Relief, Arriving Sideways
I am relieved to report that my burnout is over.
I sat with that sentence for a while, trying to find the right word for the feeling. "Happy" wasn't it. "Excited" definitely wasn't it. I was minding my own business, sitting in a lecture on the barriers physicians and APPs face in accessing mental health care, when I noticed I felt pretty good. Clear-headed. Engaged. Content, not happy, but solidly okay. And that noticing hit me with so much relief that I nearly missed the next slide.
I must have believed, somewhere below the level of conscious thought, that this was going to last forever. I didn't realize how much my suffering was making me suffer. I'll hang onto that little piece of metacognition for the next time I get burned out (if, when, who's counting), because it seems like useful information to have about myself. For now, I'm just going to let it be true without turning it into a lesson right away.
Was it kismet that my burnout resolved exactly as I sat down to learn about healthcare workers not getting the mental health care they need? No. I'd had this conference, the Joy and Wholeness Summit with the Coalition for Physician and APP Wellbeing, on my calendar for six months. It just happened to land on the same clinical break I was using to get my professional and emotional life (mentomotional, if you'll allow it) back in order. Although, now that I type that out, maybe it was kismet after all.
Y'all. We are not good. Dr. Robert Rogers opened by citing the AMA's 2025 Organizational Biopsy: physician burnout has fallen for three years running and now sits at 41.9%. He wasn't ready to call that a win, and neither am I. From there: the link between provider wellbeing and patient satisfaction (and length of stay, my mind is blown). The gap between leadership and the people actually doing the work (physicians who don't believe their organization supports their growth are eleven times more likely to leave). Zero Suicide's work with healthcare providers, and the fact that physicians carry a higher suicide risk than the general population, with some estimates putting female physicians at two to four times the risk of women outside medicine. APPs, it turns out, score worse than physicians on nearly every marker of well-being there is. (More on "Whole Brain Living" another time. That one deserves its own post.)
Here's what I keep circling back to: I've given enough lectures to know the architecture of one. You open with "yep, been there," so the room knows you're one of them. Then you bring the statistics so they understand the scope. Then you use those numbers to turn "yep, been there" into "oh no, this is serious." And only then, in the last handful of slides, do you get to offer something like an answer. I sat through a day and a half of that architecture, most of it built entirely out of bad news, and somewhere in the middle, my nervous system quietly decided it was safe to come back online.
That is not how I expected recovery to announce itself. I thought it would show up on my couch, or at a spa, or at minimum somewhere with better lighting. Instead, it showed up in a windowless conference room, mid-slide deck, while I was learning in granular detail about everything that's still broken in the profession I've given my life to. Maybe that's actually the tell. Not that the bad news stops landing, but that you can let it land without it taking you down with it. Curious instead of crushed. Able to hold "this is genuinely dire" and "I am, myself, currently fine" at the same time without needing one to win.
It also aligns with what I wrote last week: doing the effortful thing pays off later, not in the moment. This conference was exactly that kind of input. I didn't want to spend a day and a half of my break in a ballroom listening to suicide statistics. But it turned out to be the thing that eased me back toward clinical work, the thing that made me lift my head up out of the schedule and the billing and the boundaries I'd let get run over one too many times.
So. Burnout didn't leave with an announcement. It left sideways, while I was looking at something else entirely. If you've come out the other side of a bad stretch, I'd bet yours didn't announce itself either. Email me and tell me where you were standing when you noticed. I'm curious what room you were in.