Editor’s note: This is the second of a three-part series about work/life balance.
This installment focuses on the life component. To read the first article, about work, click here.
The third and final installment will address balance.
The central thesis of the last article was to do the following: boil down to one sentence exactly what you’re doing in the field of dentistry—or trying to do—in such a way that an intelligent child could understand.
Making the language simplistic is not pithy; rather, it prevents you from using jargon to ‘hide’ from the basic tenets of how you actually pass a working day. This is called your axis statement.
For example, someone who runs a general dental practice and is moving into more Invisalign work might say: ‘I run a small business, and am therefore in charge of the income of a small group of people, including my own. I achieve this by providing normal dentistry to my patients (drilling and filling crowns, etc.), and I want to also help them straighten their teeth when they aren’t so crooked that they need to go see an orthodontist’.
Then ask yourself, hand on heart: Do I actually want to live that axis statement, for the rest of my professional life?’
If the answer is yes, then great! Stay in dentistry, and try to refine the quality and efficiency of your pursuit of this axis whilst making your life away from dentistry much richer, fuller and meaningful.
If you’re not sure, then hurry up and decide to change careers, or change your axis statement to something in dentistry that you would resonate more with. Agnosticism should only ever be a transitional state. This usually involves pulling your socks up as a practitioner and small business owner—basically optimising your standards.
If the answer is no, then get out of the profession. You’re taking up room and wasting everybody’s time. What’s the point trying to balance something you don’t want to balance?
The fourth option might be to work a little bit as a dentist and do other things at the same time. I’ve done that myself; I was both a psychotherapist and a dentist. It works for a while and is often a financial necessity, but I don’t know how sustainable it is. You might end up being a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none, so let’s put a pin in that. (Maybe a future article!)
So, life. It doesn’t get more profound than that now does it? Let’s make a pact to not disappear too far down the existential rabbit hole—you may very well have an obturation in 10 minutes, so let’s make sure you’re not too distracted by the enormity of your own existence to get a good apical seal.
Mental abscesses
I’m aware that this is an industry magazine, not the dorm room of an arts college at 3 a.m. on a Sunday.
That being said, I regularly see people falling into obvious psychological trenches that can cause huge amounts of unnecessary chronic suffering—‘mental abscesses’ if you will. Dentists are often guilty of trying to circumscribe these gnawing abscesses of mental anguish with walls of luxury. These walls grow ever higher, but, like an antibiotic prescription spiralling out of control (and in much the same way as increasing antibiotics offer diminishing returns of effectiveness), these expanding luxuries lead to nothing but hedonic adaptation, which necessitates further material acquisition.
Eventually this mental abscess becomes ‘systemic’, which in our metaphor often manifests as a midlife crisis. In a luxury rehab setting I see extreme versions of this: wealthy and successful people trying to outrun their own doubts and demons in a Porsche 911 Cabriolet, because the Cayman with just didn’t seem to be quick enough anymore.
Postapocalyptic purchases
I’m not wealth-bashing—far from it! I fundamentally believe in meritocratic earnings. My point is that expenditure that is restorative to your psyche (‘I need this luxury watch to feel good inside’) is less psychologically healthy than expenditure that is augmentative (‘I love the look of the inlaid stones on this Patek Philippe; I’m so grateful I can afford to own such a beautiful timepiece to add my collection’). Identical purchase, different mental health outcome, different balance.
The former is what I call a ‘status anxiety’ purchase. It’s toxic to your life. You’re smart; you already know this. The latter is what I call a ‘postapocalyptic purchase’, and is the way to have your monetary cake and eat it in a psychologically healthy way. Let me explain by way of a thought experiment.
If there were an apocalypse tomorrow, and you were OK but the only person left on Earth, and therefore able to wander into any store and have anything, nobody around to judge you and your purchases or pursuits, what would you do and get?
I think I’d grab the best musical instruments I could find; I’d loot the Callaway store; I’d eat in the best restaurants (before the food went off!); and sleep in the most luxurious hotels.
I probably wouldn’t care much which car I drove around in or which clothes or accessories I was wearing.
So, if I’m working like the devil every hour that God sends to buy a custom guitar and a Scotty Cameron putter, then that’s all good. If I’m spending a lot of money on fine dining, that’s OK, too, because I’m purchasing in line with the desires of my most authentic self. If, however, I’m working overtime so I can buy a new car to keep up the Joneses, then I’m chasing a status anxiety purchase, and my work/life balance will inevitably deteriorate.
I’m not against people working hard to buy nice things for themselves and their families; I’m advocating that you filter all your ‘big ticket’ purchases through this metric. You’ll probably find that you’re overspending in areas and maybe even underspending in certain others. A bit of siphoning of money around will probably allow you to free up some capital to actually buy something that you can utilise to improve your lifestyle—and also perhaps helps you shave off a bit of time chairside, too! You don’t need to spend above average all across the board just because you can (or think you should).
The take-home: Purchase postapocalyptically, and you should find that your quality of life improves while your quotient of work either decreases or at least feels more goal-oriented.
Life guilt
So far I’ve advocated a sort of ‘thinking backward’ approach to work/life balance.
We all need money to live, and dentistry is our means to do that. I’ve mentioned how the postapocalyptic protocol helps you cut away some fat from your expenditures. Basically, when you systematically take stock of what you do and don’t need to spend money on (and see how that lines up with the current state of affairs), that allows you to more efficiently reverse-engineer a new, more time-efficient way to hit this target at work.
Once you’ve paid all your loans and mortgages for the month, provided for your family and materially satisfied the desires of your most authentic self ... well, then that’s it, right? It’s time to go home and enjoy the family, or go on holiday in this extra time off you now have? Work/life balance sorted?
If only it were that simple. I mentioned at the beginning of the article the concept of a mental abscess. It’s a bit of a dramatic term, but I think it alludes to that feeling of quiet desperation that can lurk inside and rear its ugly head when we least expect it.
I was recently down in the wine region of Southwest Australia with a group of friends, and a person whom I greatly admire—a medical surgeon—was telling me how in spite of her picture-perfect life, she felt a sense of guilt. This is a person who regularly saves lives, she has a loving long-term partner, they are both awesome people and they have a great social network.
Many of my friends in Perth are health-professional expats and there seems to be a selection bias for the type of people who are more cognizent of a work/life balance: They want to live the sunny outdoors life and earn a good wage at the same time. Perth is a mecca for such people, and my surgeon friend fits this bill, so it would seem she has a very well-rounded life. She mentioned all of this, and in a way was scratching her head to find the source of this pernicious feeling.
I agreed with her and told her that I had felt the same thing: A few years ago, I thought this feeling of guilt was because of wanting to make a career change that I wasn’t really making happen. However, after making the career change, which I am delighted with, this gnawing guilt didn’t dissipate.
I posited to her that maybe it was a more fundamental question that we were asking ourselves. That question was: ‘Am I doing enough for the world?’
Perhaps we let ourselves off the hook because we actually do help people every day. Excruciating dental pain is no joke—I mean, how many times have you had a woman thank you and say, ‘That pain you got me out of was worse than childbirth’?
Never diminish that utility to society, or the help you put out there! However, for some people the gnawing guilt might come from the fact that we have so much whilst large swathes of the world have so little.
Mental abscesses can come in all shapes and sizes, and a breakdown of the DSM V classification of psychopathology is beyond the scope of this article, but a common source of chronic little mental abscesses in a dentist’s mindset is the feeling that you’re not really making an impact.
I am not in any way spiritual, but I’ve seen how, when clients at the rehab who are struggling emotionally stop turning inward to their own problems and instead turn their focus outward and try to help others, it seems to be the royal road to helping improve their own mood and well-being.
An example of clients who moved into enduring recovery in part because of a new life of commitment philanthropy got me thinking. If you know that feeling, deep down inside, that you aren’t really doing your ‘bit’ for humanity, then I would encourage you to perhaps look up a movement called effective altruism.
I’d tried various charity works over the years—the usual marathons for leukaemia, working for children’s cancer charities in Perth, etc., but this is where it’s at for me. All charity is of course a great endeavour, but some approaches seem to shift this ‘guilt’ more than others, and I think it has to do with how effective you are actually being.
This movement has been championed by, amongst others, an associate professor at Oxford named William MacAskill. It suggests that instead of chasing the ‘warm fuzzies’ of charity, we should apply rigorous data analysis to which specific charitable work actually generates efficient and measurable outcomes, and then invest in those.
So, for example, lets say a stockbroker feels this nagging guilt, and decides to quit his £500k-a-year job to go and work for an NGO in Liberia. ‘Hooray!’ some might say. ‘He’s going to do so much good there!’
MacAskill would disagree: Let’s say it costs £25k per year to pay an NGO worker in Liberia. The stockbroker could have reverse-engineered his expenditure using postapocalyptic principles, and found that he could shave off £250k and still have a comparable lifestyle.
By doing so, he could pay for 10 workers to do the job he was going to just to satiate his need for the ‘warm fuzzies’. He’s just improved his charitable effectiveness tenfold— and he didn’t even need to swap his penthouse for a shack in Liberia.
MacAskill’s book, Doing Good Better, and the website he’s affiliated with, 80,000 Hours, lay out the whole approach in full. I encourage you to read about it!
I see an opportunity for dentists to do the same—perhaps not to the same extent as the aforementioned example, but I present it as an option to help your life potentially feel more fulfilling.
If you want to really do some good for the world’s poorest people but don’t want to (or can’t) move away from dentistry or your current lifestyle, perhaps a good course of action might be to maximise dental earnings through upskilling, then commit a certain amount of surplus money every month to devastatingly effective charities.
As dentists, we’re trained to think clearly, scientifically and empirically. There is an excellent website which statically analyzes the effectiveness of charities in keeping with this paradigm. It currently recommends a charity called against malaria, and for an approximate donation of $3,500 USD, you’re statically likely to save the life of a child.
I used to date a dentist who thought in monetary units of designer dresses. She would prep a crown and say, ‘That’s another dress I can afford’. I found this a fairly onerous way to measure her surplus earnings, but if you’re inclined to think like that, wouldn’t it be better to say, ‘That’s another life I’ve saved’ every time you finish a big case?
Why not balance your own life by saving a child’s?
Meditate
I hope you realise by now that I am not a crystal gazer; I do, however, believe that mindfulness meditation—more specifically, Vipassana meditation—is the most empirically sound and secular approach to becoming more present in every moment.
I am by no means an expert and am still a bit of a novice meditator, but I practice most days for approximately 20 minutes.
I have found the majority of literature on meditation to be either polluted by dubious religious hocus-pocus, too steeped in New Age fluff, or just touting resources that represent a pure bandwagon jump’. (Such content has become to be known as ‘McMindfulness’, peddled by people trying to make a quick buck.)
The only two mediations books I can currently recommend are:
- The Art of Living by William Hart, which expounds the Vipassana teachings of S.M. Goenka. I was ready at every page to discredit the enterprise—one sniff of irrationality and I’m out—but I didn’t find anything. All of its tenets seem to hold up to the type of rational scrutiny drilled into us by a bachelor’s degree in science.
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The second book is Letting Go by Sam Harris, an American neuroscientist.
I also like the Headspace app. It’s clean, fresh and accessible.
If you read these books and purchase the app, you’ll save a lot of time rummaging around in the bargain basement of pseudo-mystical psychology like I was forced to. It’s a deep, deep bin, unfortunately!
Go with the flow
This is a simple one. You have probably heard of the concept of ‘flow’. Find it in your pastimes. It is beyond mere ‘fun’; it’s the feeling of time sort of melting away from an experience. I find it when I am playing music; listening to audiobooks or podcasts whilst running or walking; reading; snowboarding; the list goes on.
I feel incredibly grateful that because of my new line of work I can now add a few things to the list—namely, editing video productions, interviewing clinicians for camera, productive psychotherapy sessions with addicted clients, and actually just writing.
For example, I’ve written this article straight in one go, and it’s well past my bedtime—I didn’t even notice the time! I feel privileged that as communications manager in my current job, I get to experience this flow in daily work. I used to feel like I was indulgent when I spent time on these pastimes, like a grown man shouldn’t ‘play’ so much. But the opposite—playing too little—actually leaves your dopaminergic pathways open to other behaviours.
I have seen how people who don’t connect with states of flow in their pastimes start seeking that satisfaction from a drug or a pathological behaviour. A lot of the new neuroscience about behavioural addictions is about how to help addicts retrain their brains, from a neuroplasticity point of view, to approximate the deep synaptic connection they feel to their drug or behaviour of choice.
This isn’t as tangential as you think; we can all learn from addicts and how their addiction makes their life go off-kilter. We are all prone to this compulsive behaviour, which robs us of variety in our life—and also our precious time. For example, how much time do you spend on Crackbook ... I mean, Facebook? What’s your record for number of episodes in a row on a Netflix binge?
You need to have a smorgasbord of ways that you can access states of flow, of relaxation, of pleasure. Otherwise, your brain will latch on to an exclusively few proven ways, and true balance in life is then very difficult to find.
So, my thoughts on a life well-lived are pretty simple. To recap ...
Mental abscesses: If you have them, don’t throw antibiotics at them; speak to a relevant health professional. Make sure it isn’t some existential thing you can figure out for yourself. ‘Not everything is therapy’—and that’s coming from a therapist!
Purchase ‘postapocalyptically’. Let the lifestyle dictate the earnings, not the other way around.
Be part of something bigger than you. As a high earner, consider the maximising of earnings as a way to do this most altruistically. After you’ve attended to your own needs and those of your dependents, every penny you earn for someone else will be the most effective happiness investment you can hope to make.
Attend to the present moment. Know that an unchecked ego will cause unnecessary suffering. Meditation is a totem for this endeavour.
Achieve a state of flow, or communion with your physical world and your pastimes away from work. You’ll know it retrospectively when you were in it, because time slides by unnoticed.
And that’s pretty much it.
My article in the next issue of DentaltownUK will be much less ‘woo-woo’, and have a lot more nuts and bolts. I have a wide range of tools you can use to reduce wasted time, and to free you up to do the things you want to do!
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