52. Dr. Stephanie Byerly on Healing the Healers

Apr 14

We all know that you can’t pour from an empty cup. It’s especially true for physicians who spend their days healing others. Dr. Stephanie Byerly joins me to speak about her own experience with burnout and how she adopted self-care practices to heal herself.

How to Avoid Burnout as a Woman Physician

Create Self Care Routines
Find a Community of Other Women
Educate Yourself About the Culture of Medicine
Find Cognitive Psychology-Based Coaching

Listen to Episode 52 Here

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About Stephanie I Byerly, MD

Dr. Stephanie Byerly is a Professor of Anesthesiology and a Director of a High-Risk Obstetrical Unit, a Gender Equity Expert, a Certified Mind-Body Medicine Coach, a Physician Wellness Expert, The Chair, of the American Society of Anesthesiologists Committee on Women Anesthesiologists, and a Certified Life and Weight Loss Coach.

Chaos and drama described Stephanie’s life until about 10 years ago. She came from a very dysfunctional childhood with a mother with severe mental illness and experienced several types of abuse and trauma. Stephanie was also an ill child growing up and spent some time in the hospital, but from 3 years old, spoke of becoming a doctor.

Stephanie always had this image of what she wanted her life to be and look like to the outside world. She had a vision that becoming a physician which would render her immune to the struggles of life and allow her to fix everything and make a difference in this world.

After graduating from her physician training, Stephanie married a physician, had two beautiful daughters, a beautiful house, cars, and a great job but still was not happy. She never would have imagined that some of the most challenging and defining times were ahead.

After getting divorced and becoming a single parent, the sole breadwinner, and being a full-time physician, Stephanie began her personal growth journey. She was balancing being a parent who was not going to allow their children to face any of the challenges she faced growing up while being a full-time physician with many administrative roles and aspirations for a successful productive academic career.

Stephanie wanted to understand why everything seemed to just happen to her, why she was not happy, and always felt like the victim. She wanted to understand why being a woman in medicine brought another slew of challenges and obstacles that were unfair.

Then the burnout came, twice, and her biggest fear was not being able to support her two daughters. Stephanie’s biggest fear was becoming like her mother and knew something had to change. She found a way out of the burnout and understood she had a lot more work to do to find the peace, joy, and happiness she wanted in her life.

Going through Life Coach Training has changed Stephanie’s life in unbelievable ways and provided her with the tools to impact the lives of women physicians by showing them a way out of “survival mode” to a life of personal fulfillment, joy, happiness, and realizing they are “enough just the way they are.”

Stephanie started her Life Coaching Business, Healing Through Life Coaching. She helps women physicians who are exhausted, overextended, and feel like they are failing at everything take back their power to have joy in their personal and professional lives.

Burnout and Victim Mentality

Dr. Stephanie Byerly speaks about her own experience with burnout. Physicians do experience burnout at a fairly high rate, but why is that? For Stephanie, hers came not just from the stress and pressure of being a woman physician and single mother, but also from falling into a space of victim mentality.

It’s understandable when you feel like the world is constantly pressuring you, to adopt a victim mentality. But it’s not sustainable. Stephanie shares the steps she took to break free of this way of thinking once she recognized it for what it is.

Stephanie took some big steps after recognizing the position she was in. The biggest takeaway here is self-care. Taking the time to prioritize your own health and wellbeing is the key to avoiding burnout - and healing from it.

The Importance of Feeling Your Feelings

Stephanie also explains the importance of feeling your feelings. Instead of avoiding them or bottling them up, actually sitting and recognizing them for what they are is a life changer. She shares how this process allowed her brain to realize that feeling even the most negative feelings isn’t the worst thing she can do - she will be just fine.

This realization allowed her to escape that automatic protection mode and move on to focusing on better thoughts. Stephanie explains how life coaching helped her change her thought model. She also shares what role fear has in her life and how she’s now able to move past the feelings of fear.

Finally, Stephanie shares some of her own self-care practices. Gratitude is one of the biggest practices you can adopt, along with regular exercise, getting outside and journaling.

Homework for Women Physicians

What self-care practices do you regularly engage in? If you don’t currently have any, what practices will you start to bring into your routine? Let me know in the comments below!

In This Episode

How to recognize when you have a victim mentality [7:00]
What the next steps after realizing you’re burned out are [11:30]
Why you should sit with all of your feelings [13:15]
What role fear has in your life [17:00]
What self-care practices will sustain you through medicine [19:45]

Quotes

“We have these 40,000 - 60,000 thoughts a day, half negative, half positive, and we don’t even know about 95% of them. Our primitive brain wants us to go towards the negative all the time. Once we realize that that’s what our brain automatically does to protect ourselves, we can start looking at our thoughts and changing those, and our outcomes, and living intentionally. It is so transformational.” [9:02]

“I let myself feel the feelings and they go away. That was the most liberating thing for me to realize that I can feel the feelings and that I’m going to be just fine. It allows your brain to have different thoughts because you’re not going into automatic protection mode and shutting everything down.” [14:36]

“We’re in this culture where we’re facing so many dilemmas we had no idea we were going to face. We face all of this, on top of everything that all physicians face, and it’s overwhelming.” [21:20]