https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njyJl1hlf1o




Welcome to the Jameson Files



Carrie Webber:



Welcome to the Jameson Files. I'm Carrie Webber, and I'm your host. Thank you so much for joining us once again for another episode. We're thrilled. If you're here joining us live on Facebook, thank you for popping in and being a part of our live stream. If you're following us on our podcast channels and listening to this through iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify, thank you for being a part of our Jameson Files community. We would encourage you to please subscribe if you haven't already to follow when we get updates, and invite your dental peers to join the community as well. We want to provide content and information that is helpful for you and your continuous growth as a dental professional. So thank you for joining us and for spreading the word. I am so excited to have with us today Jameson's founder and my mother, Cathy Jameson.



And I asked Cathy to join us today because what we have all gone through—as a community, as a society, as a whole—over the past months has been nothing less than extraordinarily stressful, both in our personal lives and in our professional lives. We’ve experienced a great deal, even continuing today, and whether we realize it or not, the results of extensive stress in our lives have a long-term impact. A lot of things that people, practices, teams, groups are experiencing now are the results of long-term experience with stress.



And for those of you that may not know Cathy, Mom has spent the majority of our lives studying stress and how to control stress. And we're very fortunate that she chose dentistry as her point of focus on how to manage stress and control stress in our daily lives. And so I asked you to be a part of today's episode so that we could speak of your lifelong study on stress and talk about not only what we are seeing happening in our dental realm, but also talk about some ways that we as individuals and as teams could do some work, manage it more effectively to get it under control. So let's start with what stress is and share with everyone, if you could, what you've learned in terms of how we could start to identify what stress is and how we may be experiencing it in our lives.



Learn to Identify and Manage Stress



Cathy Jameson:



Great. It's a great place to start. Stress. We often use the term "stress" and the whole, "I'm so stressed; this is so stressful." And so it is important to start with what is stress. Stress is a person's response, either physiologically or psychologically to anything that's impacting them from the outside. And an interesting point about stress is that each individual responds to different stimuli in different ways. Your response may be totally different than my response when we face the same thing. There's nothing good or bad about that. It's just that because we are different different people and we're individuals, we're going to have a different response. And so one of the first things that each of us needs to do is to stop and identify what causes stress for us.



Identify the Source



Now you would do this individually, but you would also do this as a practice. If you're having problems in practice. If you're having discomfort in the practice, just stop and say, “What is causing this discomfort? What's causing the commotion? What's causing the disharmony?” Because the first step in problem solving is to identify what is the problem in the first place. That's the first step in stress management to identify what is it that causes stress in the first place. Once you've identified what's causing stress, the next step is finding ways to resolve that. 



So why is so-and-so upset? Not to judge that person, but to realize that each person's going to respond differently. That doesn't make them good or bad, strong or weak. We're just different.



Types of Stress Responses



And so now let me also make one other point. One kind of response is a physiological or bodily response to stress. We know that could be headaches, migraines, cardiovascular problems, intestinal or stomach problems, sleep disorders. There's many things that can be physiological responses to overwhelming stress. Psychological responses could be irritability, inability to get along with others, a lack of energy, the lack of desire to go to work, can't get up in the morning, can't get enough energy to get dressed. It’s the inability to even function or have any kind of desire to function. 



And this can lead to tardiness. It can lead to absenteeism, which translates to a problem for the practice itself that also can lead to a dysfunction in the productivity of the practice, which becomes a problem to the practice itself. So you’ll want to identify what’s at the root of these sorts of problems. Are there problems that are going on that I really need to start taking care of? 



Because when something begins to have a true physiological or psychological impact on a person, it's then termed distress, and it's when distress begins to have a negative impact on a human being. This can become very harmful. In fact, Ken Cooper from the Cooper clinic wellness clinic in Dallas, Texas, one of the great, great wellness clinics in the world, in my opinion determined in their research that approximately 80% of illnesses being treated in America can be traced back to stress or distress in one way, shape or form. And many other programs, such as by Harvard University, have said the same.



Stress versus Distress



Carrie Webber:



I'm so glad that you brought that up because that idea of stress versus distress is something you have taught me my entire life. You know, stress under control can be good. Sometimes it can help us in our performance. You see stress under control with great athletes. It can, if we control it, stress can be a part of your healthy way of life and how you perform overall. But when you allow stress to get out of control, or if it is having that continuous negative impact on you, that is distress when you really see things start to fray at the ends.



If someone is coming to you in a state of distress, they're not themselves. And we have to recognize if you're working with a team under a great deal of distress (or a spouse or someone in your life, or even yourself) that the best version of ourselves is not coming through because you're not able to function as your best self. It’s good to be in touch and in tune with what healthy stress looks and feels like versus what distress looks and feels like. There are some things that stress you, that you don't have much control of. COVID is a perfect example. What you have to be able to focus on are the things you can control and try to make an impact on those things you can control and let those start to lead the way.



Cathy Jameson:



Right. We cannot control the fact that COVID came into our country, that there were mandates put forth. So things impacted us that we had no control over. But we can hopefully respond in positive, constructive, healthy ways. Maybe we didn't like it, and we didn't want to do some of the things we were mandated to do, but it was the best thing to do. Right. And so why pull back and push back and fight and complain and be dysfunctional about it? That isn't going to do anything about the distress.



Carrie Webber:



Yes. And, and the best way to have controlled stress that we really helped a lot of clients with at the time was to focus on the things we can do. Where can we focus our energy? We have to take a step back and say, what can I do in this situation to try and get things a little bit more under control? So let's talk about some of the things that may be impacting dentistry today, causing stress, either for dental practice owners, doctors, the leaders, even for the entire team. As we talk through this, you may say, “Hey, that’s what's going on.” We’re hearing that a lot now from doctors trying to get their teams reunified and back together. And it could be that they're experiencing the after-effects of long-term stress. So what would you say we should be looking at in our own lives and dentistry that could be impacting us in a stressful way?



Stress of COVID Logistics



Cathy Jameson:



Well, my husband is a lifetime member of the American Dental Association, so we get the morning newsletter from the ADA every morning. And I read it. It's great. And so there's good news coming from the ADA now that we’re a year into the COVID pandemic. About 25% of people who went to the dentist on a regular basis were not coming as of several months ago. But that's changing now. The vast majority of the people who were going to the dentist on a regular basis prior to COVID are now coming back.



So we're seeing that resurgence now in the numbers of people who are coming to the practice. And that's good. But some of the things that the practices have seen and are still seeing, have to do with the organization of the practice itself. Now one of the things we’re very proud of with Jameson marketing is that you have helped practices educate their patients about what you are doing in your practice to protect them. And that information and education has made a difference in keeping people coming and helping them feel safe. And research from the ADA says that patients do feel safe for the most part coming to the dental practices. So good for you.



Marketing efforts have been so critical because there was a lag in productivity for a while. Then there was a surge of patients coming back and with that revenue came back. But with that return came another organizational problem or challenge. And that was scheduling. We have all this new stuff we have to do. We have to wear all this PPE. We have new filtration systems. We have more things we have to do for infection control. How are we going to get all this done in the timeframes that we have allocated for our appointments?

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