Speaker 1: Hey friends, welcome back to the Deep Dive Snippet. In this little clip, me and Dr. Rupi from The Doctor's Kitchen are talking about how to avoid burnout. Now, Dr. Rupi is a hospital doctor who then became an internet sensation, celebrity entrepreneur by giving people advice about healthy living and lifestyles and food and has published a bunch of best-selling books, has appeared in multiple TV appearances, and he's had a very intimate relationship with burnout. So we're talking about how we as students of the craft can avoid burnout in ourselves. I hope you enjoy the clip. So you said that working this sort of GP lifestyle meant that you got quite burnt out. Yeah. What's that like, being burnt out?

Speaker 2: It is, it's where you go home at like 7, 7.30 p.m. and you've got friends who you haven't seen for a while and you just can't be bothered and you're not excited about seeing them even though you really should be because it's been weeks or whatever. It's where you don't, you lose the empathy that is so required in medicine as well. And I felt that slipping away and that wasn't a good position to be in, sort of like what we were talking before when you've got to do something for a patient and instead of you having the mindset of, this is a privilege to work for people in their most vulnerable state, it's like, I've got to do this and this is my job and I have to do this and there's another thing to tick off the list. And that's never really the way I really wanted to feel within medicine. Obviously, you can't be happy, joy, joy the whole time in medicine, you're obviously gonna have good and bad days and that's just normal. But when it becomes persistent and insidious throughout your whole week, that was kind of like, I need to take a break from this. And I had the sort of foresight and the privilege and opportunity to even do that. You know, a lot of people don't have the opportunity. A lot of my friends, for example, were supporting families and they had mortgages and they had all these other, you know, pressures on them financially. I was independent and I had the opportunity to go away and I was like, I owe it to myself and I owe it to my friends who can't do this to go out. And that's sort of what was the push for me to go abroad. But yeah, the burnout was not a nice place. And I'm thankful, I don't think I've really had that since in some ways, like obviously during the pandemic and stuff, but I think because there was that sort of like collective energy from everyone being in the same bucket and kind of like push you through, I think it's pandering out now, which is why you're seeing loads of people leave in droves. But yeah, that was, yeah, it wasn't a nice position to be in. Have you ever been in that?

Speaker 1: I don't think so. No? Like, because people do talk about burnout as like being a thing. And I'm always kind of curious, like, what does that feel like? Yeah. Because I kind of said to a friend of mine at one point, like, I don't think I've ever been burnt out. She was like, you probably have, but you just don't realize it. I was like, oh, okay, fine. What does it mean to be burnt out? I don't think I have.

Speaker 2: Do you have the ability to compartmentalize?

Speaker 1: Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Because there's a really good podcast called How to Take Over the World. You should definitely check it out. So they examine different leaders across time and history. It's usually people who have passed away, but you'll find more recent leaders like Steve Jobs. I think they did Putin as one. And one of the recurrent themes that I've noticed, and actually the host notices as well, is the ability to compartmentalize different issues. So Napoleon was able to put things in one drawer, shut it, and then open another one without really thinking about the last drawer that he's closed. I'm learning that skill now, but I definitely didn't have that when I was working as a GP. And I think perhaps that's maybe the reason why you haven't experienced it, but certainly my inability to focus on one thing at a time is probably why I got burnt out and it kind of spilled out into my personal life. Right.

Speaker 1: Spilled out into your personal life, meaning?

Speaker 2: So relationships, not really working out, not being there for my friends, not having the energy to do stuff at the doctor's kitchen, for example, putting things off, not being there for my family, all those different pressures. I think that's kind of like, yeah, how it played out for me.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Do you think that was inevitable given the schedule you were on? Or do you think there's stuff that you could have done at the time to kind of mitigate those kind of personal spillover effects

Speaker 2: of burnout? Oh yeah, definitely. I think certainly now, given what I do with all the different strands to the business and how I haven't really outsourced much, running the podcast, writing the books, doing the recipes, starting the app, running the tech team, doing the customer service, doing the charity stuff, all that kind of stuff, I'm able to flick, I'm still learning this as a skill, but I'm able to flick from different roles and positions relatively easier, easily compared to how it was before. And also having a partner who's pretty regimented about, look, it's 6.30 PM, you can't be on your computer that late at night and you haven't spoken to me for eight hours. That kind of keeps me on the straight and narrow as well. So I'm actually very thankful that I've got someone who can understand the grind and the sort of need to be there and hustle, but also knows when I need a bit of rigidity to be like, you need to stop this and I need to pull you away.

Speaker 1: Hey friends, thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this clip, then click here for the full unedited episode. And if you liked that, then do please consider subscribing to the channel. It means a lot. Thank you so much and have a great day. Bye-bye.