ABSTRACT
The thesis of this chapter is simple: seeing patients is a stressful business; too much job stress is bad for the doctor, and hence for his patients; so a competent doctor recognises his own mounting stress level, and does something constructive about it. For this is exactly the same world of inner experience which, in the patient, practitioners try to explore and give attention to during the consultation. The regular and frequent dusting of the doctor's emotional state, so that stress doesn't settle on his equanimity, is so important in the consultation that it merits a final checkpoint of its own, which the author calls HOUSEKEEPING. If dusting is grime prevention, HOUSEKEEPING is stress prevention. Job stress can be divided into the three natural divisions of time – past, present and future. There are various techniques which help dispel past and future stress which are described in the chapter.
