Diabetes care and education is incredibly rewarding work, but it can also be demanding. New medications, technologies, clinical guidelines, and evolving standards continually ask us to learn and adapt. Add growing caseloads, administrative demands, and the emotional responsibility of supporting people living with a complex chronic condition, and it’s easy to understand why burnout can occur.
Then there’s the professional pressure outside of patient care: attend the conference, join the committee, earn another credential, volunteer, network, present, publish, and keep up with everyone else who seems to be doing it all.
It can create a persistent feeling that we should always be doing more.
A few years ago, a colleague introduced me to JOMO, the Joy of Missing Out. I originally explored the concept through the lens of entrepreneurship, but I’ve come to appreciate its relevance to burnout and building a sustainable career in diabetes care and education.
From FOMO to JOMO
Professional FOMO, or the fear of missing out, can make every conference, committee, or new opportunity feel important. Saying yes can open doors, but every yes also requires time, attention, and energy.
JOMO flips the question. Instead of asking, “What might I miss if I say no?” ask, “What am I making room for by saying no?”
For me, embracing JOMO has meant focusing on a few strategies:
1. Define your priorities. Identify your professional “North Star.” When you know what you want your work to accomplish, it becomes easier to recognize which opportunities align with that vision and which can pass.
2. Protect your capacity. Time isn’t our only limited resource. Attention, patience, creativity, and emotional energy matter too. Boundaries help preserve those resources for the work and people that matter most.
3. Be mindful of professional comparison. LinkedIn and other professional spaces can make it seem like everyone is publishing, presenting, traveling, and launching something new. We rarely see what people declined, delegated, or sacrificed along the way.
4. Let good work be enough. There will always be another credential, conference, committee, or project. Give yourself permission to experience satisfaction before immediately moving the goalpost.
Building a Sustainable Career
Burnout cannot be solved through self-care alone. Workload, staffing, organizational culture, administrative burden, and healthcare systems all contribute. We shouldn’t place responsibility for systemic problems entirely on individual clinicians.
But where we do have agency, we can become more intentional about what deserves our limited capacity.
Resilience doesn’t have to mean becoming better at tolerating more. Sometimes it means recognizing our limits, protecting what matters, and allowing some opportunities to pass.
Sometimes, missing out is exactly what we need. Let it be enough.
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Want to learn more? I highly recommend The Joy of Missing Out by Tanya Dalton. It’s a great resource for thinking more intentionally about priorities, productivity, and giving yourself permission to let go of “doing it all.”