A few years ago, while I was still gainfully employed I attended a patient safety conference where Dr. J. Bryan Sexton from Duke Patient Safety Center was presenting. Dr. Sexton has committed his career to studying teamwork, safety, and resilience in high risk environments such as the commercial aviation cockpit, the hospital operating room and intensive care unit. Though his presentation was related to healthcare teams - his experiments are as meaningful for individuals as they are for teams.  I was so impressed by Dr. Sexton's work that I wrote about it in a blog article titled: "The Power of 3".  I decided today to update this entry and check out Dr. Sexton to see if he's still working with this very important topic - a topic that's certainly transferrable to the COVID-19 Pandemic. 

Dr. Sexton suggests 3 ways to deal with the threat of burnout and increase resilience (Bounce back from personal, professional challenges). Both of which are necessary with the continuous changes to working and living differently in social isolation. I'm particularly experiencing news burnout as much of it seems repititious. Dr. Sexton says "...the trick is to build mental muscles to deal with challenges thrown our way, both personally and professionally...". Similar to what we are hearing to physically exercise everyday to combat anxiety, we also need to take time to mentally and spirtitually exercise to build our mental capacity.

Dr. Sexton offers three (3) ways to deal with the threat of burnout (burnout from working at home, burnout from isolation, burnout from too much or too little useful information...) and increase your resilience (the ability to spring back into shape...).

Dr. Sexton's recommendations: Dr. J. Bryan Sexton

THREE GOOD THINGS

- Promoting positive thoughts and building resilience can be as easy as taking notes each night before bed. Think of three (3) things that happended during the day that went well and your role in the positive outcome, then jot down those three things.  According to Dr. Sexton the best results for this exercise come after 14 consecutive entries. Here's where the buiding of the mental muscles comes in - when you savor these positive emotions you begin to retrain your brain to remember good things.

SHOW GRATITUDE

- Dr. Sexton recommends grabbing a pen and paper and write a letter of appreciation to someone - anyone. Take five minutes to explain something they did, how it impacted you and the benefits you received. Whether you share the letter or not, Sexton says it can have lasting impacts, increasing happiness while lowering depressing thoughts because focusing on benefits forces us to linger on positive thoughts.

I can personally attest to feeling awesome when you take the time to comment on facebook or directly in an email that these daily posts are helping you in some way to work through this very different way of life for most of us. So thank you for that - it has given me the confidence and courage to continue to write regularly which in turn gives me purpose.

REDISCOVER AWE

- Finding awe, according to Sexton, can be easy. Study a photo of a place you've wanted to visit, peer through a telescope at a starry night or find something new in nature. The beauty of Spring is that there is something new in nature almost daily - we saw our first baltimore oriole at our hummingbird feeder this morning - what a magnificient site. We also are so blessed to live in the valley of the Santa Rita Mountains so every day, from almost every angle we can see those majestic mountains.

Sexton says: "there is profound beauty and grace in the world. When we reconnect with the emotion of awe, it helps us feel inspired and time slows down."

The power of 3 - the simplicity of 3 - the magic of 3 - perhaps we're all being called to slow down and resdiscover our true purpose.

Stay well - Namaste