Tilt!

Careful planning puts you ahead in the long run; hurry and scurry puts you further behind.
—Proverbs 21:5

Flashing lights, ringing bells as the score rolls up, the rolling steel ball and the sound of it ricocheting off the scoring posts…that is pinball.

My friends played pinball a lot. They got really competitive and spent lots of money just for bragging rights. If they played too aggressively however; the pinball machine would ring and flash the word TILT! — an indication that someone was doing too much and the game was shutting down.

TILT! Ever had that happen to you? Maybe not playing pinball …. maybe just by living at such a busy pace, the next thing puts you into overload … TILT! and the game starts shutting down. Health, relationships, headaches are all signs of TILT! in your life.

Last Thursday evening, Dr. Richard Swenson spoke at the first Physician Wellbeing seminar on the topic of overload. Actually his title was "The Role of Margin in Health and Sustainability: Practical Prescriptions." He shared some pretty compelling data indicating that life and professional work can overwhelm and place you on the edge of TILT! unless you make some careful and purposeful choices.

Look at the list of overwhelming choices and information you deal with daily:

• 30,000: the number of items you can choose from in the average grocery store
• In your lifetime you will have to operate at least 20,000 different pieces of technology
• You have about 55,000 different ways to have your coffee at Starbucks
• There are over 500 billion documents available on the Internet
• Every day, you are exposed to more than 10 hours of media
• In health care there are 2,000 to 4,000 citations added to MEDLINE each day. If you read two articles a day for a year, you would be 1,000 years behind.
• In 1948 the PDR had 300 pages. In 2006 the PDR had 3,500 pages!
• In 2006 there were 5,020 medical journals with over 15 million references in MEDLINE.

What you might call progress is really increasing complexity and the forces of this modern world are all imbalancing such that life/work balance and self care become moving targets. TILT! is the result of not keeping the balance. From time to time everyone gets into the TILT! zone, but increasingly more and more are living in the TILT! zone. Here are some symptoms that tend to appear when the TILT! zone is encountered.

• Apathy, withdrawal, depression, work dread
• Irritability, anger, hostility
• Frustration, disorganization
• Mistakes, poor judgment, chaos
• Fatigue, exhaustion, burnout
• Moral failure, relational problems
• Risk-taking behavior, excessive self-medication
• Abnormal sleeping or eating patterns
• GI & CV symptoms, headaches

So what do you do when you experience one or more of the above? You need to restore the margin in your life: the space between your load and your limits. The space where you recharge your batteries, your health, relationships; and reflect on what is really important.

In a few moments you are going to care for people who are in the TILT! zone. Help them think about restoring the margins, the edges of their life so they can do more than recover…they can heal!