You know how to treat a patient with an overuse injury. It’s time to take your own medicine and apply that to your career.

You would never tell a runner with six months of knee pain to keep foam rolling, keep scrolling Facebook groups, and keep stacking new interventions until something sticks. You'd look at her form, her shoes, her training plan, her sleep, her whole life. You'd land on a diagnosis. Then you'd give her the smallest possible dose of the thing that would actually help — because you know you'll lose her if you hand her twelve things on the first visit.

In this episode, I illuminate how women in healthcare do the exact opposite for themselves. When the work stops feeling right, the reflex is to add. Another certification. Another course. Better sleep, better labs, more meditation. All of it well-intentioned, none of it aimed at a diagnosis, because nobody has helped you make one.

We apply the principles of PT assessment to what a real assessment of your career "overuse injury" would look like, why burnout is more accurately named moral injury, and how the four stress responses show up in your career decisions — including the freeze and fawn responses, which are the ones that feel like progress and are the biggest traps.

And then there's the trap underneath it all -- you're looking for answers inside the same system that's wearing you down, from the mentors that are invested in keeping you swimming in the same current that's not right for you anymore.

No one is telling you to blow up your life. That was never the ask. The ask is to stop carrying the whole experience by yourself.

00:58 — The thing you'd never tell a patient to do (yet here you are doing it to yourself)
02:05 — The patient who piled on everything and it still didn't work
04:35 — Minimum effective dose: where you'd start with a patient that you're not doing for yourself
05:45 — What piling on looks like when it's your career
07:25 — Nobody is telling you to burn your career down and start over
11:05 — The real flex: why it feels brave to say "this isn't working anymore"
14:20 — Why your nervous system is behaving how it is — and how to step out of the current you're swimming in

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