Stress

In viewing trauma through a wider lens we see its detrimental impact.

Avoiding implicit bias starts with a conscious knowledge it exists within you.

Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.

Already struggling in a system-wide burnout crisis, COVID-19 responders in healthcare now have reason to worry.

Many organizations don’t think about the impacts of stress on their workforce in a systematic way when designing their organizational policy. How could they? Policies grow over time, and often are reactive rather than proactive. These are the key concepts Greenleaf uses to assess the current Stress Responsiveness of an organization and support the leadership in making more stress responsive policy decisions.

Any stress, both positive stress (excitement) and negative stress (nervousness), involves the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS functions in the background every second of our lives. It regulates the human body’s most basic regulatory processes, including breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, and digestion.

Though burnout and trauma exposure have different causes and symptoms – and require different interventions and remedies – it’s well established that both are highly toxic to the wellbeing, resilience, and health of employees.

Imagine you and a friend are going down a sidewalk and a dog lunges at both of you. For you, the incident may be forgotten in a matter of minutes. Your friend, however, has heart palpitations and then he stays in a funk for an hour. Why is this?

Trauma. We encounter it just about everywhere we look these days. We absorb it through news stories of victims and from witnesses of violent plots, shootings, and cruelty. We feel it through natural disasters, poverty, and homelessness. You don’t have to be someone’s mother to ache with empathy and compassion for those suffering from such horrific experiences.

Although it’s been two weeks since the anniversary and remembrances of 9/11, I find myself still reflecting on how it changed the lives of so many, including my own. The horrors of that day occurred only two months after I started my residency at Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC.