Chrissie (Ep 31 Amna)
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Amna: [00:00:00] there was no boundary between what I was doing at work and I was bringing everything at home, and that if I was to step away all of this would crumble. how do you shut down so then you can be present and access that joy?
Chrissie: True joy is an inside out phenomena. We're not ever gonna find joy coming just from the outside in. It's an expression of what's alive. It's aliveness, you know, within us.
Amna: What is happening between burnout, postpartum depression, physical health challenges, everything that happened in life, and you just look back , and the common thread that ties all of these events has been perfectionism.
Chrissie: you're listening to Solving for Joy. I'm your host, Dr. Chrissie Ott.
[00:01:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to today's episode of the Solving for Joy podcast. I am super extra delighted to bring you my friend and collaborator and esteemed coach, Dr. Amna Shabbir. Amna is passionate about empowering high achievers to cultivate sustainable wellbeing. She's a master certified coach, a geriatrician, internist, a professional speaker, and a fierce advocate for healthcare workers mental health. Serving as an ambassador for the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes Foundation. She's the founder and CEO of the Early Career Physicians Institute and Amna Shabbir Wellness Coaching. She hosts a fabulous new podcast called Success Reimagined with Amna Shabbir which explores the crossroads of ambition and wellness. Beyond her professional roles, she embraces her most cherished title, super mom to two young girls. [00:02:00] Thanks for being with me today, Omni. I'm so excited to get to have this conversation with you.
Amna: Thank you so much, Chrissie. I am delighted to be here. Okay. I'm a big fan of the podcast. I just wanted to say that before we started.
Chrissie: Thank you so much. We have been, um, you know, like internet friends for, I don't know, a long time. Um, and then we got to actually be together and play together at the Physician Coaching Summit in November. And I just feel like you're, you're one of my people now. And it's so just warms my heart to, to get, to spend this time with you and share what I know will be a beautiful conversation with our listeners.
Amna: The feeling is quite mutual.
Chrissie: Yay. Um, we set off with a little bit of an intention today to talk about perfectionism, and how that intersects with our desire to solve for joy. So I'm just gonna let you kind of start [00:03:00] with what's on your mind with that and we can go from there.
Amna: Thank you Chrissie. Perfectionism has has been a topic and a, a point of great interest for me over the past couple of years, and I'm currently working on this larger project surrounding perfectionism as well. So why, why am I doing this and why is it top of my mind? I kept looking for answers in all of these other places. What is happening with me between burnout, postpartum depression, physical health challenges, everything that happened in life, uh, things that happened maybe in middle school, high school, elementary school, medical school, and you just look back and, and the common thread that ties all of these events has been perfectionism. And when I had that recognition come up for me, I just wanted to dig deeper.
And the reason I brought it specifically [00:04:00] for our conversation is when I look at solving for joy and I look at my obsession with perfectionism, whether it's good or bad, or wherever it lies on the spectrum and not in any shape or form dichotomous, it's a barrier. It's a barrier between where I am at and where joy lies. So I'm gonna have to go over this if I'm going to tap into any real joy.
I mean, the first time I saw your first episode release, it was so beautiful solving for joy, just that term itself. And amazing that you're having these conversations surrounding, because so much of our life is all about survival, about how we should appear, about how our exterior should be, and even a lot into my healing journey through burnout, through moral injury, and all of these other elements that I've talked about joy just seemed way, way [00:05:00] out of reach. I mean, you don't talk about joy, you talk about survival, and you talk about looking a certain way and just surviving. And, and that's at least that was my perception. And now I pause and I ask myself, and this has been a question more so that's been surfacing since last year, can I give myself permission to actually receive joy? And over and over again, the, the problem that always comes in the middle is perfectionism.
Chrissie: What you're saying is sparking so many things for me, um, when I think of perfectionism, and I'd love to hear, you know, for our audience, like maybe some detailed manifestations of that in your life, but perfectionism is our energy, looking at how is the world viewing me and am I acceptable? Am I okay? Am I actually expressing enough excellence in whatever dimension we're trying to. Be in that I will be accepted and experience belonging and safety, [00:06:00] whereas true joy is an inside out phenomena. We're not ever gonna find joy coming just from the outside in. It's an expression of what's alive. It's aliveness, you know, within us. And when we don't have a lot of practice with joy, it becomes unfamiliar and we get confused about it, right? We get like caught up in that outside in phenomena, and we have to intentionally grow our capacity to receive and experience joy.
Amna: Chrissie, when you talk about joy, it seems like something so inaccessible in a way. And in a way it is something we need. I mean, they're both the things that are, it, it, it's essential. Why are we even alive? What's the point of all of this if we're not going to experience joy? And yet at the same time, it looks [00:07:00] inaccessible.
Because here's what comes up for me and what comes up for a lot of people that I coach or work with in other different capacities or just have dinner with, it just seems like something, uh, if you are feeling joy and you're having fun, then you're probably doing something wrong. If it's not hard, uh, is it? Is it the right way? Aren't you supposed to feel miserable and bootstrap your way, pull yourself up, you know, keep getting up and keep going down. It's almost that we have decided that the absence of joy equates to some sort of like a moral superiority, as if there's some righteousness to work when it's harder, when it's, you're going uphill. It's an uphill battle as if somehow that work is more worthy. And for the longest time, that was what was my perception. I.
I really struggle past the age of maybe like 6, 7, 8 years to think about when I tapped into Joy, because I feel that the moment I gained consciousness [00:08:00] and I gained conscious awareness, I had a very, I was handed a very singular goal, which was to become a physician as early as I can, like look back into my life. And so I feel that I have been running. And so I ran, I ran, I put my blinders on, and I just ran towards becoming a physician and I got there and it wasn't all that it was cut out to be, and it still isn't, but I'm, I'm managing to find my pockets of joy. But during the, this entire time, it was really exhausting because when your focus becomes so singular and it's all performance based, you have to perform and you also have to look very perfect the whole time. It is exhausting.
So, stepping back a little bit, when we look at as, as I dive into this project surrounding perfectionism, how do you even define perfectionism? Everyone's definition is different. So if I was to look at purely in the research terms, there are three types of perfectionism. There is self-oriented perfectionism, [00:09:00] other oriented perfectionism, and socially prescribed perfectionism. Then if you're to look at some of the other definitions, the way we define as adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism, but step into the first, you know, the three types of perfectionism, all these three types of perfectionism, self-oriented, other oriented, and socially prescribed perfectionism have increased since the eighties and they're continuing to exponentially increase it off these three types.
The type that has risen the most, especially in younger adults, is socially prescribed perfectionism. And so what's happening is, although there is, I mean I can say that something is inherently wrong with me maybe, and that I am a perfectionist. No. As a society, we are becoming more and more obsessed with perfection. We look at everything through this filtered lens.
And then of course you take people like us, we're high [00:10:00] achievers, and our lives have just been like a level of being put in a pressure cooker and then another pressure cooker, and you just keep turning up the pressure till you, there's nothing left. And so when you are doing all of that extremely, like, you know this, all of this journey is happening. You pause and you find joy. find it really hard because I'm surviving between this yearning to ask for help and this expectation to look perfect. All joy is lost.
Chrissie: It is time for some new permission structures. It is time to actively dismantle those things that have been keeping us from our joy because I have a belief that joy is part of our birthright, that even though it may feel hard when we're under the boot of these social structures, especially this [00:11:00] socially prescribed perfectionism, thank you for breaking down those three types. That's super fascinating.
Um, the socially prescribed perfectionism immediately goes to social media for me. And, you know, the imagery that we have that like, oh, everything is perfect on screen and these little selfies and my favorite vacation shots and, you know, the performative, performative stuff. Um, but if joy is there and is our birthright and that we had it at some point in our innocent early life it is absolutely rea attainable.
Our mutual friend Kathy on this podcast said she thought we were born for joy, and I love that. I love that phrase. I will always turn back to that. that is a beautiful phrase. So much. Yeah. I think what you were saying earlier about, you know, the [00:12:00] misery that we endure when we put our blinders on and we run towards goals that may or may not be our own, and that demand a high degree of excellence and the appearance of perfectionism. Um, sometimes misery is signaling virtue.
Amna: Yes. Yes, it really is. And, and I want to add over here, Chrissie that whenever we start talking about perfectionism, performance, achievement, a lot of people, and then you add joy in there, right? People get very uncomfortable. It makes people uncomfortable because now maybe you are telling people to just sit on the couch and drown themselves in carbohydrates and other substances and it's okay.
Chrissie: Mm-hmm. And
Amna: for the longest time, that was also my perception. Yeah. So the first thing I like to dismantle is talking about, well, what's the difference between perfectionism and maybe a good ism, you know, so. What [00:13:00] can, what can you as a high performer, as somebody who wants to go and live their best, most amazing life do? Are we telling you to settle? Are we telling you to settle? Well, we maybe, yeah, maybe we are, and maybe that's not such a bad thing.
But the point to recognize is perfectionism, maladaptive perfectionism especially, and that's for me, I find the, the line between adaptive and maladaptive blurs very easily. So perfectionistic strivings and healthy striving is very different when you strive for something that is healthy, that is striving for excellence. You are not operating from deficit thinking. You are running towards something good. You're running towards joy. You have inherent intrinsic motivation. You will make healthier choices.
But when you are operating from perfectionistic tendencies, you are running away from yourself. You are running away from all the things that you think are wrong from you. So you're [00:14:00] operating from deficit thinking, you're gonna have worst imposter. You're going to have all of those symptoms that come along with it. Perfectionism is a chance diagnostic risk factors for mental health issues, all of this is going to come together.
So when we talk about should you strive for excellence and should you want to go and live all those, you know, bold, audacious goals for yourself? Absolutely. Go and do everything. But are you running towards your goals or are you running away from what you think society has told you that you should do? Here's what you should look like. Here's what you should feel and believe in all of those things. And you're running away from that and you're, you know, all of this. So ask yourself, am I running towards or am I running away from everything that's aligned with me?
Chrissie: Yes. It's so the energy of embracing the good versus avoiding the bad, subtle, but, um, so important to [00:15:00] discern.
Amna: Absolutely. 100%.
Chrissie: I love, I love that distinction. How did perfectionism show up loudly for you and how did you catch it?
Amna: I only caught it very recently that this has been happening, but it, it started really early and I think that the first time I truly felt this, maybe I was five or six years old, and it started from there onwards, I felt I wasn't good at school, you and I needed help and I needed to get better. And then I got really good. I became into the, you know, the superstar and then I, of course, as we all are, we were the best students. And then we went to medical school and then we were surrounded by all these other amazing students. So that's where that pressure cooker, the pressure sort of built up a little bit.
And then residency happened. I [00:16:00] was surrounded by phenomenal co-residents. At that time as well, all of this was going on in the background and there was a very real narrative. Here's what a South Asian woman physician looks like, behaves like, acts like, and all of those things were very clear for me. I had my first brush with, uh, a mental health disturbance in the form of postpartum depression during residency. That pregnancy itself was very complicated and. I'm so glad I had an amazing program director. Shout out to Dr. Abby Spencer. She's incredible and she is the example of what happens when your program director actually cares about you.
So a time that could have been extremely traumatic for me was not because I had support, I got help, I processed as I went, and. I don't carry a lot of like specific trauma from that time. And thankfully my baby daughter is healthy, but when she came out I was definitely not [00:17:00] prepared for postpartum depression. And for me, at that time when perfectionism and postpartum depression collided was, I felt there was something really wrong with me. What is wrong with me? You know that that, the flawlessness started to really crack and so concealing it was really important for me. Of course, I light on my pqs and I didn't do anything, but thankfully that episode didn't last for that long. Um, I was back in the back in the madness of residency and in a way it helped me survive in almost.
Fast forward. I have my second, uh, as an attending. So I did my residency. I worked full-time as a primary care physician, and then I went back for my fellowship. But during that time when I was working full-time in primary care and even before this episode of postpartum depression started, I was really burnt out in the first couple of [00:18:00] months working full time. And that's where, that's the reason why I founded the Early Career Physicians Institute is because I felt really alone. I was, I was the person who thankfully was supported during residency, but when attending Hood hit, I was not supported in the way support probably should have been present.
But when I experienced burnout along with postpartum depression. I felt very broken. And again, the perfectionist in me wanted concealment. And the other thing that really was happening to me was this extreme dichotomist thinking everything was all or none. It is either I'm going to win all the gold medals, show up in all my 10,000 roles or I'm useless. That's it. Like that's end of my work. Like all or. Absolutely, absolutely all or nothing. And, and it really started to plague me, but I didn't share this with anyone at all. Again, I lied [00:19:00] on my PHQ, it was only, and that's with my obs office, but when I went to my primary care physician, she and I had a really good relationship and I was honest, and she prescribed me Lexapro.
When the prescription was given, I felt myself collapse, like it had gone this bad that I actually need to take meds. Wow, Amna. Like the inner narrative and the inner critic that I have. It was always really bad but it became so loud. And later on, now that I look at data and research shows that people who have perfectionism, they are extremely deficit in self-compassion and they have a lot of self-criticism, and, and it was happening, it was really loud.
So of course I filled the prescription, but didn't take it. Until there came a day where I just felt like, okay, I am, I'm having, I'm feeling very angry for the humans around my life and they don't deserve my anger. [00:20:00] So I went up and I, I took my med in like five days the sky became blue and the grass became green. Way faster for that medicine to work as we counsel patients. But I just felt, I felt. I started to recalibrate, but I still, because I felt like I was depending on the medicine. I mean, this is me, I'm a physician, so cognitively this makes no sense to me. Even socially, this doesn't make sense to me, but I just felt on a very personal level that, uh, the perfection, perfectionist, stickly appearing human, that I was the perfect human. I was. It was, it was just broken. It's crashed. I, it's all downhill from here.
And all of this happened right before the pandemic. So just, and, and of course that's why I work with Dr. Lorna Breen's, uh, uh, um, heroes Foundation and I'm an ambassador for them, is because I was really, really afraid of how this is all going to show up on my licensing. And so I took the medicine. I literally took [00:21:00] Lexapro for just enough time so that I could come up for air and I tapered it off. I probably should have taken it for a month or two more, but I tapered it off. Right as I was coming off my taper, everything shut down for covid, and then I had a physical injury that I had to deal with for a year later.
So as all of this, the reason I'm I'm going on this journey is as all of this was happening, it was every instance where I felt less than, and my inner critic was so loud and joy was inaccessible that. All of this was all happening in the flux of me, absolutely operating from deficit thinking, running away, trying to appear perfect to the point that only my husband, my brother, and a handful, like maybe two friends, knew that I was going through postpartum depression. My parents were not aware, nobody knew.
So I would get all these compliments on dinners like, oh my God, look at, she's got it all together. She's taking care of [00:22:00] her kids. She's working as a full-time doctor. You know, all of these things. And they, they give you that dopamine rush and then you also feel that pressure. You feel that socially prescribed pressure that weighs on you. And, you know, you, you, you try to wonder, and you ask yourself, am I stuck in a loop on an Instagram reel or am I real for real?
Chrissie: Am I a real person even? Yes. Oh my goodness. So much of that speaks to me as a, um, co recovering perfectionist Amna, and I'm, I'm called to, um, repeat something that my friend James Olivia Chu Hillman said, um, a few months ago. That is that affirmative othering is still othering. When people compliment, um, for example, another person's body size or, um. [00:23:00] You know, whatever it is that might trigger in them the repetition of the neural pathway pattern of, see, I need to perform in order to receive accolades. I am now in a dopamine reward cycle with perform and accolades versus I am performing high level, you know, meal preparation because it delights me to do so, not because I'm seeking the rewards. You know, performance and perfectionism like that can masquerade as excellence, but they really are just anxiety in disguise. They're like status anxiety, fear of loss of connection.
My own story of perfection. So I became onto myself about perfectionism around the time that I began to recover from anorexia in my teenage years as a ballet dancer, and that doesn't mean that my relationship to perfectionism ended then, but I [00:24:00] began to be a little bit onto myself that early, and it's been a long, long, long, long road to keep being a good enough instead of a perfectionist, right? I have to remind myself all the time, that's good enough. I can, I can express my value for excellence in this way rather than in a way that feels oppressive and, suffocating, you know.
And so much of what we do in the perfectionistic mindset is dysthymia driving, right? We are depleting ourselves of our own inner experience of self-compassion, dopamine, serotonin, happy hormones, happy neurotransmitters, and so it's no doubt that perfectionism as a pattern sets us up to have higher risk of mental health disturbance.
My relationship with Lexapro very similar to yours. I hit some [00:25:00] wall at some point where it's like I have to now admit that I am suffering with enough amplitude that I need assistance and I too had to like push through thoughts of otherness, right? Thoughts of not holding myself in common humanity. I. Totally talking myself through, you know, the things that were the opposite of what I would tell a patient or a good friend and have told many, many patients and good friends and just like you, it was Lexapro and just like you it was like five days and I was like, oh my gosh. I have access to my inspiration and vision again. Like things are different. I'm so grateful for that tool. So grateful that it helped both of us.
Amna: Absolutely. And And thank you for sharing that out loud, Chrissie, because more people need to [00:26:00] hear that. And more people also need to hear this experience where you are a physician and you might have a very different experience as a patient. And I also really liked your earlier part where you mentioned about how we're getting these dopamine hits from the validation and then actually it's exhaust, it's exhausting at the end of the day. All of that is just, it's leaning into you forget who you are.
A lot of people, um, hold on to like defend their perfectionism and they, they're clutching at it because again, they're worried as if, as I was and The moment you try to pry it away or you talk about joy or you talk about good enough, everything will crumble and fall away. So one of the things that happens over and over again is perfectionists and performance. We think that we really want to hold tight to our identity as perfectionists because we think it's directly going to help our performance. But actually research shows [00:27:00] research done by amazing researchers like Dr. Thomas Curran in uk. Show us that you are not going to actually have better outcomes in high profile, high pressure jobs such as medicine, such as, uh, being in nuclear power, flying planes, all of these situations if you're a perfectionist, because when you're a perfectionist, what's going to happen in the moment of crisis? You're, instead of actually looking at the moment objectively, you're going to start berating yourself. You're going to start putting yourself down.
Now when there's a moment of crisis happening, you don't want the person who's operating on you or flying a plane or got sensitive information to have a dialogue in their own head. You want them to be mindfully aware of what's happening, to be clear and to take decisions that are appropriate and needed for that. Now, this other arm of perfectionism and performance, we think that by being a perfectionist, we're going to have a higher yield on our productivity or whatever metrics you wanna [00:28:00] call it, that's also false.
When you're a perfectionist, what's gonna happen is you will burn out and we have plenty of data that tells us that you're gonna burn out. When you burnout, your performance starts to decline anyways, so this is the paradox of perfectionism where you have all of this, what Dr. Curran says, restless, striving, but then at the end of the day, you are no better than someone who's not a perfectionist.
So as a society. We need to stop glorifying perfectionism. You know what people say when you ask them for interviews? Like, can you name three strengths and one weakness? Something like that. And people will say, well, I'm a, I'm a little bit of a perfectionist. I think we need to stop saying that. And that is an element that really came up over and over again as I was digging into this project that I'm doing on perfectionism. That's what experts also mentioned over and over again is I don't think it's really helping us, and we're just so fascinated and we're enamored with this idea, [00:29:00] and that's why we're holding onto it, and that's why we keep moving the goalpost as far as joy is concerned farther and farther.
And so your audience is all high achievers. They love metrics and they love numbers, so the numbers don't support you burning yourself out by perfectionistic, striving. Yes, healthy striving for excellence, please do it. Please have that Healthy striving for excellence when you're doing surgical procedures or any other thing, nobody's telling you that we're gonna take that away. And here's another thing, Chrissie that comes up when we talk about, I shared about perfectionism and performance, perfectionism and shame. It's all so tied together.
So when we coming back to myself. I carry very intense shame from requiring Lexapro, and even when I was taking it, I was physiologically feeling better, [00:30:00] but I continued to have this shame show up over and over again. Oh, I am taking this medicine. That means I not good enough. I am clearly struggling. This is not okay. And there were, there were very real. Um, I would say there was a culture of medicine and my perception of my culture, which was a little biased as well. I mean, there is, there's definitely the, the socially prescribed element of South Asian culture was on me, but in my own home, I just felt like my parents would find it such a failure of parenting. This is what I thought, a failure of parenting if I shared that I was actually taking medication to help me with postpartum depression.
And so I never said anything. And years later I wrote an article on Mother's Day and it got published and they were visiting me and I sent them the link to the article and that's how I told them. [00:31:00] How'd it go? So my dad just he clicks the article, he looks at it and he, he read the whole thing. He just looked at me and he said, well, good. And I said, what? He said, good, you were struggling and you got help and now you're helping other people. And that was that. I. And so in my head, it was just something that I had made up and, and I know why I had made up. It's not like an inherent flaw. That's what I had seen all around me.
I mean, when I shared to, to one human outside of my close friend network, a close, um, local friend that I was going through this, she said, please don't share with anybody else in. This in the South Asian friend circle that you're going through this, people are really going to start looking at you different. And I did it. I actually took her word for it. And then so later when I actually opened up and shared about how imperfect I am and trying to be okay with that. [00:32:00] It's not that I, there was some magic potion and I've, I'm now cured of perfectionism and it shows up every day. But when I shared at that moment that I was going through postpartum depression, that this was happening, that I took medication, there were so many humans that reached out to me. So many men that had gone through postpartum depression reached out to me and so many South Asian men and women.
And off this, this experience. Another funny part was that most people reached out to me in dms because they also didn't feel safe enough to even openly comment in the posts. But that was very validating and realizing that I can talk about it, share. So this part of my life, Chrissie, I look at it as my undoing and my I'm trying to find that child in me, the inner child. It's, um, it's still, it's still difficult, but I, I'm, I'm trying, I'm trying to get there.
Chrissie: She's there. I [00:33:00] can sense her sparkle. Thank you for sharing all of that. It is, it is like when someone validates and appreciates your sharing and you get to hear from them as well, you are healing one another. I shared very early on with my hospitalist group during a talk about physician suicide. Um, and I shared with them, you know, the, the situations that led to my starting an SSRI. And I know that in that professional circle, people were shocked, not just surprised, shocked that I would bear something so personal in our professional space. Um, but I am not one to shy away from certain kinds of risk taking. Um, for me it feels alive to do so, even if there's a lot of discomfort, it actually is a certain kind of aliveness and I am all about, you know, taking [00:34:00] life by the horns.
And, you know, they also quietly one by one shared with me, you sharing, gave me the inspiration to talk to my primary care doctor. Um, you sharing makes me think that maybe I could talk to you about the fact that I sometimes don't wanna wake up in the morning. You know, you sharing the resources helped me. And every single time that happens, just like, yes, we all need to be a little bit out of the closet about this guys. We, we don't need to be leading with it in every single staff meeting. But there are really helpful, appropriate ways to share this and down with any structures that tells a doctor implicitly or explicitly, or any kind of healthcare worker that there should be shame with them getting help for themselves when they are operating in such a high performance field under such [00:35:00] duress so much of the time, the suffering that we witness and the life and death situations, the decisions that are on our backs, the barriers to care that our system places for us. We are doing battle all day every day that we are working inside the American healthcare system, and it is not pathological that we would develop difficulties with that.
Amna: I'm so grateful that you shared. I'm so grateful that you openly shared, because when we talk about specifically physician suicide and healthcare worker suicide, I. It is, it's a whole different ballgame because I'm, I'm sure a lot of in folks in the audience know this statistic, but a lot don't. We crash an entire large plane full of doctors every year to suicide. 400 [00:36:00] physicians, almost 400 physicians, and that's, how's that okay? That's more than one doctor a day. Breaking this down further. Numbers are powerful. What does that mean? Every physician, you know, knows a physician who has died by suicide, and we're gonna pretend, like, let's pretend nothing happened. Uh, there's a giant elephant with a stamp, a yellow stamp on it, and it says, shame and standing in the room, and it's just like, we're just gonna ignore this elephant and we're just gonna move past it.
So I think it's really important to start bringing humanity back to medicine. We are dehumanizing ourselves by putting all these expectations on ourselves, that is the self-oriented perfectionist of us. Mm-hmm. And then there is the socially prescribed and other oriented perfectionist element that keeps coming into it. So what, what is happening is asking for help to stay alive and survive [00:37:00] keeps getting inaccessible and sharing modeling humanity is one of the biggest ways in which we can actually access our joy and access help. It's huge. I mean, vicarious learning, is there vicarious experiences there? Vicarious growth is there, resilience is there, yes, we talk about vicarious trauma, but so are all of these elements, and so I do believe that when more people share their stories others can get help. It does de-stigmatize.
And I know wherever I can. I always put in a plug for Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes Foundation because they have done phenomenal work in terms of, as of this recording, they have helped over 1 million healthcare workers and I believe over 200,000 licensed, credentialed healthcare workers in, in seeking mental health support and when you start removing stigmatizing languages [00:38:00] from licensure applications and hospital employment applications, you start making help, uh, more accessible. And part of that is really embracing that your humanity. And when you embrace humanity, you embrace fallibility. That's when you can actually start as a society accepting that you're not perfect, you that a doctor, a nurse, any healthcare worker should be able to access mental health help when they need it.
Chrissie: So good to normalize these conversations. They really do change and save lives very specific lives. There may be somebody listening to this today who is feeling moved and affected for the very first, most impactful time to say, I have been suffering. I can acknowledge my suffering. There is something I [00:39:00] can do today to actually help my suffering.
So anyone out there who is hearing this and is currently navigating depression or thoughts, even passive ones of self-harm or suicide, please do not stay silent. Even if all you can do is whisper to a friend or call a hotline or tell somebody, I don't feel safe, just do something and connect. Use your voice to ask for help, to tell the truth and to start anew. You are never alone. Your suffering is never too much. Your suffering does not have to be the loudest suffering to count. And we need you. We need all of these voices here.
I think that when we separate a little bit from either the self-directed [00:40:00] perfectionism or the other directed perfectionism we have more room to experience ourselves as we are. And that may be unfamiliar territory. It may feel unsafe or silly. It may not be logical or, um just familiar enough for people to relax into at first, but it is great fun. Trust me. You know, when we can actually play with life and fuck up a little bit on purpose even like we were in the sandbox, you know, we can make life a sandbox. Fuck up a little bit on purpose, make repair, acknowledge it, laugh at it, and be like, oh, I'm actually intact. I'm okay. You know, I'm not talking about big medical errors, guys. Of course not. Um, but we don't have to perform with perfection to be enough. We don't have to perform with perfection to be [00:41:00] excellent, highly skilled. We can trust our training. We can trust our own rigor. We can trust our own consistency of practice, and we can let go of just a little bit of that rigid, um, self-editing, hyper vigilance that is really hard to coexist with and solve for joy.
Amna: Chrissie what's coming up for me as you shared that was this absolute utter lack of boundary between what we do as physicians in the clinical world and what we do in our lives outside of medicine because when there is no boundary, all of that perfection, all of that load, the cognitive load, we carry that with ourselves into our bedrooms, and we sleep with that and we wake up with it again and there's no rest and there's no time for play or joy when you're ruminating and you're [00:42:00] taking all of those things. And there are a variety of techniques that are out there that can help with that. And if you are in a place or space that you can't breathe and it's inhospitable, if you can't advocate for yourself, leave. See if you can advocate for yourself. Like there's nothing wrong.
And, and here's this other part of my journey that comes up for me is when I decided to step out of academia, my black and white thinking was so loud. I mean, that was the end of medicine. I now practice clinically part-time in nursing homes and rehab facilities. It allows me to tap into that joy because joy is the actual question I asked myself when I was deep in burnout and I really wanted to just leave medicine altogether there. We all have those one day, so my one day there were a lot of tears involved. I was in clinic. I asked myself, I can't do this anymore. I either, I just wanna quit medicine, all or none, thinking [00:43:00] I'm terrible. I'm just not cut out for this thing. Clearly. Clearly everybody else is doing it other than me, clearly.
But what still gives me joy in the practice of medicine. That my answer to that question was taking care of older adults, and that's why I was burnt out. And my answer to burnout was more medical training. I went back for fellowship in geriatrics, which was so healing for me despite, uh, the Duke University program is pretty rigorous. But it was so I was able to reconnect and being with older adults talking about their complex issues, talking to their family members is what gives me joy. But when I decided to step away from being in a hardcore academic environment, the following six months, every day I cried in the car. Every day I felt this is it. This is how you completely crash your career. And I'm so what? First you take a medicine for a couple of days, then you like, you know, you're having physical, [00:44:00] all physical health struggles.
I don't even talk about my struggle with weight and all of that that was happening because I still feel like it's not totally healed. Um, and I've gone through this journey of what I call my healthy weight journey. Took about six and a half years. I don't talk about it because I know that there's somebody somewhere, someone outside who's this is not gonna land well with, and I don't wanna be that person. I, I only talked about it twice in this entire time that I've been public on social media.
But coming back to that point of where joy starts to become inaccessible. So I really felt that there was no boundary between what I was doing at work and I was bringing everything at home, and that if I was to step away, all, all of this would crumble. And so I, I do encourage physicians to get back in the playground and bring that playfulness. And can you start [00:45:00] incorporating shutdown routines for yourself when you leave the hospital system? Can you have a formal shutdown routine? You. Even if you're not working in the hospital and you're in any other setting, even if you're a physician entrepreneur, how do you shut down so then you can be present and access that joy?
Chrissie: What is your shutdown procedure?
Amna: My shutdown procedure these days, um, looks like, and, and the, this term, uh, is, is taken by Cal Newport's book Deep Work. Mm-hmm. In which he,
Chrissie: it's on my shelf. I have not read it.
Amna: Yes. Need it. I listen to it. Um, because as you know, we're simultaneously reading a couple of books at the same time and he talks about the shutdown routine and I've started incorporating it. Okay. I think for me being absent from social media intentionally is really important to reset myself. Mm-hmm. I will be honest, there are weeks and days when I don't do that, but last year I was off of it for almost a month completely. And that was heaven. [00:46:00]
So to shut down I will check my email. I will go and see all of the tabs that need addressing. So usually it's the same. It's the emails and all the alerts and notifications everywhere. For me, shutdown looks like how can I be completely device free? And so that's where it actually starts. And even if it's the devices that we carry, not just our phones, it's going to be your EMR work, all of these other things that you carry with you. So unplug, complete hard, unplug. So what I do is most of the days now, I will check all my apps, check all the things that try to put my phone away physically. Mm-hmm.
Chrissie: And then we know that makes a difference. Mm-hmm.
Amna: Yes. And then I will tell my daughters, and now anybody who has daughters knows that if you give an eight and a half year old girl a responsibility, and then you also tell the 6-year-old, [00:47:00] they will make sure mommy follows through. And so they know, I say, okay, mommy has put her phone away and now we're gonna have fun in the evening, and they will make sure to hold me accountable. I thought you were done with that. I thought you didn't have to do anything else. So does this mean? And then they'll use words like, so does this mean you don't love us anymore? And, and, and then whatcha gonna say. Yes. I've added my children to my shutdown routine and that's been really helpful.
Chrissie: I'm taking that one. Um, that's fantastic.
Amna: Thank you. And It's really holding yourself accountable after that, because then at some point their bedtime happens and then the itch starts to come back. Like, let me see all the alerts, um, that all of that dopamine starts to flood back in. Yes. Yes. Let me see if my friends have actually responded to that reel that I shared, or what happened on LinkedIn, right?
Chrissie: Yes. The drive, the dopamine hits. [00:48:00] Mm-hmm.
Amna: And you go through the app circle, right? You're gonna go open all of it, and then you're gonna go check. And so by physically putting this away, I have to have this, like I owe it to myself to unplug. Ben Hardy said this in one of his books, and I'm blanking out, which, in which he talks about psychological detachment. If you're never truly unplugged, if you're also never fully in the zone. And I've really tried to lean into those words when we talk about embracing imperfection, actually shutting down, resting, putting a boundary. Because again, you might think that hard life being hard and this constant feeling like a martyr is going to give you some metal at the end. It's not. And you can go and have fun as chrissie is urging you to do so and you still achieve. 'cause that's what the data shows.
Chrissie: More kitchen dance parties for everyone. That is my [00:49:00] prescription. Amna, thank you so much for being here. Um, I wanna make sure that people know where they can find you. Of course there is the Success reimagined with Dr. Amna Shabbir podcast, which is fabulous. Um, give us some websites and contact info so our listeners can follow you too.
Amna: Thank you, Chrissie. I am available on LinkedIn and Instagram. Those are the main places I hang out. Just my first and last name and my website is dr amnashabbir.com. I also wanna put in a plug for anybody who wants to help healthcare workers, please go to dr lorna breen.org and you'll find ways in which you can support the foundation. You don't, it's not about, um, just supporting in financial ways you can. Just with a couple of clicks, help reauthorize the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes Act. You can also ask your own healthcare organization if they have not gone through the [00:50:00] processes to bring in the work that they're doing. It's very simple. They're procedures on the website, so I highly urge folks to go there and find me on LinkedIn and Instagram and listen to the podcast. This has been amazing.
Chrissie: Heck yeah to all of that. Thank you so much, Amna. And. If you received a gem today from this conversation, give us a comment, leave us a review. We would love to interact with you, all of us. Um, I know Amna would I know I would. Um, we are just delighted to connect with our listeners and if you have an idea for a podcast, we are here for that, uh, solving for [email protected]. I almost hate to close. It's been so much fun. Amna, thank you so much again for being here. I adore you, my friend.
Amna: Thank you so much. This has been an absolute privilege.
Chrissie: The [00:51:00] amazing Dr. Amna Shabbir everyone fiercely loving, thoughtful, and deeply real. If our conversation today had you reflecting on the quiet cost of perfectionism, the weight of silence, or the possibility of healing out loud, you are probably not alone. And we would love to hear from you in the Ratings reviews or social media domains, please speak out. Speak to us. We wanna hear. Amna reminded us today that joy is not something we earn through flawlessness. It's something we remember, reclaim and allow, especially when we stop performing and start telling ourselves and others the truth.
Next week, we are continuing this truth Telling Journey with another powerhouse voice, Dr. Kim Downey. Kim is a physical therapist, a three-time cancer survivor, and a passionate advocate for physician wellbeing. She's the creator of Standup for Doctors and serves as an ambassador for Both Medicine Forward and the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes Foundation. Her lived experience [00:52:00] combined with her gift for deep listening will bring a fresh, fierce perspective on what's not working in healthcare and what we can build instead. We'll talk about everything from moral injury to the power of story and community in reshaping the system. You will not wanna miss it.
And a quick note from my fellow physician coaching friends, the Physician Coaching Summit should be on your radar. Now is the time to register. We have an incredible speaker lineup coming your way, and a limited block of deeply discounted rooms at Savannah Wellness Resort and Spot that will eventually run out. Lock in your best pricing secure spot now at the physician coaching summit.com. We cannot wait to see you there. Connect in real life. Do some deep learning and relaxing together.
As always, I am a physician, but I'm not your physician. Nothing here should be construed as medical advice. These are personal perspectives and stories meant to spark reflection, not replace professional care.
If there is something stirred in you today, if you're feeling the pull to quiet the inner critic, or take the next step toward your own healing and highest [00:53:00] self-expression, I would love to walk alongside you. Coaching can be a powerful mirror and tool and companion on that path. You can learn [email protected]. Check out our links in the show notes.
And huge thanks as always to my incredible team producer, extraordinary, Kelsey Vaughn, post-production, Alyssa Wilkes, operations by Denise Crane, theme music Dennis Kyshchuk and cover Photography by Shelby Brakken. And as always, a big shout out to my beloved wife, Sue. My number one fan and champion, thank you so much for being here. Keep choosing your wholeness. Keep telling the truth even when your voice shakes and may we all keep solving for joy. Thank you guys. We'll see you next time.
