There was a time in medicine when I thought being a good doctor meant learning to set emotion aside.
Not because I didn't care.
But because emotions felt messy, and I needed clarity and objectivity.
There were patients waiting.
Charts to finish.
Diagnoses not to miss.
And somewhere along the way, many of us absorbed the same quiet message:
Stay objective.
Stay efficient.
Keep moving.
So we did.
What we didn't always recognize was that in becoming skilled at functioning as good doctors, we could also become increasingly disconnected from ourselves.
Like many of us, I once thought of emotional life as something separate from our physiology.
It is not.
Our emotions are integral to how our nervous systems help us navigate the world. They influence what we notice, how we respond, and how we connect with others.
Over time, through my work in behavioral health and my study of social neuroscience, I began to see something differently:
Human beings are not machines with interchangeable parts.
We are relational beings whose nervous systems are constantly responding to one another and to the world around us.
The exhaustion so many clinicians experience is not simply a consequence of too much work. For some, there is an additional cost to learning to function under pressure while becoming increasingly disconnected from their own experience.
And patients may feel that disconnection, too.
I don't believe doctors have stopped caring.
Rather, medicine has become increasingly organized around productivity, measurement, and performance—often at the expense of presence, relationship, and humanity.
The answer is not to become less scientific.
It is to become more fully human.
This space is an exploration of what that might look like.