How to Battle Negative Workplace Thoughts in Rehab Therapy

Healthcare employees, like most other industries, have bad days at work that can lead to negative thoughts. Those negative thoughts could be about the job itself, but they can also address a wider range of stressors and concerns in the worker’s life. Negative thoughts and stress are a part of life—and in fact, stress in the short term can be beneficial—but chronic stress is certainly not healthy or conducive to a productive workplace long term.

So, if negative thoughts and stress are so bad, how do we reduce their prevalence in the workplace? Luckily, there are ways both employees and employers can mitigate these thoughts and their resulting stress. There are even tools that can turn some of that acute stress into longer-term career positives.

Let’s dive into some of the best ways those in rehab therapy can combat negative workplace thoughts.

What Causes Negative Thoughts at Work?

Regardless of your care setting, rehab therapists have plenty of workplace stressors that can cause negative thoughts on a day-to-day basis. Things like understaffing and increasingly complex insurance and Medicare compliance expectations make it harder to focus on your patients’ care and well-being. Never-ending notes and documentation can be a damper on the enthusiasm of treating patients.

First, let’s figure out what negative thoughts actually are. It’s a pretty general term, as it can cover several different types of situations of varying levels of intensity. Anything from having a kind of blah day to wanting to quit to feeling deeper levels of burnout count as negative thoughts in the workplace.

Run-of-the-Mill Bad Days

Seriously, everyone has bad days. Whether that’s at work or with family or anywhere else, some days are exhausting, some days you struggle to connect with a patient, some days you make a mistake on some paperwork and need to redo it. These days probably make up the bulk of negative thoughts in the workplace, and they’re likely the lowest level of stress you experience at work.

Sometimes, these might be due to other life circumstances. New babies might be a positive reason that work is stressing you out (hello, lack of sleep!), but less exciting circumstances can also cause general apathy at work, like a death in the family or a spouse getting laid off.

Chronic Stress

Those outside life circumstances can cause a one-off bad day, but they can also contribute to chronic stress, which makes working without negative thoughts a bit of a tall order. Chronic stress is also more likely to contribute to more common and intense negative thoughts in the workplace and may have a bigger impact on your work as a result.

Of course, life circumstances aren’t the only thing that can cause chronic stress at work. Work itself can cause chronic stress. Typically, in rehab therapy at least, this is due to things like extra-long hours, seemingly excessive compliance regulations and documentation expectations, or difficult bosses. Those are far from the only factors that can play into chronic stress in the workplace, though, so pay attention to the signs and look for patterns that might indicate you’re dealing with chronic stress which might be causing those negative patterns at work.

Burnout

Chronic stress that continues for an extended period of time can lead to burnout. Burnout is incredibly common in rehab therapy, with 45 to 71% of physical therapists reporting they experience burnout. Burnout can make negative thoughts at work a daily occurrence, leaving you ready to quit to reduce the stress. In healthcare, the problem can be so intense that many are considering leaving the profession entirely.

Burnout can cause you to feel disconnected at work, to feel like you’re not accomplishing anything successful, or cause you to feel like you no longer care about succeeding at work. All of these symptoms fall generally under the “negative thoughts” category, but can be much more serious from an individual and a career perspective.

Strategies to Battle Negative Workplace Thoughts

We know that negative workplace thoughts are a problem for both employers and employees—after all, how can you expect to offer top-notch treatment for your patient and be a successful practice if your employees are constantly discouraged and bogged down with stress? There has to be something you can do to handle these feelings when they occur. The good news is, there is!

Emotional Agility

Emotional agility is a term coined by Susan David, PhD, an award-winning psychologist at Harvard Medical School. Her book of the same name became a New York Times bestseller and her TED Talk has had over 10 million views. That’s all to say, this is a framework that resonates with a lot of people.

Emotional agility outlines a process that you can employ to help navigate changes in life with self-acceptance, clear-sightedness, and an open mind. The “agility” half of the title stresses the importance of flexibility and an openness to change in tactic and mindset. Applying this strategy to workplace problems can help manage how much those negative thoughts get to you.

Show Up

The first step in emotional agility is acknowledging the problem and taking on a positive perspective to tackle the problem. Basically, you can’t address the thoughts without acknowledging that they’re negatively impacting you and determining what exactly the cause of those thoughts are.

Being willing to honestly tackle these thoughts when they occur sets you up for success, and combined with the other emotional agility strategies, can provide helpful career development.

Step Out

This second element is all about perspective. Emotional agility encourages stepping back and evaluating those thoughts as the outcomes of your emotions that they are. Detaching thoughts from the emotions they stem from can help you remember they have less power over you. Your emotions aren’t permanent, and they don’t define who and what you are.

Keep in mind that those emotions will come and go, especially in a profession like rehab therapy, where you’re interacting with patients all day every day. Remembering that the negative thoughts that might occur won’t last forever can be a great way to calm down the inner monologue in your head.

Move On

The final element of emotional agility in the workplace is moving on. Make small but purposeful tweaks to your mindset that will move you more towards your core values. If you value kindness, this might mean being kinder to yourself when negative thoughts occur. It might help to form your response to your thoughts the same way you’d advise a friend, child, or coworker, who we tend to be more kind to than ourselves.

Changing your mindset can help you move on from negative thoughts more quickly, making you more agile and adaptable in your career. Not to mention, it might just make your average day more enjoyable.

All of these emotional agility strategies make you more able to handle problems at work—not just those that stem from your own negative thoughts—and make more moves in your career at large. You can successfully navigate common negative thought patterns that might be sabotaging your performance and emotional well-being.

Chronic Stress and Burnout Strategies

Of course, managing your thoughts on your own can only do so much, especially if you’re dealing with chronic stress or burnout. Often, the ways to manage those workplace concerns requires effort from both you and your workplace as a whole. But there are some things you can do to manage stress and prevent burnout, in partnership with your workplace.

Managing Stress

Limiting the amount of chronic stress you’re under is priority number one when it comes to preventing burnout. Much of this comes down to knowing the root causes of your stress. Is it your schedule? Are you missing too much family time? Do you not have time for documentation? Are you not able to adequately connect with patients because your appointments are too short or you see too many of them? Are you having trouble connecting with your coworkers?

Once you know what’s causing your stress, you can figure out the right way to tackle it. This might mean using new technology, like an electronic medical record (EMR) that cuts down on documentation time and reduces how many compliance regulations you need to be on top of. It might mean setting alarms to keep track of how much time you spend on documentation. Finding ways to manage the root cause of the stress will help you feel more in control of your day and your career.

Clinic Changes

Some of the ways you manage stress at work can’t be fixed by changing your mindset or adapting to new tools and strategies. Some things you need help from your supervisors and clinic to alleviate. You need aid from your overall clinic or organization to reduce the risk of burnout and make the work environment more pleasant for employees who spend most of their days there.

If you run a clinic, burnout could be costing you money and quality staff, which is not only not good for your operations, but also might be putting a strain on your working relationship with the therapists. Check in with them regularly about their schedule and workload, to make sure they’re feeling good about how much they’re working and when they’re in the clinic. There are plenty of areas of concern when it comes to preventing burnout, but those are a good place to start.

The best way to promote clinic-wide changes to reduce stress, burnout, and negative workplace thoughts is to ensure employee and employer are in regular contact with each other and are communicating openly and effectively.

Rehab Therapists Can Beat Negative Workplace Thoughts

With a little change in perspective and some help from your workplace at large, you can beat those negative workplace thoughts. Whether they’re just your run-of-the-mill bad day, chronic stress creeping in, or full-blown burnout. Shifting to remember your thoughts are temporary, that they simply reflect your emotions, and then move on from them can keep negative thoughts to a minimum.

When it comes to bigger issues, like chronic stress and burnout, keeping an open dialogue between employer and employee can mitigate the factors that might be leaving rehab therapists feeling overworked or underappreciated in their career. Whatever the cause, there are strategies you can employ to reduce the impact negative workplace thoughts have on your career.