Burnout doesn’t stay at work.

We bring home the exhaustion, the frustration, and sometimes the short fuse. And the people closest to us can end up carrying the weight of a job they never signed up for.

But can that work in the other direction, too? Can healthy relationships actually protect us when work gets hard?

In this episode, I talk with Steven Cohn, PhD, LMFT, MBA, a relationship specialist who has spent more than 25 years working with couples. We explore the “crossover effect” of work stress, why feeling heard and understood matters, how couples can support each other without becoming responsible for fixing each other, and why even a strong relationship can’t make an unsustainable job sustainable.

Steven also gives us a wonderfully simple way to think about relationships: two people in their own boats, learning how to navigate the same pond.

Because maybe sustainability at work isn’t only about our relationship with work. Maybe it’s also about taking care of the people who keep us whole.

Are physicians islands? We spend years learning to be self-sufficient, to have answers, and to keep moving forward when things get hard. But what happens when the weight of the work becomes too much to carry alone? In this episode, Dr. Natalie Bowersox joins me for a conversation about teamwork, conflict, difficult outcomes, coaching, and the moments that remind us we were never meant to do this work by ourselves. It's a thoughtful discussion about connection, vulnerability, and why asking for help may be one of the strongest things we can do.

In this episode of Heal the Burn, I talk with Dr. Carrie Hersh, a neurologist and multiple sclerosis specialist at Cleveland Clinic in Las Vegas, about burnout, identity, and what it means to “buy back time.”

Carrie shares the story of reaching a point where she seriously wondered whether she could stay in medicine at all. She shares how, with time, support, and a lot of reflection, she realized that medicine itself wasn’t the problem. The problem was trying to do everything, all at once, without enough room to breathe.

We talk about the hidden stories physicians carry about productivity, seriousness, and success — and how changing the shape of a career can sometimes be the thing that allows us to stay connected to the work we still love.