Dentistry is a great career, isn’t it? Or at least it has that reputation. You get to help people and change lives and be a respected member of society. Plus, everyone needs dentistry and always will. It’s not going anywhere, so you can collect a steady paycheck forever, really. The stability of dentistry makes this career a no brainer for many.

That’s the great part about this career and a main reason many of us chose it.

But is dentistry really as stable as we think?

I talk to a lot of dentists who tell me that this stability and security is precisely why they stay– despite being extremely unhappy.

I’ve received texts from dentists who’ve had to pull over on their way to work and cancel their day because the anxiety felt debilitating. Some dentists told me they’d rather collect disability for depression than empower themselves to take control and make changes. Some dentists have even confided in me that they’d been suicidal. I get it. When you’re that sad and depressed, it’s hard to imagine that you can take control of your career and fix it yourself. That’s actually part of the depression. It tricks us into thinking we have no options.

In fact, one of my friends told me that when she was most entrenched in her depression, she thought she had only two choices: either suck it up and deal with it, or die.

Yes, the option of death came before the idea of fixing the root cause of her depression. Luckily for her, she knew those two options weren’t okay, and she got the support she needed to empower herself.

I get it. I used to feel stuck too. Dentistry was like that comfortable marriage, the relationship that gave me so much comfort in the familiar– despite the fact that the passion was gone.

The stability of dentistry actually kept me stuck.

We become so afraid of the unknown that these extreme “solutions” (which are really a lack of solutions) seem like the only way.

Lately I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how unstable and unpredictable dentistry really is.

In the grand scheme of things, dentistry does give us the stability we all crave. But in the granular day-to-day moments, dentistry is anything but stable.

In fact, that unpredictability is exactly what makes the work we do so hard.

You know how it is. You might have too many emergencies one day, so you have no time to go to the bathroom. Then the next day you have a million cancellations, so you’re sitting around.

No matter how perfect your work is, there are no guarantees. You can never predict when your perfect work will have a less than ideal result.

You never know when a team member will have to call in sick and leave your whole team barely surviving to get through the day. In a non-clinical business setting, that’s not the end of the world, but when it happens in dentistry, it severely impacts the day. The show must go on. We do our best to keep it going, but it creates a massive amount of stress.

So really, how ironic is it that we view dentistry as stable in the big picture, but the work itself is anything but stable?

Maybe this is partly to blame for your unhappiness in dentistry. If so, there’s a lack of alignment here. You want stability and safety, but dentistry itself feels chaotic, unpredictable, and unsafe. It doesn’t always allow you to safely be human and make mistakes. Sure, it might sometimes, but you never know when your favorite patient will turn on you or you’ll have to redo all your hard work. You never know what consequences you’ll have to pay for being human, even when you’ve done your best.

It’s not that problems are guaranteed to happen, but the fear of problems happening is what makes life in dentistry debilitating.

There is such a disconnect here. We allow ourselves to suffer through daily instability that leads to depression, anxiety, and more… all so we can have the big picture stability that we think will make us happy.

The problem is that big picture stability doesn’t really help us feel better every day. We go through our days feeling miserable, and clinging to the illusion of stability is exactly what keeps us stuck.

As you are assessing your relationship in your career, if stability is a main draw for you, notice the tradeoff you are making. Ask yourself if true stability really even exists.

Then ask yourself, is it worth it?

That’s up to you.