I just spent a weekend doing absolutely nothing. Well, nothing memorable, anyway. The week before, I’d been on home call during an Epic upgrade. If you’ve lived through one of these updates, you know the chaos. In addition to the usual phone calls about echo results, arranging studies, and communicating with referring physicians, I was getting a constant stream of secure chat notifications updating me on the system’s progress. These pings arrived at all hours, including one particularly aggravating notification at 2:45 a.m. Because apparently, even our IT infrastructure doesn’t sleep.

So when my call week finally ended on Monday morning, I put in my time the following week with the quiet determination of someone counting down to freedom. When I arrived home on Friday evening, I did something radical: I put my phone on the charger, switched it to silent, and walked away. That night, my family and I lit a fire in the fire pit and watched a college football game outside, soaking in the perfect Midwest fall evening, that magical window between summer’s humidity and winter’s bite when the air smells like wood smoke and possibility. Saturday brought a morning workout, followed by a leisurely stroll through our garden. We took inventory of the fruits of our hard labor in the yard, appreciating the beauty we’d cultivated over months of weekend work. The dogs joined us, delighting in their simple pleasures: new smells, a neighbor’s cat, and the joy of just being outside with their people. Sunday unfolded with equal simplicity. I read a book whose title I can barely remember now. I took a nap in the afternoon sunlight. And then I cooked for our weekly Sunday supper, a family tradition where we gather around the table to catch up and simply enjoy each other’s company.

During that meal, we went around the table sharing our weekly highs and lows, a ritual that’s become as much a part of Sunday supper as the food itself. I honestly can’t remember what my highs and lows were that particular evening. But as I listened to my family share theirs, something struck me: I was happy. And I hadn’t done anything extraordinary. I’d spent the weekend doing ordinary things, on ordinary days, with ordinary moments. And somehow, that ordinariness had filled me up in a way that I hadn’t experienced in a while. It made me realize something we rarely discuss in medicine: the extraordinary power of ordinary joy.

The physician’s paradox

Here’s the thing about physicians: We’re trained to hunt for the extraordinary. Our entire education is built around pattern recognition and finding the problem. We learn to spot the lab result that doesn’t make sense, to recognize when something is subtly off, and to identify the one abnormal finding among a sea of normal ones. Sure, most of us see plenty of well patients, but our training sharpens our focus on those who are unwell. We’re professional seekers of the abnormal. This mindset starts long before medical school. We were admitted to medical school by being extraordinary: achieving the highest GPAs, becoming leaders in our communities, accumulating the most clinical hours, publishing research, and volunteering. We learned early that “average” wasn’t good enough. We had to be exceptional. Then came medical school, where we competed for the best residency spots. Then residency, where we worked 80-hour weeks (or more, depending on when you trained) while striving for fellowship positions or the best job offers. Years of delayed gratification, of sacrificing sleep, relationships, hobbies, and health in pursuit of excellence.

When we finally finish training, many of us play catch-up. We rush to start families, scramble to save for retirement after years of accumulating debt, and begin spending our attending income on the things we deprived ourselves of for so long. The dream vacation. The house that finally feels worthy of all those years of sacrifice. What little free time we have, we try to live fast. We pack our weekends with activities, our vacations with itineraries, our lives with achievement. Because ordinary doesn’t feel like enough after everything we’ve delayed to get here. In short, our training and the sacrifices we make teach us to overlook the ordinary, to dismiss it, to see it as insufficient. And that might be one of the most important, least discussed contributors to physician burnout and dissatisfaction.

What is ordinary joy

Ordinary joy isn’t about settling for less or lowering your standards. It’s not about becoming complacent or giving up on goals. Instead, ordinary joy is the ability to find fulfillment in everyday moments. It’s the pleasure of a good cup of coffee in the quiet hours of the morning. The satisfaction of a short walk around the block between patients. The comfort of a familiar routine. The warmth of a regular Tuesday dinner with your family, where nothing special happens except being together. Psychologists call this “savoring.” It is the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance positive experiences in our lives. Dr. Fred Bryant, a social psychologist who has spent decades researching this concept, describes savoring as “the capacity to generate, intensify, and prolong enjoyment.” It’s an active process of noticing and appreciating the good that’s already present in our ordinary lives. Ordinary joy is found in what the Danish call hygge, or the sense of cozy contentment and well-being through enjoying simple things. Or what the Dutch describe as gezelligheid, a feeling of coziness, togetherness, and belonging. The world’s happiest countries find richness in simplicity.

The science of the ordinary

The research on ordinary joy and its impact on well-being is compelling and relevant for physicians. A landmark study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that the frequency of positive experiences matters more than their intensity. In other words, having many small, pleasant experiences throughout your days and weeks contributes more to overall happiness than occasional peak experiences. People who experienced frequent positive emotions, even mild ones, showed better psychological resilience and greater life satisfaction than those who experienced occasional intense positive emotions. This finding flies in the face of how many physicians structure their lives. We save up for that one big vacation, that major purchase, that significant achievement. But the research suggests we’d be better served by cultivating daily moments of positivity. For physicians specifically, research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association examined factors that protect against burnout. While systemic issues like workload and administrative burden were significant contributors to burnout, the study found that physicians who reported regular engagement in activities they found personally meaningful, including simple hobbies and family time, showed significantly lower burnout rates. The protective effect wasn’t about the activities being extraordinary; it was about them being regular and personally resonant. Neuroscience offers additional insights. Studies using fMRI imaging have shown that our brains respond to anticipated rewards (like that big vacation or major purchase) differently than to experienced rewards (the actual enjoyment in the moment). The anticipation activates our dopamine system, that seeking, wanting circuit, but the actual experience of simple pleasures activates different neural networks associated with contentment and satisfaction. We need both, but our achievement-oriented culture (and medical training) overemphasizes the dopamine-seeking pathway while undervaluing the contentment circuits. Perhaps most compelling is the research on what psychologists call “hedonic adaptation,” or our tendency to return to a baseline level of happiness despite major positive or negative life events. That attending salary, that promotion, that dream house? Research shows we adapt to them within months, and they contribute less to our ongoing happiness than we predict. But the capacity to find joy in ordinary, repeated experiences shows less adaptation. Your morning coffee ritual can bring you pleasure for years. That Sunday dinner tradition can sustain you indefinitely. The extraordinary becomes ordinary quickly; the ordinary, when truly savored, remains nourishing.

Bringing it back home

Sitting at that Sunday supper table, I wasn’t thinking about any of this research. I was just noticing how I felt: content, connected, at peace. The weekend hadn’t included anything Instagram-worthy. I hadn’t checked off any major life goals or accomplished anything that would impress my colleagues. I’d simply existed in my ordinary life, paying attention to it, being present for it. And it struck me how counter this was to everything my medical training had taught me. In the hospital, ordinary is what we’re trained to see through. A normal exam, normal labs, normal imaging. These are things we quickly dismiss as we search for the abnormal. “Unremarkable” is literally a term of dismissal in our documentation. We’re pattern-recognition machines calibrated to detect deviation, and we carry that calibration home with us. We look at our ordinary lives and find them unremarkable. We compare our regular Tuesday to someone else’s highlight-reel. We measure our weekend against some imagined ideal of how successful people spend their time off. We feel guilty for “wasting” a day reading or napping when we could be optimizing, achieving, and advancing. Friday night around the fire pit wasn’t remarkable because anything special happened. It was remarkable because I was fully there, not checking my phone, not thinking about the next day’s cases, not mentally reviewing the week’s complications. Just watching the flames, feeling the fall air, half-listening to the game, and fully present with my family. The garden walk wasn’t special because our landscaping is award-winning (it’s not). It was special because I took in the colors, textures, evidence of growth and change, and the satisfaction of having created something with my own hands over time. Sunday supper wasn’t memorable because of what we ate or what we discussed. It was meaningful because it was a ritual, a regular touchpoint, an ordinary thing we do that connects us. These ordinary moments are the texture of a life. They’re what we’re actually living, day to day. The extraordinary moments, the promotions, the publications, the major achievements, are punctuation marks. Important, yes. But you can’t build a life out of punctuation marks. You need the sentences, the paragraphs, the ordinary words that carry the actual meaning.

The cost of overlooking the ordinary

When we dismiss the ordinary in our relentless pursuit of the extraordinary, we pay a price. We experience what psychologists call “arrival fallacy,” or the belief that reaching a goal will create lasting happiness. We tell ourselves: “I’ll be happy when I finish residency.” “I’ll relax once I make partner.” “I’ll enjoy life after I pay off my loans.” But the research is clear: arrival doesn’t work that way. We reach the goal, feel a brief surge of satisfaction, then return to baseline. Meanwhile, we’ve spent years overlooking the ordinary joys available to us right now. We’ve been so focused on the destination that we’ve missed the journey, and the journey is actually our life.

Reclaiming the ordinary

So how do we, as physicians trained to achieve and hunt for the abnormal, learn to appreciate the ordinary? It starts with permission. Permission to value the unremarkable. Permission to find a quiet weekend restorative rather than wasted. Permission to enjoy simple pleasures without feeling like we should be doing something more productive or impressive. It continues with practice. Like any skill, savoring ordinary joy requires repetition. Here are some practical ways to start:

• Create ordinary rituals: That Sunday supper isn’t special because of what we eat; it’s special because it’s regular. Rituals transform ordinary activities into meaningful touchstones. Maybe it’s a morning coffee routine, a weekly walk, or a regular phone call with a friend. The ordinariness is the point; it’s reliable, sustainable, and woven into the fabric of your life.
• Practice presence: When you’re doing something ordinary, actually do it. Not while checking your phone, not while mentally reviewing your to-do list. Just be there. Feel the warm water when you wash your hands between patients. Taste your lunch. Notice the sky on your drive home. Presence transforms ordinary moments into nourishing ones.
• Resist the comparison trap: Your ordinary life doesn’t need to be Instagram-worthy. In fact, the most nourishing ordinary moments often aren’t photogenic or shareable. They’re just yours, quiet and simple and real.
• Redefine productivity: Rest is productive. Play is productive. Doing “nothing” is productive if it restores you. We need to expand our definition of a “well-spent” day beyond achievement and accomplishment.
• Notice what you notice: Pay attention to the ordinary moments that make you feel good. Maybe it’s the first sip of coffee, or your dog’s greeting when you get home, or the feeling of clean sheets. These aren’t frivolous; they’re data points showing you what nourishes you. Honor them.
• Protect the ordinary: In our packed schedules, ordinary time is the first thing to go. We’ll move a regular dinner for a work obligation, skip our morning routine to get to the hospital earlier, or sacrifice our weekend walk to catch up on charts. But protecting these ordinary moments isn’t selfish; it’s essential. They’re not luxuries; they’re the foundation of a sustainable life.

An invitation

That weekend of “nothing” taught me something my medical training never addressed: ordinary joy isn’t a consolation prize for those who can’t achieve the extraordinary. It’s not settling. It’s not giving up on excellence or ambition. Ordinary joy is the sustainable fuel for a meaningful life. It’s what carries us through the long middle of our careers and our lives. It’s available every day, not just on special occasions. And it’s something we can get better at experiencing if we’re willing to value it. We spend so much of our medical training learning to see what’s wrong, to identify what’s abnormal, to fix what’s broken. These are crucial skills. But they’re incomplete. We also need to learn to see what’s right, to recognize what’s nourishing, to appreciate what’s working. We need to become as skilled at savoring the ordinary as we are at diagnosing the abnormal. So here’s my invitation: This week, notice one ordinary moment each day. Not to photograph it or share it or achieve anything with it. Just to be present for it, to let it nourish you, to recognize it as part of the texture of your life. Maybe it’s your morning shower, or the walk from your car to the hospital entrance, or the moment you sit down after a long day. Maybe it’s a regular meal with your family, or playing with your pet, or the quiet of your house before everyone wakes up. These moments won’t make it into your CV. They won’t impress your colleagues or advance your career. They’re just ordinary. And that’s exactly what makes them extraordinary.

Ben Reinking is a board-certified pediatric cardiologist, medical educator, and certified physician development coach, as well as the owner of The Developing Doctor. He can also be reached on Instagram.

He’s not just any coach—he’s a practicing physician who truly understands the realities of modern medicine. He knows firsthand the internal battles you’re facing, from short-staffing and limited resources to production metrics, constant billing pressures, and the ways your altruism can be taken advantage of. Ben is here to help you reignite the passion that first led you to medicine and provide you with the strategies needed to regain control.