There is a veterinary technician — you probably know her, or someone exactly like her — who has been at the practice for 11 years. She knows which cats will bite before they're out of the carrier, which clients need five extra minutes, and how to talk a panicked owner off a ledge at 4:45 on a Friday. She is, by every reasonable measure, indispensable. And that is precisely the problem.

Veterinary medicine selects for competence. Veterinary professionals study for it, test for it, get judged by it on every shift. The more issues one individual solves, the more challenges find their way to them. The more people rely on them, the less they learn to function without them. And somewhere in that feedback loop, the practice's greatest asset can become its most significant bottleneck.

Cohost Jennifer Edwards, DVM, ACC, CPC, ELI-MP, and Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS, call this pattern "over-functioning." In this episode of The Resilient Vet, they make the case that this system can burn out individuals, stall team development, and make entire organizations more fragile than they appear.

In this episode of The Resilient Vet Podcast: Mind and Body Strategies for Success, hosts Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS, and Jennifer Edwards, DVM, ACC, CPC, ELI-MP, discuss the impact of catabolic energy on veterinary teams. Edwards explains that the exhaustion many veterinary professionals feel is often tied less to their workload and more to the breaking-down, draining nature of catabolic energy. Although useful for short-term survival, this state becomes a primary driver of burnout when it becomes a long-term default.

In this episode of The Resilient Vet: Mind and Body Strategies for Success, hosts Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS, and Jennifer Edwards, DVM, ACC, CPC, ELI-MP, discuss how physical and emotional preparation before shifts can help veterinary professionals become more resilient in their careers. They explain that resilience is not a "switch" one flips, nor a product that can be bought. Rather, it is a skill set developed through intentional physical and emotional warm-ups before a shift even begins.

They also explore the concept of the “veterinary athlete”: The idea that surviving the physical and emotional demands of a long shift requires the same kind of intentional warm-up and training an athlete brings to game day. To help veterinary professionals build this resilience, Shaw and Edwards share tips and exercises that veterinary professionals can use to strengthen their mental and physical resilience in their roles.

“We all know that burnout in [veterinary] medicine is really kind of an epidemic,” cohost Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS, begins in this episode of The Resilient Vet: Mind and Body Strategies for Success. In this installment, Shaw and Jennifer Edwards, DVM, ACC, CPC, ELI-MP, dig into why veterinary professionals continue to struggle with burnout despite the abundance of wellness information available.

According to Shaw and Edwards, addressing burnout starts with identifying an individual’s true “why,” recognizing what gets in the way, and shifting from gathering information to taking action in meaningful, personalized ways.