Your Attention Is Being Stolen: Why Physicians Feel Mentally Exhausted Even After an Easy Clinic Day | Ep65
You can finish a clinic day that wasn’t particularly busy and still feel completely drained. Not physically tired, mentally spent. Sometimes the drain starts long before the first patient walks in.
In this episode of Better Physician Life, Dr. Michael Hersh turns his focus to attention: the limited resource physicians spend more freely than almost any other. He examines how headlines, online physician groups, productivity dashboards, market updates, and endless predictions about the future of medicine quietly occupy mental bandwidth long after the screen is closed.
Drawing on the observation that power today may lie in knowing what to ignore, Dr. Hersh distinguishes being informed from being continuously immersed. He explores how attention compounds like money; small deposits and small withdrawals both add up, and why the things that matter most (patients, family, health) are often the least aggressive about demanding it.
This episode is not a call to disconnect completely. It invites you to notice where your attention is actually going, ask whether it deserves to be there, and begin treating this finite resource with the same care physicians already apply to medications, patient safety, and protected health information.
About the Show:
Created for physicians who want more than clinical competence, Better Physician Life is a space for honest reflection, reinvention, and reclaiming purpose beyond the pager.
Hosted by Dr. Michael Hersh, each episode dives into the questions we didn’t learn to ask in training, offering tools and conversations to help you live and lead with intention.
Three Actionable Takeaways:Â
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Distinguish Useful from Interesting: Useful information leads to action. Interesting information often just feels urgent. If you cannot do anything with it today, it may not deserve another hour of your attention.
- Ask Who Benefits: When you notice yourself continuing to engage with a headline, thread, or dashboard, pause and ask: Who benefits from me continuing to pay attention to this? The answer is often not you, your patients, or your family.
- End the Day with One Question: Before plugging in your phone, ask: “Did the things that got most of my attention today actually deserve it?” No tracking required. Simply noticing begins to change what you choose tomorrow.
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