surgeon mindfulness

1. Self-Awareness and Guided
Meditation for the Surgeon

2. Goals and Objectives
 Define self-awareness
 Define mindfulness
 What is guided meditation?
 Physician burnout
 What are we doing to help?

3. Financial Disclosures
 No financial disclosures

4. Self-Awareness
 Conscious knowledge of one's own
character, feelings, motives, and desires.

5. Self-Awareness
 The capacity for introspection and the
ability to recognize oneself as an
individual separate from the environment
and other individuals.

6. Self-Awareness
 Having a clear perception of your
personality, including strengths,
weaknesses, thoughts, beliefs, motivation,
and emotions.

7. Self-Awareness
 The ability to monitor our emotions and
thoughts from moment to moment is key
to understanding ourselves better, being
at peace with who we are and proactively
managing our thoughts, emotions, and
behaviors.

8. Self-Awareness
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIhEMk7CZ-
A&t=29s

9. Level I – What are You
DOING
There’s a lot of pain and struggle in life. Over the last 30 days,
how many times have you:
 Struggled with a relationship with someone close to you?
 Felt lonely, isolated or unheard?
 Felt unproductive or lost on what you should do?
 Been underslept, under-fed, low energy, or unhealthy?
 Stressed about work or finances?
 Uncertain about your future?
 Been physically hurt, ill, or debilitated?

10. Avoiding Pain Through
Distraction
 We transport our minds to some other time or
place or world, where it can be safe and insulated
from the pain of day-to-day life.
 We stare at our phones, we obsess about the past
or our potential futures, make plans we’ll never
keep, or simply try to forget.
 We eat, drink, shop, swipe and scroll ourselves
into numbness to dull the reality of our problems.

11. Awareness of Our
Distractions
 We need to make sure that we’re choosing our
distractions and our distractions aren’t choosing
us.
 We’re the ones opting into the distraction, rather
than simply being unable to opt out of distraction.
 We need to know when we’re checking out.

12. What are We Actually
Doing
 We think we work more than we do
 We think we spend more time with our friends and
loved ones than we do.
 We think we’re more present than we are, that
we’re better listeners than we are, that we’re more
thoughtful and intelligent than we are. But the truth
is, we’re all pretty bad at this.

13. Level II – What are You
FEELING
 Becoming comfortable with your emotions
 Self-awareness is like peeling an onion, that
whatever you’re thinking/feeling, there’s always
another layer underneath, and the deeper you go,
the more layers you peel back, the more likely you
are to spontaneously burst into tears.

14. Level III – What are Your
Blind Spots
 The more you become aware of your own
emotions and your own desires, the more you
discover something terrifying: you are full of shit.
 We realize that a large percentage of our thoughts,
arguments, and actions are merely reflections of
whatever we are feeling in that moment.

15. How to Fix This
 Hold weaker opinions
 Take yourself less seriously
 Learn your patterns
 Recognize the problems you create for yourself
 Be realistic
 Welcome empathy

16. Shelley Duval and Robert
Wicklund’s
 In 1972 they proposed that self-awareness was
“when we focus our attention on ourselves, we
evaluate and compare our current behavior to our
internal standards and values. We become self-
conscious as objective evaluators of ourselves.”

17. Mindfulness is the key to
self-awareness
 Paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in
the present moment, non-judgmentally

18. Mindfulness
 The psychological process of bringing one's
attention to experiences occurring in the present
moment,which one can develop through the
practice of meditation and through other training.

19. Mindfulness
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6T02g5hnT4
 Why Mindfulness Is a Superpower

20. Buddhism and
Mindfulness
 Sati (mindfulness) is the first tenet of the Seven
Factors of Enlightenment
 Mindfulness is an antidote to delusion (Pali:
Moha), and is considered as such one of the
'powers' (Pali: bala) that contribute to the
attainment of nirvana.

21. Seven Factors of
Enlightenment
 Mindfulness (sati). To maintain awareness of reality
(dharma).
 Investigation of the nature of reality (dhamma vicaya).
 Energy (viriya) also determination
 Joy or rapture (pīti)
 Relaxation or tranquility (passaddhi) of both body and
mind
 Concentration, clear awareness (samādhi) a calm, one-
pointed state of concentration of mind,[1] or clear awareness
 Equanimity (upekkha). To accept reality as-it-is (yatha-
bhuta) without craving or aversion.

22. Nirvana
 Nirvana is a state of being in which greed, hatred
and delusion (Pali: moha) have been overcome
and abandoned, and are absent from the mind.

23. Meditation
 All it takes is 10 minutes
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzR62JJCMBQ
&t=29s
 Andy Puddicombe – creator of Headspace

24. Meditation
 Letting Go of Effort
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyj8l9miy4w&t
=29s

25. Meditation
 How to Be OK With Dark Thoughts
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7u5N2MfTNU
&t=29s

26. Meditation
 Let Go of Stress
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1Ndym-IsQg
 Mini Meditation

27. How does this relate to
surgery?

31. What’s being done?

32. What’s being done?

33. What’s being done?