Coaching science
Coaching scienceThe studies behind the letter
Every study I cite in The Open Hand, or in my letters to physicians, is listed here.
Each one comes with what it found, and what it didn't.
Get each new study, and the complete bibliography, by email.
I'm a physician and a certified professional coach. When I cite research, I state it at the strength the evidence supports. These studies describe groups of people under study conditions. They don't promise what coaching will do for you.
Naming a feeling
Lieberman MD, Eisenberger NI, Crockett MJ, Tom SM, Pfeifer JH, Way BM. Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychol Sci. 2007;18(5):421-428.
Thirty adults viewed photographs of faces, most of them angry or afraid, in a brain scanner.
Choosing a word for the emotion lowered activity in the amygdala, compared with choosing a name that matched the face's gender, matching faces by emotion, or simply looking. It also raised activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex.
This was one small imaging study with lab images. It didn't test what happens in real life.
Stepping back from a painful moment
Kross E, Ayduk O. Making meaning out of negative experiences by self-distancing. Curr Dir Psychol Sci. 2011;20(3):187-191.
This review sums up the authors' experiments in which people recalled a painful memory.
People who watched the memory as an observer and asked why they felt what they felt reported less distress and less rumination. Their blood pressure rose less and came back down faster. Stepping back to dwell on what they felt didn't help.
These are lab experiments, not clinical trials.
Looking back from the future
Bruehlman-Senecal E, Ayduk O. This too shall pass: temporal distance and the regulation of emotional distress. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2015;108(2):356-375.
Across seven studies, mostly with university students, imagining how a current stressor would feel 10 years from now lowered distress more than imagining it 1 week from now.
The long view seemed to work by drawing attention to the fact that the hard part would pass. In one study, students who had done poorly on a midterm felt less distress, and their final exam scores didn't change.
The studies measured how people felt, not how well they decided.
Coaching physicians
Dyrbye LN, Shanafelt TD, Gill PR, Satele DV, West CP. Effect of a professional coaching intervention on the well-being and distress of physicians: a pilot randomized clinical trial. JAMA Intern Med. 2019;179(10):1406-1414.
In this Mayo Clinic pilot trial, 88 physicians who volunteered for coaching were randomly assigned to six sessions with a professional coach, about 3.5 hours over 5 months, or to a control group.
Overall burnout fell 17 percentage points in the coached group and rose about 5 points in the control group. Emotional exhaustion, quality of life, and resilience also improved with coaching. Depersonalization, job satisfaction, and engagement didn't change significantly.
It was a small pilot of volunteers at one institution.
Notifications and the inbox
O'Connor AW, Helfrich CD, Nelson KM, Sears JM, Singh H, Wong ES. Changes in electronic notification volume and primary care provider burnout. Am J Manag Care. 2023;29(1):57-63.
Across 138 Veterans Health Administration facilities, daily electronic notifications per primary care physician, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant fell on average from 128 to 114 between 2016 and 2018.
Burnout wasn't associated with how much a facility's notification volume rose or fell. Volume alone didn't predict burnout.
This was an observational study, so it can't show cause and effect.
Coaching is not medical care and does not create a doctor-patient relationship.
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