Burnout: How Did We Get Here And What’s Next

Picture this with me for a moment. You wake up each day excited to go to work. You love the work you do and you have sufficient time with each patient, feeling a sense of pride and accomplishment in being able to make a difference in their lives. Your support staff are consistent and competent, asking for your help only when it truly requires a physician’s input; otherwise, they handle the administrative and triaging tasks so you can focus on patient care.

You finish the day with all of your notes done and your messages answered, and you seamlessly make the transition of putting your work thoughts aside and going home to enjoy your evening. You may not do patient care every day - other days you teach, or consult, or coach, and this variety keeps you feeling inspired and energized. You’re grateful each day to have chosen a career in medicine, and you happily endorse the profession to any young person who’s considering becoming a doctor and asks for your advice.

If this visualization describes you, congratulations!! You’re among a minority of physicians who have found work-life balance and aren’t grappling with burnout. More likely, however, this scenario feels so foreign it’s almost a parody of reality. It may even make you angry to read it. But what if this could be real? What if this could be your life?

But I thought I knew what I wanted to do with my life, and that led me here, you might say. I don’t know what I want anymore. As physicians, most of us were raised as high achievers. It’s been ingrained in us to be competent, decisive, and driven. While many of us have learned to say “I don’t know” when discussing complex medical questions with our patients, admitting to feeling lost or stuck in our career can feel like an admission of failure. I took on multi-six-figure debt, worked innumerable grueling hours, delayed earning until my 30s, and missed so many life and family events for this? I don’t even know if I want to do this anymore. 

In addition to this unrealistic expectation that our younger selves could have actually predicted what our present-day work life looks like, physicians are almost categorically susceptible to stretching ourselves too thin in the service of others. In their book Burnout, sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski talk about “human giver syndrome,” the notion that you must keep giving and serving others at the expense of your own well-being. At some point in your life, you received attention and validation for trying to “fix” things, and at some later point it becomes almost impossible to disentangle this service from your self worth. You’ve heard the instruction on flights to put on your oxygen mask in an emergency before helping others? Many physicians are the living embodiment of putting masks on everyone else while neglecting to secure their own.

You can’t keep filling the cups of others when you have nothing left to give, and you can’t refill your own cup without taking some time to care for yourself. But with a healthcare system that touts individual responsibility for resilience rather than acknowledging institutional culpability, it’s important to be discerning about the kind of support you seek. During the several years I struggled with burnout, I felt very alone. I tried reaching out to colleagues to network and find more tolerable clinical work or the elusive non-clinical miracle, and I got the sense that I was the only one who couldn’t figure out how to just suck it up and make it work. This was a soul-crushing threat to my identity and the most financially costly time of my life through lost productivity. 

If you’re feeling stuck and feel like this is speaking to you, I have good news - you don’t need to know what to do. You just need to recognize that something needs to change and be willing to take that one first step by asking for help. Connection is key to creating the space to hear yourself think again, to learn to trust what you want, and to find empowerment to pursue the life you want. That’s what I aim to provide here at EmpoweredMD. This is a space to be yourself, to share the thoughts you’ve been afraid to say out loud, and to find a supportive community of like-minded physicians. 

Please join our community today for more inspiration on how to build your dream career, or book a free consult to learn more about our coaching offerings.