How We Recover From Burnout

Recently, we talked about energy vampires , and I gave you a practice. Name what drains you and what fills you back up, and if you know one of those people is coming, talk yourself up first, with music or movement or whatever gets you there, before the energy vampire comes for you. It works, and I still do it. But it doesn’t answer why it's so hard to say no at work, and I have to be honest with y...

I came home from three days away with a group of women. There was rest, there was a massage, there were facials and there was the food, and none of that is what restored me. If you’ve been booking the spa day and still asking why isn’t self-care helping my burnout, I want to be really precise about what actually did, because I think we have been sold the wrong definition of self-care for years. Wh...

Your house is quiet. Everybody’s settled in. The work is done. The kitchen is closed. You tell yourself, you know what, I’ve earned a few minutes to just sit and do nothing, so you pick up your phone, look up, and an hour’s gone. If you have ever lain there afterwards asking, “Why can’t I stop scrolling at night?” I’m not going to tell you to get off your phone, and I’d like to explain why. Why ca...

I met with a friend of mine whose boss told her she was acting far too overconfident, and then on other days told her she was acting too mopey. She doesn’t work at my firm. She doesn’t even work in law. When she went looking for what she had actually done wrong, nobody could give her a single example, and that gap is what this post is about: what to do when your boss criticizes your personality an...

I talk a lot about work. Statistics about work, what work costs, what the profession asks of you. I know. But we all have to go home at some point, and today I want to talk about how to stop bringing work stress home when you walk in still wearing your full workplace armour. Here’s how I discovered it. How do you stop bringing work stress home? You catch the transfer while it’s happening, in the h...

If you are burnt out right now, you have already been handed two options. Leave, or push through. I’ve done both across more than 40 years in the legal profession, and I want to say this plainly to anyone lying awake at 9 pm on a Monday asking, “Should I quit my job or push through burnout?” Neither one was the actual solution for me, and I don’t think it will be for you either. Should I quit my j...

You can have your annual physical. Your blood work can come back fine. Your doctor can tell you everything looks good. And you can still find yourself thinking: If everything’s okay, then why do I feel like this? I think this is one of the hardest parts of burnout to recognize. The early signs of burnout rarely arrive with a big announcement. They show up in pieces, and we get very good at explain...

In the last article, I went through two studies, one Canadian and one American, on what the ecosystem of law costs the women working inside it. Same profession, same hours, same pressure as the men beside us, and the numbers still come back worse for us in every study I have read. What is self-advocacy for women lawyers? Self-advocacy is the work you already do on a file, aimed at your own situati...

In the last two episodes, I gave you a lot of data. Two national studies, two countries, both arriving at the same conclusion: women in the legal profession are burning out faster than men, and it isn’t because of individual resilience. Once resilience is off the table, the question of why women lawyers burn out faster than men stops being a question about us and becomes a question about the desig...

Why do women lawyers burn out more than men? Until this month , I could only answer that with Canadian data: the 63% burnout rate among female lawyers I walked through in the last episode. On August 1, 2026, the American Bar Association released its first national study built specifically around the well-being of women lawyers. Almost 3,000 lawyers participated. The findings mirrored what we alrea...

63.3% of women in the legal profession report experiencing burnout. Not a rough month. Not a heavy trial schedule. Burnout, measured, documented, and reported by nearly two out of three women practicing law in this country. That is not one overwhelmed associate at one bad firm. That is the profession. What the numbers actually say about women in law The figures come from Canada’s first comprehensi...

I have watched women negotiate seven-figure settlements without blinking. I am one of them. And then I have watched those same women go home and not be able to ask their own partner for help with dinner. Instead, a narrative runs quietly in the background: it is all on me, no one else is going to do this, I just have to keep pushing through. I have watched women write the most surgical, airtight e...

In the last article, I asked you a question. How old is the version of you that shows up at work? If you sat with that, even for a few seconds, you may already know the answer. Something inside of you has been running for a very long time. So today I want to answer the question I left you with. Why doesn’t “just relax” work? Why doesn’t breathing, setting more boundaries, or getting a hold of your...

Picture someone with me for a second. She walks into her office at 7:15 in the morning. Nobody else is there yet. She sits down and starts answering emails before she has taken her coat off, maybe before she has had her first coffee. Watch her for the rest of the morning. She does not ask twice for anything. If the answer is no, she moves on. She does not push back. She walks into meetings, reads...

Someone in a community I belong to left a comment about my podcast. They said they wanted to know more about me. Not the framework. Not the tools. Me. How am I actually living this, and not just teaching it? I was taken aback at first. I thought I was living it. Then I sat with it and realized something more uncomfortable: maybe I am living it, and I am just not showing you that part. So here is t...

Last month I read an article on Women of Influence about remote work, and one line has not left me since. The flexibility that keeps us in the workforce quietly turns into the reason we are not moving up in it. The research in that article found something worth sitting with. Remote workers are not getting passed over for promotion because they are producing less than their peers. Output was never...

Have you ever known exactly what you needed to say? You rehearsed it. Out loud in the shower. In the car. To a friend who told you that you were completely justified, that the argument was airtight, that there was no room for a single “yeah, but.” You had an answer for everything. And then the moment came to hit send. Or make the call. Or walk into the room and have the conversation. And you didn’...

The story you tell yourself about your life is the life you’ll experience. I want to leave that there for a second before I explain it, because it tends to get read as a nice idea and skipped past. This is not a catchy line on a poster. It is not a mechanism I invented. It is closer to a description of how attention actually works. We all have an identity story Every one of us has one. We talk abo...

I saw something recently that caught my attention. It was a side-by-side image. On one side, what girls were told about red flags in the 1990s. On the other, what someone believes we should be teaching now. The 1990s column read like a script most of us can recite from memory: * If he picks on you, he likes you. * Boys will be boys. * He’s jealous because he cares. * Give him another chance. * Be...

Let’s start with a question. Not one to answer out loud. One to sit with for the next six minutes: What does this mean about me? That is the question every child asks constantly, long before they have language for it. And the answer they land on becomes the operating system they run for the next thirty years. The Moment a Child Decides What They Are Worth Picture a kid running home from school. So...

It was nighttime. My work was done. I was sitting in my chair, ready for bed, completely chill. Nothing was going on. Then, for some reason, I picked up my phone and checked my messages. There was an email. I read it, and my entire state changed in seconds. My breath went shallow. I felt the tension climb into my neck. My heart started pounding a little harder. I stood up, and I started moving. My...

It is Tuesday, 6:30 at night. A partner drops a file on your desk on their way out the door and says, “Can you turn this around by tomorrow morning?” You already have plans. You said it out loud earlier. You may have even texted your friends: tonight is all mine. No responsibilities. No obligations. And yet, before you have had a single second to think, your mouth opens and out come the words. “Su...

Burnout isn’t your problem. The story you’re living is. I know this because I was living one too. Be the strong one. Hold it all together. Never drop the ball. From the outside, I looked like a success. On the inside, I felt a pressure I could never escape. And it wasn’t until I finally saw it that things shifted. It wasn’t my life that was exhausting me. It was the identity I was trying to prove....

If you are exhausted but still performing, successful but strangely empty, this post is for you. The short answer: high performers burn out not because they lose ambition, but because they keep answering an old question (“how much can I achieve?”) long after it stopped being the right one. Recovery starts by asking a new question:  What matters to me now? Key takeaways: * Being driven is not the p...

I want to begin somewhere I don’t usually begin. Not with a framework. Not with the research. With me. Because I was that woman. The one who was achieving everything and disappearing at the same time. I was delivering at every level, hitting every external marker, and quietly going through the motions of my own life. I wasn’t falling apart in any way you could see. I was doing everything I could j...