Favourable: Practising a Hobby whatever (by Dr Lutz Ammerer)

In a doctor´s life it is very important maintaining social contacts. I am always teaching my students to avoid passing the obligatory advanced training for doctors and the exam online, but to attend training courses to meet colleagues and to exchange opinions. When exchanging with colleagues it becomes easier to assure one´s position.

Lutz Ammerer (holding a piano reduction in his hands) and his friend Jörg Demus

What the work in companies concerns: entrepreneurs and supervisors are meantime admonished to pay heed to first signs of their staff´s burnout and to offer preventive occupational care in time. Stress very often causes bad habits in nutrition. The person concerned is craving for sweets and chocolate from one minute to another. It is easy to pull this together – it is a little something to reward herself/himself. So it is very important to be aware of the problem behind. One can point to the patient that when she/he takes chocolate more often this can be a symptom of a psychological problem. And never forget to mention that the addiction itself is a sign of a problem. People who suffer from burnout are much more endangered by addiction. Alcohol can become a problem if there is a genetic disposition in the family.

Eventually the person afflicted has to think about how to deal with the hard-fought leisure time in the future. At the beginning she/he will mostly enjoy the rest. And this is good to start with, but one has to structure the leisure time long term and actively. To reach this target hobbies can be very helpful. Burnout patients are usually very ambitious persons, it should be easy for them to find suitable leisure activities. As a doctor you have even to forewarn the patients not to act as ambitious as usual: an untrained sexagenarian should not have the ambition to achieve a marathon world record. Apart from that athleticism, artistic activities, handicraft work, reading, gardening and supporting non-profit-making institutions are very appropriate to organise leisure time wisely and full of relish.

There are always new aims to reach. Grass is always growing, so there is always work for the hobby gardener, and as there are more than 5 mountains in the world there will always be a new challenge for hikers and mountain climbers. In art the most ambitious ones who try to become amateur-artists run the risk to become frustrated: starting to play the violin with 40 years you will not become another Menuhin, and the 50 years old piano student will probably never be able to perform Beethoven´s Hammerklavier sonata or Liszt´s sonata in B minor. Anyway, a setback like this will not be the biggest psychological problem if one has escaped from burnout.

In the old days there was the wonderful art of black-and-white photography. The artistic process started pressing the shutter release button, choosing the filter and the portrayal´s composition and ended in the darkroom where one selected the gradation of the paper and chose the time of burn for particular parts in the picture. Since digital photography took off on its triumphal course this art is in danger of extinction. In the past you took 12 medium format negatives and 5 were nicely done. Today there is the 16 GB memory card containing thousands of photos and approximate 5 are nicely done … In the darkroom one used to shake the photo in the developer that slowly took its different shades of grey in the ruby light and one was looking forward inspecting the quality in the fixing bath. It was a different kind of contentedness when the copy turned out fine and this was much more enriching than staring at the PC´s screen in our days with eyes sting to photoshop the pictures and suffering from head ache and neck pain.

There is a wide range of activities to practise and I think everybody can find something interesting to do in the leisure time. In every end is a beginning too, that is what I try to communicate the persons concerned when they are still or again receptive to advice. The abundant shadow in front of you is nothing other than your own image thrown by the light behind. Sometimes you have to finish one part of your life so far and to become able to perceive a new perspective to life.

It was only some time ago when a lady in her late thirties (it was about 2 months before first burnout symptoms occurred) told me by the way – but she was thinking about seriously – it was her burning desire to own a Porsche and she was hard working towards to reach this aim. For people like her it really needs a turning point to be able to show them what went wrong in their lives until now. It occurs very often that they only can come to a conclusion when running through pain and crisis.