{"id":9793,"date":"2021-02-01T00:00:32","date_gmt":"2021-02-01T08:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/todaysveterinarybusiness.com\/?p=9793"},"modified":"2022-06-15T17:47:45","modified_gmt":"2022-06-15T17:47:45","slug":"stop-your-best-effort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/navc.sitepreview.app\/todaysveterinarybusiness.com\/stop-your-best-effort\/","title":{"rendered":"Stop Doing Your Best"},"content":{"rendered":"

How often have you heard the line, \u201cJust do your best.\u201d How often do you tell it to yourself?<\/p>\n

A psychiatrist for 25 years, I specialize in treating stress-related conditions. Many of my patients work in veterinary or human medicine. Many of them are burnt out or suicidal. One significant reason is their drive to constantly \u201cdo your best.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be effective and healthy, we must \u2014 absolutely must \u2014 STOP doing our best. But how can we do that, and is it OK? And what do we do if we are not doing our best?<\/p>\n

Well-Meant Encouragement<\/h3>\n

When we were children, we all had someone \u2014 maybe a parent, English teacher or track coach \u2014 who encouraged us to \u201cJust do your best.\u201d Their words were intended to reduce the pressure on us to meet an external goal and instead reach an internal goal. If we gave it our all, then the outcome didn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, doing our best meant pushing ourselves to the limit. Only if we exhausted ourselves could we be sure we did our best. If we had any energy left, then we felt uneasy because of the nagging feeling that we hadn\u2019t done our best. We thought we were disappointing anyone who had instructed us that our best was required.<\/p>\n

Over time, we internalize past authority figures. We carry them with us, and if we have not pushed ourselves to the limit, we can see the disappointed look on our teacher\u2019s face or hear the track coach\u2019s disparaging comments about how we didn\u2019t do our best.<\/p>\n

\u201cBest\u201d Does Not Exist\u00a0in a Complex World<\/h3>\n

\u201cBest\u201d can be defined only in simple situations where a linear or numerical rating scale is involved. School and sports are examples. We can have the best time in a footrace, the best score on a test or the best grade in a class, but school and sports are not real life, and even in mildly complex situations, there is no single \u201cbest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Consider an appointment with a client whose cat is sick. What is best for the wealthy widow, Ms. Wilson, who dotes on her cat and spares no expense, differs from what is best for the busy professional, Ms. Clarke, who has three children and needs to get in and out quickly. It\u2019s also different from what is best for the newly employed Ms. Johnson, who has little disposable income and wants to be treated compassionately and not judged because she is unable to do everything for her cat.<\/p>\n

When we operate in a complex world with no \u201cbest,\u201d then the only sign that we have done our best is an internal feeling of having pushed ourselves to the limit. We, therefore, find ourselves compelled to push harder, even to perform in ways that are not particularly helpful, in order to experience that internal state of having done our best.<\/p>\n

Minimal Effective Effort<\/h3>\n

To start the escape from the \u201cdo your best\u201d trap, let\u2019s shift gears for a minute and think about choosing the medication dose for a sick patient. When we administer medication to treat a particular condition, we need to have two dosages in mind. One is the minimal effective dose (MED) and the other is the maximal therapeutic dose (MTD). If we give less than the MED, the medication will not have the desired effect. If we give more than the MTD, the medication will do more harm than benefit. The dose we give needs to be between those two amounts. If we are more concerned about side effects, then we might give a dose closer to the MED. If we are more concerned about effectiveness, then we might give a dose closer to the MTD.<\/p>\n

In the same way, when we deal with a situation, we need to have a sense of the minimal effective effort (MEE) required. That is the minimum effort that will meet the situation\u2019s demands.\u00a0 If we put in the MEE, then we will meet the demands effectively. We also need to keep in mind that as we put in more effort than the MEE, the additional effort will start to have negative consequences. The extra effort might run up the client\u2019s bill, take up too much of the client\u2019s time, take away staff time from other patients, or tire us so that we are not able to meet the demands of other patients or the needs of our family or ourselves. The more effort we put in, the greater the side effects. Eventually, the negative effects will be greater than any benefit from our effort.<\/p>\n

So, there is now a maximal beneficial effort (MBE) that we need to avoid exceeding.<\/p>\n

In almost every situation, the minimally effective effort will be significantly less than our best. In fact, even the MBE might be less than our best at times, meaning that doing our best will make the situation worse. We will have to get used to doing less than our best and doing less deliberately.<\/p>\n

\u201cI Choose Not to Do Better\u201d<\/h3>\n

If we have practiced doing our best for years, we tend to feel uneasy when we do less. We will feel an intense desire to push harder. If we give in to the unease and push harder, then we are simply going back to our old habits. We must have a process for unhooking from the unease and creating a new habit.<\/p>\n

The feeling of unease and the urge to push harder activate our sympathetic nervous system and shut down our parasympathetic nervous system. We must correct this imbalance in order to unhook from the unease. Relaxation techniques to reduce sympathetic activation will not work because they take our attention away from the tasks at hand. Instead of relaxing, we reset.<\/p>\n

The One-Breath Reset<\/h3>\n

You can correct the imbalance of sympathetic excess and parasympathetic deficit by using a single breath to increase parasympathetic activation. This increase gives you a window of a few seconds to refocus your attention<\/a> so that you do not slip back into your old habits. To do a one-breath reset:<\/p>\n