What I wish I’d known before it happened to me
In 2019, I burnt out.
If you’re reading this as a fellow doctor, you’ll understand exactly why that sentence is harder to write than it looks. Because I knew burnout. I had cared for patients navigating it for years. I knew the frameworks, the language, the risk factors. I knew what I had to do not just to manage it, but also to avoid it.
I understood, intellectually, what it looked like from the outside.
What I didn’t understand was how invisible it could be from the inside, especially when you’re the one who’s supposed to be doing the seeing.
Looking back now, that still surprises me.
Medicine trains us to be extraordinarily observant of others. We learn to listen closely, to notice subtle shifts in behaviour or mood, to piece together the small details that reveal what someone is really experiencing beneath the surface… and yet that same attentiveness is rarely turned inward. The culture we were trained in actively encourages the opposite- push through the fatigue, prioritise the patient… keep going, even when your own system is clearly signalling that something is not right.
Like many of you, I followed that culture faithfully, for a very long time.
What it actually looked like
Burnout crept into my life gradually, in ways I now recognise as textbook, and yet somehow didn’t see at the time.
Exhaustion that sat alongside an inability to sleep. I was asleep by 8pm every night (so I didn’t think I had a ‘problem’), but it was because I was up at 3-4am every morning, unable to stay asleep.
Going above and beyond at work, saying ‘yes’ to everything, fitting in last minute patients… but still feeling like it wasn’t enough.
A background hum of anxiety about making a mistake, which I helpfully reframed as just being a “good doctor.” But as I look back now, it was more than that near ubiquitous perfectionism we have come to normalise in medicine. It was the sort of underlying fear that made me triple check everything and practice defensive medicine. I felt like it was only a matter of time before I would make that mistake that could end my career.
But here’s the part that I think will resonate with a lot of you: what I genuinely believed at the time was diligence- the comprehensive notes (more than usual), the extra investigations “just in case,” squeezing in every patient I could because I didn’t trust my own ability to risk manage- was actually my rapidly diminishing capacity to hold uncertainty. I wasn’t being thorough. I was grasping at the threads of a clinical identity that was beginning to fray.
I was doing all of this while not fully registering how much everything was unravelling.
The final collapse came abruptly, after an unexpected patient outcome. Nothing that caused lasting harm, but my brain spiralled hard into the what-ifs, and I had my first panic attack. Even then, I tried to manage it like a clinical problem. I booked appointments with my psychologist, I found a psychiatrist who specialised in seeing doctors and medical students. I arranged leave… three weeks in advance, because I was fully booked until then. But at the same time as I was madly trying to micro-manage my burnout… I kept showing up.
Pushing myself further and further towards what was rapidly becoming an inevitable endpoint.
Eventually, the decision on when to stop clinical work was taken out of my hands.
One morning, as I went to walk out the door for work, I decided to check my patient list for the day and saw the name of the patient who I had had the unexpected outcome. Hanging on by a thread, and now knowing that they would be sitting across the room from me in a few short hours, I had one of the worst panic attacks of my life. Everything I had been trying to outpace by staying busy and “in control” hit me all at once. I crumbled to the floor, hysterically crying. My three and five year old, who had been standing beside me, ready to go to daycare and kinder, started crying at the sight of it.
My body had finally said no, long after my mind should have.
Up until that point, I had continued showing up each day, doing the work I had trained for and cared deeply about. But this wasn’t tiredness or reluctance. It was as though something inside me had shut down. The best way I can describe it is that the “doctor light” within me had gone out.
For someone whose professional identity had been built over more than a decade of training and practice, that was both frightening and deeply disorienting. I had always thought of myself as resilient. Capable. Someone who could handle the pressures of medical work. Yet suddenly I couldn’t do the very thing I had spent years preparing for, and more than that- I couldn’t physically even will myself to set foot outside of my own front door.
How I got there
What I understand now is that burnout rarely arrives overnight, even when the final moment of collapse feels sudden. The conditions accumulate slowly, in ways that are genuinely easy to overlook when life is busy and your responsibilities feel non-negotiable.
The years leading up to my burnout will feel familiar to many of you. Medical training is intense and prolonged, and I had spent years carrying it alongside young children, a growing practice, and the particular kind of pressure that comes from being someone who holds their own performance to a very high standard.
Those personal characteristics- the strong sense of responsibility, the high standards, the willingness to push through difficulty, are exactly what medicine selects for and rewards. They helped me succeed academically and clinically, but they also meant I almost never paused to question whether the pace I was sustaining was actually sustainable.
When warning signs appeared, I explained them away. Everyone feels exhausted sometimes. The workload will settle. If I can just keep pushing forward, things will improve.
In hindsight, the signals were there for a long time. Increasingly fragile sleep. A gradual dimming of enjoyment in work. The emotional load of clinical care beginning to feel heavier than it once had. But without the space or the awareness to actually reflect on what those signals might mean, I kept moving forward until moving forward was no longer possible.
What recovery actually looked like
One of the most important things I learned during this time was that recovery from burnout is not linear. It is tempting to imagine a steady upward trajectory, things gradually improving until eventually you return to “normal.” My own experience was far more complex than that, and I think it’s important to say so.
Progress was slow and uneven. There were genuine moments of hope, and there were periods where old patterns resurfaced and it felt like I was back at the beginning. That’s not failure. That’s what recovery from burnout actually looks like, and knowing that in advance would have helped me enormously.
Over time, things did begin to shift. I worked on building skills that had been largely absent from my life before- a deeper awareness of my own internal experience, actual attention to what my body and mind were signalling. I intentionally invested more time and effort into my mindfulness practice, and perhaps most transformationally for me personally- I learnt how to practice self-compassion. Not as some abstract wellness concept, but as a clinical tool that is fundamental for perfectionists like me (and perhaps you, too?).
Through this, I realised that perhaps the hardest part of my recovery was beginning to soften my relationship with perfectionism, and with the deeply ingrained belief that my worth was tied to constant productivity. Learning to approach myself with the same curiosity and kindness I routinely offered to patients… that took time. It still takes practice.
But gradually, I came to understand that respecting my own limits wasn’t weakness. It was what was required to sustain both my wellbeing and meaningful work over the long term. Burnout forced me to confront that directly, and in doing so, it reshaped the direction of my life in ways I never anticipated.
If you’re reading this and recognising something
I didn’t write this to alarm you. I wrote it because I know how easy it is, in the middle of a full and demanding clinical life, to overlook the quieter signals that tell you something needs attention.
Burnout doesn’t always announce itself dramatically. Often it begins with subtle shifts in energy, in enjoyment, in connection, that gradually accumulate over time. The same observational skills we apply to our patients (the ones that notice what’s really happening beneath the surface) are often the last skills we turn on ourselves.
You cannot change what you do not see. And the culture of medicine has not historically made it easy to see our own distress or need to change.
Whole Hearted Medicine exists because of exactly this. Our retreats are designed by doctors for doctors- CPD-accredited spaces where you can step away from the demands of clinical life, develop genuine evidence-based tools for mindfulness and self-compassion, and do that in an environment that actually takes care of you for a change. I created these spaces because I knew more than anything else, the thing that changed everything for me, was learning that self-compassion is a skill- a skill that is learnable, practicable and applicable in every domain of life. It is also something that I’m learning with some humility; many of us struggle with as doctors.
If the Mindfulness and Wellbeing retreat resonates, or if you’re in a leadership role and the Wholehearted Leadership retreat feels more relevant, I’d love to have you join us. And if you’re not sure where to start, feel free to get in touch and we can have a conversation.
Because burnout didn’t end my story. It turned out to be the beginning of something I couldn’t have imagined. I hope that whatever you’re carrying right now, you don’t have to wait as long as I did to put some of it down.
With warmth, from one doctor to another,
Emily
If any of this feels close to home for you, or if you would like some support, as a doctor there are many resources available to you.
Your GP: On the day that I stopped work due to burnout, my GP was the first person I turned to for help, and I am forever grateful for her support. I can promise you, as a GP myself, that you are never “wasting our time”, and we are always happy to see our colleagues taking care of their health. You deserve the same level of care and support as what you give to your patients, and even though you are a doctor yourself, that also means that you deserve to be a patient sometimes and let someone else help you to carry the weight of making decisions around your health.
Doctors’ Health Alliance: https://doctorshealthalliance.org.au/ Ph: 1800 006 888
There is a Doctors’ Health Alliance in every Australian state and territory, plus in New Zealand as well. They have a free 24hr confidential advice line that is available to all doctors, as well as a list of GP’s in every state, who are happy to see their colleagues as patients (if you don’t already have your own GP).
Mindcheck HP: https://www.mindcheckhp.com.au/
Mindcheck HP are a group of psychologists who work exclusively with health professionals and their families. They are based in Brisbane, but offer telehealth services across Australia, and you do not need a referral in order to access their services.
Hand-n-Hand Peer Support: https://www.handnhand.org.au/
Hand-n-Hand offer free peer level support to all health professionals across Australia and New Zealand.
Beyond Blue: https://www.beyondblue.org.au/
Beyond Blue has a significant amount of online resources that are free and easy to access, as as well as offering crisis support if needed.
Your Medical Defence Organisation:
A lot of us might not immediately think about contacting our MDO when we need support- but depending on who you are with, many will provide access to mental health support or other programs to support your overall wellbeing.
AVANT https://avant.org.au/key-support-services
MDA National https://www.mdanational.com.au/member-benefits/health-and-well-being