Ending Physician Overwhelm

Send us Fan Mail You got more done today than you’ll ever give yourself credit for. And the list is still longer than it was this morning. If you’ve got scraps of paper in every bag and a notes app full of lists that never end, nothing is wrong with your work ethic. We were trained, for very good reasons, to drop everything the moment something is labeled urgent. That training saves lives. It also...

Send us Fan Mail What if the thing standing between you and an easier work life isn’t time, or staffing, or the right moment? What if it’s permission, and the person you’ve been waiting on to give it is you? We are rule followers. We got here by passing every test, clearing every hurdle, and doing what the hierarchy asked of us for years. So of course giving ourselves permission feels foreign. Som...

Send us Fan Mail You cut back your FTE, or you finally walked out the door, and somehow you still aren't resting. If that sounds familiar, nothing is wrong with you. Your brain is doing exactly what it was trained to do. When I sit down with a physician who's weighing a big change (cutting back, leaving employed practice, going out on her own) and we dig into why, it nearly always comes...

Send us Fan Mail If I asked you right now to name your superpower, could you? I don’t mean the thing you’re working on or the thing you apologize for. I mean the thing you are genuinely, unmistakably good at. Most of us would hesitate. We spent years training to become experts, and the whole time we were also being trained to be deeply humble about it. So we got very fluent at apologizing, even fo...

Send us Fan Mail Raise your hand if you've asked your employer for something you needed and gotten a whole lot of no. Maybe with a little gaslighting on the side. A few weeks ago I talked about thinking of your career as a business. One of you wrote in with a great question: how does that work when I'm sitting across from my employer, trying to get what I need? So this week, that's...

Send us Fan Mail What would you say if I told you that you're just a couple of "No's" away from getting the "Yes" that you want? With this in mind, most of us would likely persist when it comes to asking for what we want/need, right? It's all a part of the art of negotiation, and my guest today, Dr. Weili Gray, is an expert in finding the path to the "Yes!&q...

Send us Fan Mail What if the reminder to renew your license isn't an insult, just a line item in a business you didn't know you were running? Most of us never took a business class, and we can still tell you exactly how it feels when the CME reminder arrives and no one offers time to do it. This week I want you to try on a different frame: your career is a business, and you are the one t...

Send us Fan Mail This was not the break I needed. That was the thought running on a loop years ago, when I finally took time off because I wasn't sleeping and couldn't keep going. A few days in, my three-year-old's preschool had a fire in the kitchen. Nobody was hurt. Preschool closed for ten business days, which was most of the rest I had taken that time to get. And then came the p...

Send us Fan Mail Raise your hand if you have ever made a big decision based purely on how you thought it would make you feel afterward. If your hand is not up right now, I am calling you a liar, because we all do this constantly. Maybe if I get that board certification, I will stop feeling like an imposter. Maybe if I drop my FTE, I will finally feel calm. Nothing is wrong with thinking this way,...

Send us Fan Mail You don't actually want to leave medicine. You want to leave whatever is happening to you right now. Those are two completely different problems, and only one of them has a fantasy attached to it. When work gets bad enough, our brains tend to offer us exactly one exit: quit. Become a barista. Move to an island. And I get it, that fantasy is doing a job for us. But it is not a...

Send us Fan Mail Back to school season hits different when you're the physician, not the kid with the new backpack. But that Target aisle full of fresh pens and Trapper Keepers is tapping into something real: the pull toward a reset. This week I'm borrowing that energy, minus the pressure to build some perfect new system from scratch. We're talking about the low hanging fruit. The d...

Send us Fan Mail "I'm just a family doc." "Oh, you can call me Megan, that's fine." "Ugh, I'm so lazy." We say these all day long and almost none of us hear ourselves say them. I was at a coaching retreat recently, standing with a brilliant physician friend who had just pitched herself to speak at her state medical group's women physicians' co...

Send us Fan Mail There is a decision you are not making. It finds you in the car on the way to work. It finds you after a hard clinic day. It finds you at 11pm when you are trying to fall asleep. And every day you tell yourself you will just wait and see. Here is what I want you to know: waiting is not free. Every day you spend not deciding is a day you hand over mental bandwidth and emotional ene...

Send us Fan Mail There is no algorithm for being everything to everyone. There is no version of you that can close every note, remember every modifier, sort every piece of garbage correctly, and never make anyone unhappy. And yet somehow we keep walking around asking ourselves how we're supposed to do it all, like the failure is ours instead of the expectation being the problem. This week I w...

Send us Fan Mail Tell me a place in your life that is not home and not work where you feel fully like yourself. And no, sitting in your car in the driveway does not count. This week we are talking about the idea of a third place, a concept that is part physical space and part something you do, a hobby or an activity that lets you show up as a full human being instead of Dr. So and So. Think the co...

Send us Fan Mail I spent 48 hours trying to get home from a trip to see my mother in law. A canceled flight, a rerouted city that turned out to be smack in the middle of World Cup weekend, a storm system, and a whole lot of nothing I could control. And somehow, it turned into one of the clearest lessons on values I have had in a long time. Here is the thing. Most of us do not think about our value...

Send us Fan Mail Quick: without overthinking it, what area of your life could use some more attention right now? If your answer was "all of it," or if you just went completely blank, this episode is exactly for you. In this episode, we work through the five areas where I see physicians struggling most. Not in some abstract, general-public kind of way, but in the specific, trained-out-of-...

Send us Fan Mail Raise your hand if you've hit December and suddenly realized your CME credits are nowhere close to where they need to be. Yeah. Me too. That particular flavor of end-of-year panic is incredibly common, and it doesn't have to keep happening. In this episode, we dig into the unsexy but necessary work of getting a handle on your CME, your board certifications, and all the c...

Send us Fan Mail You are halfway through 2026 and I have a feeling you have not stopped once to notice what you have actually done. That is exactly what this episode is for. Not a performance review, not a goal-setting hustle session, just a real pause to look at where you are, what you want for the rest of this year, and what is honestly getting in the way of you having it. We are going to do a l...

Send us Fan Mail When was the last time you actually saw your own doctor? If you just cringed a little, you are exactly who this episode is for. I take care of a lot of physicians in my practice, and I have heard every version of the story: self-prescribed thyroid meds, skipped physicals, and a very impressive collection of coping strategies that are working just well enough to keep going. I get i...

Send us Fan Mail (Trigger Warning: This episode does briefly reference physician suicide) Have you ever looked up and realized you've slid back into a pattern you thought you'd left behind, and immediately wondered what is wrong with you? That moment of recognition, the one where you feel like you've undone all your progress, is exactly what we're digging into today. One of my...

Send us Fan Mail How many times have you apologized today? Not for something you actually did wrong. Just for existing, taking up space, having needs, being human? This episode is about that. We're going through 10 specific things that women physicians have been socialized to apologize for, and we are done. Not because we're going to become difficult or stop caring, but because the apolo...

Send us Fan Mail You did the hard part last week. You sat with the feelings, let the thoughts tumble out, and didn't immediately sprint toward a job board. Good. Now we figure out what's actually next. Part 2 is where we get practical, but not in the way medicine trained us to be practical. We're not just dusting off the CV and hitting LinkedIn. We're doing something harder and...

Send us Fan Mail Raise your hand if you or someone you know has been laid off. Not fired. Laid off. It's happening more and more, and if you've been watching what's going on in healthcare right now, it probably doesn't surprise you. What might surprise you is how complicated it feels, even when part of you is relieved. In this episode, we dig into something that doesn't ge...

Send us Fan Mail Let's talk about the hassle factor, and why that term doesn't even begin to cover what we're actually dealing with. I'm coming into this episode a little fired up, and honestly, that's the point. In the last two weeks, I've been flooded with prior authorization requests for patients on GLP-1 medications. Patients who already have approval. Patients we...