The Snow Day as a Diagnostic Test

Over the past few days, Nashville has been living inside a weather event that feels both mundane and oddly apocalyptic. This time, the snow itself was not a big deal. And we unveiled a new snowplow this year. She is named Dolly Plowton. She’s not pink or covered in rhinestones, though, which is a missed opportunity IMHO.

The ice has been another story. Trees are bowing and splintering under its weight. Power lines have been pulled down all over the city. Days after the initial weather has rolled through, hundreds of thousands of people across middle Tennessee are still without electricity. We’ve been lucky so far. Our lights have stayed on. But we have spent a lot of time standing at the windows, watching ice‑coated branches slowly sag toward the power lines that feed our house, quietly negotiating with the universe.

The abrupt interruption of ordinary life has stirred up two very different categories of memory. One is grim: early COVID, when the world narrowed overnight and every plan dissolved into uncertainty. The other is unexpectedly tender: snow days in Ohio, where I grew up.

On normal school days, getting out of bed felt so very unfair. But on possible snow days, I woke up at the crack of dawn without an alarm, heart racing, staring at the television as the ticker at the bottom of the screen listed called-off school districts. When I saw my own school scroll by, the feeling was unmistakable. Pure, unfiltered joy. A gift. A small miracle. A temporary suspension of gravity.

That was…not the vibe when my calendar began to collapse on Monday.

One by one, the in‑person lectures were cancelled. Then the virtual meetings. Then, the meetings that existed only as calendar placeholders for “someday when things calm down.” Even Teams was no match for widespread power outages.

Instead of joy, I felt disoriented. Untethered. Adrift.

And almost immediately, pulled in two opposite directions: the fantasy of an adult snow day—reading on the couch, drinking hot drinks to warm up from the inside, doing absolutely nothing of consequence—and the familiar gravitational force of productivity. I could catch up. I could get organized. I could get ahead. I could be good.

Productivity won.

I cleared my inbox. I reorganized the rubble of my schedule. I started drafting a lecture I’m not scheduled to give for months. It felt competent. Contained. Respectable.

It also felt expensive.

Not in hours, exactly, but in something quieter and more revealing: motive. I did not do those things because they were necessary or even particularly urgent. I did them because I knew I would feel vaguely ashamed if I did not. I did them to avoid the low‑grade anxiety that creeps in when I am not demonstrably useful.

I had fleeting thoughts of resting. But the truth is that my sense of worth remains stubbornly entangled with my output.

I believe, sincerely and without caveat, that all human beings have intrinsic value independent of their productivity. All human beings except me.

Somewhere along the way, I absorbed the idea that I must justify my existence with motion. With checked boxes. With forward progress. When the world shuts down—so thoroughly that even the elaborate virtual scaffolding we built during COVID is unavailable—and I am not scheduled to be physically present in the ICU, my internal narrative becomes blunt and unforgiving:

If you are not useful, you are unnecessary.

So I manufacture necessity.

I create purpose out of tasks that could have waited. I build small altars out of to‑do lists. I offer them up to the gods of legitimacy and hope they accept the sacrifice.

Seen this way, the snow day functions like a diagnostic test.

Not for the city’s infrastructure, or the fragility of our power grid, or even the impressive tensile strength of tree branches under half an inch of ice.

But for the stories we tell ourselves about who we are when no one is asking anything of us.

For many physicians (especially women physicians), the reflex is the same. If there is unscheduled time, we fill it. If there is quiet, we populate it. If there is rest, we metabolize it into preparation.

We do this in part because our work genuinely matters. Patients still need care when roads are impassable. Colleagues still shoulder impossible loads. There is real worth in showing up when it is hard, dangerous, or deeply inconvenient. That devotion deserves respect.

But another force is at work as well: the moralization of productivity. The idea that time must be justified. That rest is indulgent unless it is medically necessary. That stillness is suspicious.

A true snow day threatens that worldview.

It asks an uncomfortable question: Who are you when you are not optimizing anything?

Not improving. Not preparing. Not rescuing. Not producing.

Just…existing in a temporarily paused world.

I do not have a clean resolution here. No triumphant declaration that I spent the second day of the storm wrapped in a blanket, fully healed and spiritually renewed.

I still answered emails.

But I noticed the discomfort.

I noticed how quickly my brain equated “nothing scheduled” with “nothing valuable.” I noticed how reflexively I reached for work to stabilize myself. I noticed the faint panic under the efficiency.

And noticing is not nothing.

If burnout is, in part, the slow erosion of the ability to believe that we matter outside our function, then these strange, accidental pauses are data points. Small, unscheduled stress tests of the stories we carry.

If You Get a Surprise Pause, Here Are a Few Things to Try

Not as a prescription. Just as experiments.

• Name the reflex. When the urge to optimize arises, say it out loud: "This is my productivity alarm." You do not have to obey it to acknowledge it.

• Choose one small boundary. Not a whole day of rest. Something modest: a late start, one unproductive hour, a walk without a podcast, a book with no professional relevance.

• Separate urgency from discomfort. Ask: “Does this truly need to be done today, or does it simply relieve my anxiety to do it today?”

• Practice being “off duty” on purpose. Even briefly. Sit somewhere and let the world be paused without filling it with tasks. Notice what comes up.

• Write down the story your brain tells. (“If I’m not useful, I’m unnecessary.” Or whatever yours is.) Seeing it in ink often reveals how harsh and brittle it actually is.

You do not need to transform the day. You only need enough space to collect the data.

The snow will melt. Meetings will repopulate the calendar. The city will lurch back into motion.

But I am trying to remember this:

The discomfort of an empty day is not a character flaw. It is information.

And information, inconvenient as it may be, is where any honest diagnosis begins.