You have to maintain your professionalism while working, and often that means you have to suppress your personal views or feelings. An important key to preventing physician burnout is to make sure this suppression of feelings doesn't spill over into your personal life.

Being able to confide in someone, to share your emotions (particularly with respect to worries, fears, anger and frustrations) in a healthy way with someone you trust, is in no way a sign of weakness. To the contrary, it is a hallmark of confidence and is one important key to having control over your actions and emotions.

Making a habit of suppressing your emotions can eventually lead to depression, less-than-ideal decision making, and sometimes seemingly uncontrollable outbursts. Ultimately, it can also be a major contributor to physician burnout.

If this has become an issue for you, then rather than burying your emotions, focus on recognizing them and understanding them, so you can transform them into meaningful actions and choices – ones that will benefit your patients, your family and friends and your peers, and that will help you reduce your risk of physician burnout.

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