Impacts of Mindfulness for Physicians

      Physicians are committed to not only the well-being of patients, but also themselves. Medical practice involves working in a stressful and lively environment, where they have limited time and resources to support their contentment. The well-being of physicians is a combination of their physical, psychological, and occupational health, and these are very important for their success and satisfaction in all aspects of their life. 

     Burnout is a huge issue for physicians worldwide, it is mainly caused by the various demands of modern practice, such as workload and administrative burden. These demands have been know to decrease autonomy and interfere with the patient-provider relationship. Many physicians lose meaning in their work, and research has shown that mindfulness practices can reconnect and enhance this issue. 

     Physicians often work harder when they are responding to stress, but mindfulness shows a different approach that increases awareness of their own emotions and stress levels, promotes self-regulation, and facilitates self-reflection of behaviors. Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have began to increasingly become common in medical education and practices, they involve mindfulness meditation and approaches for awareness and attentiveness. 

     MBIs have shown that when providing patient care, doctors that practice mindfulness are more likely to perform better in interpersonal domains, have increased empathy when responding to patients, and can decrease medical errors within the facility. These interventions are most effective in an organizational approach promoting a wellness culture in various educational phases for physicians. Mindfulness interventions increase acceptance and compassion towards patients, while also giving them back the sense of meaning in their work that was lost. 

      The safety of patients has been a prominent topic in the last decade, and evidence has shown that medical errors are responsible for significant mortality and morbidity rates. Many efforts have helped to understand the system level of errors and how to identify them, but performance in individual clinicians remains a largely unaddressed issue. These errors typically come from cognitive biases, these biases are vital for human cognition and there have been many strategies to "debias" an individual to prevent these errors. 

     Metacognition, or an individual's knowledge of their own thinking process, is an important part of the strategies and has shown a remarkable overlap with mindfulness. Mindfulness leads to an increased understanding of a person's experiences, which includes their thoughts, emotions, and bodily senses. Mindfulness instruction for physicians acts as a pathway for a debiasing strategy that can reduce diagnostic and other medical errors. 

     Mindfulness has been described as having 7 interrelated attitudinal qualities that includes patience, beginner's mind, trust, non-judging, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go. These qualities all have their own meaning that leads to trusting yourself and others, having an open mind, reflecting judgmental thoughts, living in the present, seeing a situation as it truly is, and allowing your thoughts, feelings, and experiences to come and go. Practicing these aspects of mindfulness helps a person have greater awareness of their internal processes and enhance their present experiences. 

     Enhancing mindfulness in physicians has great potential to improve the safety of patients and increase metacognition which will reduce many causes of medical errors. There may also be additional benefits for physicians who practice mindfulness, which includes improved mental health, reduced burnout, greater job satisfaction, and an improved work environment. The potential benefits of mindfulness reaches many domains, and another major reason to pursue it is because care will be required to ensure the quality of mindfulness instruction and incorporate its concepts and techniques into physicians medical practices.