtual Experience, on Nov. However, she also found ways that individuals and institutions can reduce the sense of being overwhelmed and find more balance between life and work - hence the book’s subtitle, How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time. Schulte found that people across the country, especially in knowledge professions like medicine, have absorbed a cultural obsession with busyness that causes significant harm: robbing them of living full lives, causing burnout, and impeding the quality of their work. Her findings, published in 2014, hit home for millions of Americans who feel overwhelmed by the demands of daily life - a feeling that’s particularly intense among medical students, physicians, and researchers. The stressed-out journalist, wife, and mother set out to find out why her life had drifted into a cycle of meeting work and family obligations, always feeling behind, and rarely pausing for leisure - a journey that led her to discover what researchers call “time serenity”: the feeling that there actually is enough time to do what you want and need to do. Brigid Schulte’s bestselling book, Overwhelmed, began as a mission for an audience of one: Brigid Schulte.

Overwhelmed by brigid schulte