How We Recover From Burnout

Stacey Stevens
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Writer. Award-winning speaker. Lawyer. Writing about my life as high-achieving women who has broken free from performance conditioning and reclaimed my autonomy, self-worth, and personal power—without guilt, apology, or permission. staceylstevens.substack.com

  1. 17h ago

    Why Can't I Stop Even Though I'm Burnt Out?

    I couldn’t stop, even if I wanted to. If you’ve been asking yourself, "Why can’t I stop even though I’m burnt out?" I never once sat down and asked it, and the answer I gave everyone else back then left out most of the truth. For three years, my days were law school, raising two teenage boys, working part-time, and driving to and from law school, two hours each way. Then home to two dogs, one of which was a Great Dane; dinner for my kids; getting them ready for school; and tucking them into bed. Then it was my time. Study, read, write, and of course, sleep. The short answer: If you can’t stop even though you’re burnt out, ask yourself what it would mean about you if you just stopped. If the answer is nothing, keeping going is a choice. If what comes up is that you’re not enough, you don’t belong, or you feel guilt or dread, you’re being driven by fear. Why does “just put your head down” sound like the right answer? Because people love it, and so did I. Whenever someone asked me, “Stacey, how did you do it? How did you keep pushing yourself?” I shared that I just put my head down, put on these blinders like racehorses do, and pushed through and did what I had to do. “People love that answer. And honestly, so did I. Because it made me sound strong.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout It made me sound resilient and determined, and I was doing this for me, but I was also doing it for my family to give them a better life. All of that was true. It was also the only part I said out loud. What did “pushing through” leave out? It left out that I was exhausted and running on pretty much mostly nervous energy. It also left out that I was missing things that mattered to my kids, and the guilt I carried with me that never let up. “There were nights, I’ll admit it, when I was absolutely sure that I was making the biggest mistake of my life. That my kids were somehow gonna pay the price for my choice.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout When people ask me how I did it now, I give a bit of a different answer, one with those nights in it. Why can’t I stop even though I’m burnt out? For me, it was fear. Deep down, underneath all the commitment and resilience, I was driven by a belief I had created about myself: that I wasn’t enough, that I was always going to be that girl who would never amount to anything in her life. That belief had a history. “I’d left home when I was 15. I was told I wouldn’t amount to anything.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout So I spent most of my life doubling down to prove I wasn’t a failure, and I never recognized that as what was really driving me. I thought I was driven by dedication, plus the reward of people watching me and saying, "Oh my gosh, I can’t believe how you did it." Could I have stopped even if I wanted to? Honestly, no. It wasn’t until I started looking back that I realized being driven by fear had left me no choice but to keep going. What happens in your body when you feel you have no choice? When you believe you have no choice, you’re operating in survival mode. Survival mode is when your nervous system reacts to a threat, and while you’re in it, you aren’t really weighing options. Your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that handles reasoning and judgment, goes partially offline, so everything feels a little off, and your emotional brain takes over. At the same time, your body is being flooded with adrenaline and cortisol. I did this day in and day out for three years, and that was before I started working as a lawyer in a male-dominant profession. It got me success, and it got me to where I am today. It also led me to being extremely burnt out, standing in my kitchen looking around and saying, "Is this really all there is for me? If you’re living your life based on a past belief, a meaning you’ve made about yourself that you’re not something, you will burn out. I know it, and I proved it by driving two hours to school and back every day for three years. How can you tell if fear is what’s keeping you going? Ask yourself what it would mean about you if you stopped. If the answer is nothing, if you could do a little bit less and still know who you are, then keeping going is a choice. “Stacey, if you stop doing this, what does it mean about you? What are you afraid that it’s going to mean about you?” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout, on the question she wishes someone had asked her in law school If what comes up instead is an underlying fear that you’re not enough or you don’t belong, or there’s guilt or dread, you aren’t choosing anymore. That’s a sign your nervous system is dysregulated, meaning it’s stuck in its threat response, and your emotions are running the show over your logic. Maybe it’s a job where you keep wondering why you’re still there, or a relationship where you know it isn’t good for you, and you stay anyway. Take a moment and ask what it would mean about you if you just stopped. If the answer is that you're not whatever that blank is, you’re being run by a past conditioned belief about yourself that no longer serves you, and that’s your signal to go back and look at where that story came from. What do you do once you find the belief that’s running you? Go back to where the story came from and ask whether it’s really true. I did that. I looked back at my life and everything I’ve accomplished and asked, is it really true that I’m the girl that wouldn’t amount to anything? No, it’s not. Once I realized that, I learned how I could rewrite that story and change the meaning I’d made about myself, based on the truth as it is today. “Whatever comes up, remember that is not a verdict. That is your old rule that is still running you. Only now you get to see it.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout You will recover from burnout, Stacey Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit staceylstevens.substack.com

  2. 2d ago

    Why Do I Always Say Yes at Work?

    It’s 4:50 on a Friday. Your boss leans into your office and says, can you take this on? I need it for Monday. And before you’ve even had a chance to think about it, you hear yourself say, of course, not a problem. If you’ve ever typed “why do I always say yes at work” into a search bar, that’s the moment I want to stay in, because something happened in your body right before the thought fired that led you to say yes, even though you wanted to say no. The short answer: You always say yes at work because of a belief you’ve carried since childhood: if I say no, they’ll stop seeing me as someone they can count on. Your nervous system can’t tell a boss from a parent who sent you to your room, so it runs the same fear loop, and the overcompensation that follows leads to burnout. What happens in your body right before you say yes at work? Something physical happens before the yes, and it happens before the thought that fires it. Maybe there’s a drop in your stomach, maybe your shoulders come up, or maybe the words tumble out of your mouth so fast you don’t notice anything at all. If you can’t name a signal yet, that’s okay, because most of us were never trained to notice them. What you’re feeling in that second is your nervous system protecting you. The question I want to raise is: from what? Why do I always say yes at work, even when I want to say no? You say yes because underneath your “of course, no problem” there’s a belief about what happens if you say no. For a lot of us, it sounds something like this: if I say no, they’ll stop seeing me as someone they can count on. “There is a belief that you have carried around with you for probably most of your life, and you just don’t realize it yet.” Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout Your version might be worded differently. If I say no, they won’t see me as a team player, or maybe I won’t get hired back. Whatever the wording, that sentence or some other version of it is what fired your yes, and it fired before you’d consciously decided anything. What do we do after saying yes to protect how we’re seen? We compensate. Once we’ve said yes to protect ourselves from what we believe someone will think about us, we do everything we can to prove ourselves. “We cancel our weekend plans. We over prepare. We send the email at 11 o’clock on a Sunday night just so the person on the receiving end can see the timestamp.” Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout The Sunday-night email gives it away. The timestamp is the point, because it’s evidence someone else can see that you were the one they could count on. Should you stop saying yes if you’re early in your career? No. Especially if you are a junior coming up in your career, you have to work hard and prove yourself, and the last thing I would tell you is to do the opposite. What I’m asking about is the root belief about yourself if you say no. That belief makes all the difference between going down the road of burnout and making a conscious decision to take something on or not. Where does the belief that saying no diminishes your value come from? It comes from the meaning you made, as a kid, of what happened when you said no. As we grow up, we reach a certain age where we stop just having experiences and start interpreting those events in a way that makes meaning about who we are, and our nervous system and our mind take that meaning and bury it deep in our subconscious, where it becomes part of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. [ADD SOURCE for the research, or reframe this as your own observation.] Here’s how it went for me: “I remember growing up that if we were asked to do something and we said no, we were punished. If we said yes, and we did a good job, we were rewarded.” Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout At that point, we were already learning who we needed to be to get the reward, and at such a young age, the reward is love, validation, and acceptance. Then we become teenagers. Maybe you had a group of friends who wanted you to do something you knew you didn’t want to do, so you said no. Were you laughed at? Were you no longer in the loop, part of the group? Maybe you walked away feeling that your decision somehow meant you didn’t belong, or you weren’t good enough anymore. Why does a childhood fear still drive how you work as an adult? Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between you as a younger person who says no and gets sent to your room, let’s say without dinner, and an adult sitting behind the desk. So it runs the same fear loop it has been running your entire life. By fear loop, I mean the protective reaction your nervous system learned back then, firing again in a new room. Fast forward 10, 15, 20 years, and the meaning you formed as a child still lives within your nervous system. “That same fear, that same feeling of being excluded, it’s still there. It’s just wearing a suit.” Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout When your work ethic is driven by fear, you’ll constantly react in ways that make you overcompensate so your nervous system can return to safety. And the yes on Friday at 4:50 is one of those reactions. How do you question the belief behind the automatic yes? You ask yourself questions afterward, starting with how you actually felt in that moment and when you first remember feeling that way in your life. That’s what I started doing when I found myself repeating the same behaviour pattern. Then comes the harder question. In that moment, as that person back then, with the knowledge and capacity I had, is it really true that I was less than, unwanted, or that I didn’t belong? And more importantly, is that still true about me today? When I finally allowed myself to answer honestly, I found something I hadn’t expected. “Every piece of evidence that I had for this potential outcome was evidence that I took from other people’s reactions. None of it was evidence about me.” Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout It was the belief that had been running my life for decades. What should you do the next time you hear yourself say yes? Stop and check in with how you’re feeling in that moment. If your body is giving you a signal, listen to it, because that is your first clue that you’re living your life based on a past conditioned version of yourself. If you keep overriding that signal and saying yes from fear, you will ultimately burn out. You will recover from burnout, Stacey Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit staceylstevens.substack.com

  3. Oct 23

    Burnout in Women Lawyers Hides Behind “I’m Fine”

    The hardest part of admitting that I was burnt out was realizing how long I had been pretending that I wasn’t, and just how good I’d gotten at it. This post is about burnout in women lawyers, and about the mask that comes with it. By the mask, I mean the version of yourself you hand to whoever is in front of you: tough for opposing counsel, warm for clients, unshakable for the partners, and then, when you walk in the door at home, fine. The short answer: Burnout in women lawyers often stays hidden because we keep performing. We figure out which version of ourselves the room needs, and at home we say we’re fine without checking whether it’s true. Recovery starts by admitting it to yourself first, then deciding who else actually gets to know and asking for what you need. Why is burnout in women lawyers so hard to see? Because when we burn out, we don’t stop. We keep performing, and we get so practised at figuring out which version of ourselves the room needs that the performance doesn’t register as a performance anymore, even to us. “I didn’t decide to wear a mask. I didn’t decide to just pretend everything was fine. Nobody does.”Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout That’s what caught me. Because I was burnt out, I was hiding my thoughts and my emotions along with what I needed, and I had been doing it for so long that I didn’t even realize it, because that’s just how good my conditioning was. So a question, and answer it honestly: how many times today did you say “I’m fine, I’m good” without actually checking whether or not it’s true? None of this is weakness, and it certainly isn’t drama. Why don’t women lawyers ask for help with burnout? Mostly fear. Canada’s national study on the mental health of legal professionals found that women under 40 had the highest burnout rate in the entire profession, more than two out of every three, and one of the biggest reasons people didn’t reach out or use the resources available to them was fear of being stigmatized and labelled. The questions behind that fear are practical ones. What would people think? What would it mean? How would it follow them throughout their career? Nobody wants to be the lawyer who gets thought of as unable to handle it, and I get that. It makes complete sense in a profession like law that is built to reward people who never show a crack. But think for a minute about what it adds up to. “We’re all hiding the same thing, only we’re hiding it from each other. In the same hallways, in the same meetings, we’re all carrying it alone and thinking that we’re the only ones.”Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout What does wearing the “I’m fine” mask cost you? It costs energy you don’t have. Every time we perform calm while our nervous system is dysregulated- meaning the body is in full alarm while the face says everything is handled- we drain energy that was already almost fully depleted to begin with. Nobody mentions this when they praise someone for staying composed under pressure. Composure that’s covering burnout is running on a reserve that’s close to empty, and the performance itself is one of the things emptying it. Where does the “I’m fine” habit come from? For a lot of us, it starts long before law. For me, it goes back to a time when I was growing up, when I equated being fine with being safe. “It may have gotten me approval. It may have meant that nobody had to worry about me. Nobody could be disappointed. And nobody left.”Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout We all learn this skill without knowing it. We make meaning about ourselves out of what happens to us growing up, and we carry that meaning forward even though we’re no longer living the life of the person who made it. So I keep coming back to this. If you’re living your life based on a past conditioned version of yourself, you will burn out. When a lawyer wears the “I’m fine” mask, what looks like professionalism is an old behaviour habit replaying, one that once meant that if you were fine, you would be okay. How do you admit you’re burnt out? You say it out loud, and the first person you say it to is you. That’s what I did, with no audience and no announcement. “I was just finally honest with myself. I admit it, I’m burnt out. And that’s just it.”Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout When I did that, I felt something shift. I felt something let go. I finally let myself put the weight down. I’m not telling you to walk into a boardroom tomorrow and announce that you’re burnt out. What I’m describing is self-advocacy: you let yourself know first, then decide who else gets to know what you really need, and who you ask for it. So start with you. Admit to yourself that you’re burnt out, take a moment with it, and put the weight down. When you’re comfortable starting with yourself, tell someone else. You may be surprised to hear they’re feeling the exact same way too. You will recover from burnout, Stacey Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit staceylstevens.substack.com

  4. Oct 19

    Can Childhood Beliefs Cause Burnout? I Spent Decades Living by the Rules of the Girl Who Left Home at 15

    I left home at 15. A few years later, maybe 17 or 18, I remember sitting and thinking about where my life had taken me, and I made myself a promise: one day I’m going to share my story, because somebody out there might need to hear it. Then I forgot it. Completely. Life happened, my career happened, and for decades I never thought about that promise. When it finally came back, it came with the answer to a question I’d spent years not asking: whether childhood beliefs can cause burnout. In my case, they did. Can childhood beliefs cause burnout? They can, and they do it quietly, through a stress response that fires decades after the moment that set it up. As children, we start deciding what our experiences mean about us, and those meanings go on running long after we’ve forgotten deciding anything. “As children, we don’t just live through things. We start to decide what they mean about us. Not good enough. I have to earn my place. Don’t make trouble. And these meanings, they become part of our internal operating system.” -Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout An internal operating system, the way I use the phrase, is the set of meanings about yourself that runs underneath everything you do without ever announcing itself. Decades later, everything else has changed. We’ve grown up, we’re adults, and we haven’t changed our story, so it keeps replaying. It might be a deadline or a late-night email. Something in that moment sounds to your nervous system like the old childhood meaning, and it triggers a stress response; day after day, that cascade of stress hormones becomes a big part of what burns us out. If you’re living your life based on a past conditioned version of yourself, you’re going to burn out. I know because that’s what I did for years without ever seeing it. Why does “it’s just part of the job” sound so reasonable when you’re burnt out? Because the old story has learned to speak in your professional voice. The sentences sound like someone who is realistic about the work, which is exactly why they’re so hard to catch. “How many times have you said, hey, it’s just part of the job, or look, I’m tired, everybody’s tired. Or, I’ll rest when this file or this deal closes. It isn’t reasonable. It’s actually an old story that’s speaking to you in your professional voice.” -Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Listen for “everybody’s tired” in particular. It turns your exhaustion into a group norm, so that questioning it starts to feel like complaining about something nobody else is complaining about. I came at the same voice from another direction in the post on why it’s so hard to say no at work, where the fear underneath a yes gets relabeled as being reasonable. Here the relabeling runs the other way. The word reasonable gets attached to the exhaustion itself. What does it look like to live by an old version of yourself? From the outside, it can look like a successful career. On the inside, I was still carrying the baseline beliefs of a girl who needed to be a certain way just to get by. “I was still living my life based on an old version of me. Right? The girl who just needed to be a certain way just to get by. On the outside. I was still me, but I was still carrying my old baseline beliefs inside. I was just wearing better shoes.” -Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Baseline beliefs, as I mean them, are the ones you set as a kid and never went back to revise, so they become the starting point you measure everything else from. I realized this a couple of years ago, and I’d be lying if I said it was news. It was something I probably knew deep down and never wanted to see. That was also the moment the promise came back, the one I’d made at 17 or 18 and then forgotten for decades. The promise had its own friction. I think I made it to give myself a sense of purpose rather than feeling ashamed of the decisions I’d made. So the story I’m sharing now started as a way to avoid looking at it too closely. Is it too late to stop living burnt out if you’re 20 years into your career? No. I want the women 20 years in to know it’s not too late, and I want the woman six months into her career to know before she loses herself. I started at a law firm as a receptionist. I went to law school at 37 with two teenagers at home and a high school diploma in hand. That’s it. I became a lawyer at 41. “Nobody gave me a map. Nobody told me the exhaustion that I was carrying wasn’t actually the price of admission.” -Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout That’s who this is for: the women coming up behind me, and behind all of us, really. Sharing the story is how I reach back for them, because none of us have to live burnt out, exhausted, and disconnected from our family, friends, and the things that matter most to us. What promise did you make yourself and then forget? Most of us made one somewhere along the way. Maybe it was who you’d be, or something you’d finally do for yourself, and maybe, like me, you forgot it. “Somewhere along the way, you probably made yourself a promise too ... And maybe just like me, you forgot it. This week, see if you can find it. Because you don’t need anybody’s permission to go back and pick up that promise.” -Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Mine took decades to come back, and when it did, it brought the old version of me with it, which is how I finally saw her. You will recover from burnout, Stacey Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit staceylstevens.substack.com

  5. Oct 13

    How to Stay Calm When Someone Is Getting on Your Nerves: The Sentence I Said to Myself in the Hallway

    Earlier this week I had the privilege of giving a talk to a group of rehabilitation support workers, and I want to talk about capacity, though maybe not in the way you think. If you’ve been searching for how to stay calm when someone is getting on your nerves, this is where that conversation went. There were a lot of questions at the end, and most of them started with something outside the people asking: an external event, a circumstance, somebody else’s behaviour. As we dug deeper, almost every one of them came back to how they were feeling in that moment. How do you stay calm when someone is getting on your nerves? Get out of the room before you answer them, take a breath, and tell yourself that this person is acting at their capacity in this moment, at this time. That sentence hands the moment back to the person it belongs to, and that’s what lets your body come down far enough to walk back in. Capacity, the way I’m using it, means what a person actually has available to give at a particular moment, which some days is a lot less than what the room is asking of them. Here’s how it went for me. I excused myself and went out into the hall. I took a deep breath, short in, long out, and I said the sentence to myself. Then I took a couple more minutes, walked, took a few more breaths and regrounded myself until I had a little bit better center, and I went back into the meeting, and the rest of the day went fine. What does it feel like right before you say something you’ll regret in a meeting? For me, my breath went short and shallow, and I got more and more irritated, to the point where I knew whatever I said next wasn’t going to come out the way I wanted it to. I was, to put it bluntly, on literally my last nerve. It was a long meeting, a whole afternoon, and we were covering things that were very important. One person in the room kept interrupting while other people were talking and kept asking what seemed like the same question over and over again. It was clear they just weren’t up to speed. They hadn’t read the materials, and they weren’t prepared for the meeting. “And when I think back to how I was feeling at that time, I was tense, my breath was short and shallow, and I was irritated. I was getting really irritated to the point where I knew that whatever I was going to say next wasn’t going to come out the way I wanted it to, and it wasn’t going to sound the way I wanted it to. To put it bluntly, I was on literally my last nerve.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout It might not be work. It could be a friend group or a recreational group. It could even be at home. Why does telling yourself “they’re at their capacity” calm you down? Because it takes the focus off of you and gives the moment back to the person it belongs to, with the grace you’d expect for yourself on a bad day. The second I said it, my entire nervous system shifted. “And I reminded myself that person is just acting at their capacity in this moment at this time. And as soon as I did that, I felt my entire nervous system shift because I took the focus off of me, first of all, and I put it on who it belonged. And I put it on that person with the same amount of grace that I would expect if I was the person who said, I’m sorry, but I’m at my capacity right now and this is the best I can do.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Sitting in that room, every repeated question had started to feel like something being done to me, to my afternoon and my patience. The sentence stopped making it about me and put it back exactly where it belonged, on them, and nothing about how they were behaving had to change for that to happen. The test I use for the grace part is simple. Is it the same amount I’d want if I were the one saying, I’m sorry, I’m at my capacity right now? What has already happened in your body by the time someone is on your last nerve? By the time you’re saying, "This is getting on my last nerve," you’re already deep in survival mode, and the physiological changes have already happened. Cortisol and adrenaline are already up. Survival mode, as I use it, is your stress response running the show, the chemistry that gets your body ready to deal with a threat, whether or not there is one in the room. “By the time we get to the point where we’re saying, this is getting on my last nerve, or we are feeling so angry and irritated, we are already so far into survival mode that we’ve already experienced all of the physiological and biological changes in our systems.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Your body is designed to handle those two chemicals. Don’t get me wrong. The trouble is an environment where you’re chronically, low-grade stressed out, or worse, because then you get a continuous spike in both of them, with chain reactions through the rest of your body that lead to health consequences. I wrote about the low-grade version of this, the part that follows you through your own front door, in the post on how to stop bringing work stress home. A meeting is just a smaller room for the same chemistry. How can you practice this with someone who got on your nerves last week? Pick a time from today or last week when you were dealing with somebody who was getting on your very last nerve, go back to how you felt in that moment, and then tell yourself they were acting within the capacity they had. Then notice whether anything shifts. The going back matters. If you look at it from where you’re sitting now, calmer and with the whole week behind you, it won’t do much. “Don’t look at it from how you’re feeling today, but really go back there and think about it. Feel those feelings and then tell yourself, but they were just acting within the capacity that they had at that moment. And see how you feel. See if it makes a shift.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout I’d love to hear what happened when you tried it, in the comments or in a direct message. You will recover from burnout, Stacey Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit staceylstevens.substack.com

  6. Oct 6

    Why Is It So Hard to Say No at Work, Even When You Walk In With a Full Tank?

    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 you: it never was. What this covers: what the energy practice doesn’t fix, why we relabel fear as being reasonable, what the flinch is and where it comes from, and the two questions I ask before I answer. Why is it so hard to say no at work? Because at the moment you go to say it, saying no feels dangerous, and that feeling usually belongs to a much older moment than the one you’re standing in. Being tired makes it worse, but you can walk in calm and fully resourced and still hear yourself agree. A boundary, the way I’m using the word, is the line between what you’ll take on and what you won’t, said out loud to the person who’s asking. Most of us know where our line is. The trouble is in the half second between the ask and the answer. You walk in with a full tank of energy, and you still don’t say the thing. You watch yourself agree to take on the extra file, the extra task. You watch yourself smooth things over instead of pushing back, or apologize for a delay that wasn’t really your fault. “You can still walk in fully charged and still leave having agreed to do something that you didn’t agree to, didn’t want to ... Carry one more thing that wasn’t yours to really carry.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Why doesn’t topping up your energy help you set boundaries? Because topping up changes the state you arrive in, and it does nothing about the moment someone asks you for something. Topping up, as I use it, means deliberately raising your energy before an interaction you know will drain you. That was my advice last episode, and I’m not taking it back. But I have to be honest with you about something that this actually does not fix. It gets you through the meeting. It doesn’t get you out of the phone call or the visit, and it doesn’t stop you from saying yes when the true answer is no. Another problem lives underneath the energy one, even after you've refilled your energy: we’ve never actually set a boundary in the first place. A full tank just means you have more to give away. Why do we call it “being reasonable” when we’re afraid to say no? Because “fear” sounds like weakness and “reasonable” sounds like professionalism, so we pick the word that lets us keep our self-image. Underneath being a team player, there’s usually a flinch, and the flinch is fear. “That is not an energy problem, even though it still depletes our energy. That is a fear problem. And it’s worth naming because ... we don’t call this fear. We call it being reasonable.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Listen to how it sounds in your own head. I’m going to be a team player. I’m not going to make this a bigger deal than it needs to be. Those are the sentences firms reward, and they are also, a lot of the time, a way to avoid feeling the fear long enough to look at it. That’s an uncomfortable thing to say in a profession that treats “team player” as the highest compliment you can pay an associate. I’m saying it anyway. Some of what gets praised as collegiality is people who are scared to say no, and the people praising it benefit from that. What is the flinch you feel before saying no? The flinch is the split second before you answer when saying no feels dangerous, out of all proportion to anything actually happening in the room. You’ll feel it if you look for it, and once you’ve named it, you start to notice it in a lot of places. “There’s a flinch. There’s a moment where saying no felt dangerous. Not inconvenient. Dangerous. Even when there was nothing about the actual situation that warranted it.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout The person asking might be perfectly pleasant. The ask might be small. Your body responds as if declining it would cost you something you can’t get back. Where does the fear of saying no come from? Usually, it comes from somewhere much older than the request in front of you. If you slow down and ask yourself where you’ve felt that exact feeling before, you’ll often find it’s rooted in history. “It almost never belongs to the moment that you’re actually in. Yes, it feels current. It feels like it’s about this person, this ask ... But if you slow down and you actually ask yourself where you felt that exact feeling before, you’ll find it’s pretty old.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Maybe it’s your boss from 10 years ago, or a parent. Someone who taught you, a long time before your current position existed, that saying no would cost you something you couldn’t afford to lose. The feeling arrives in the present tense, which is why it’s so convincing, but the lesson behind it was learned by a version of you who had far less power than you have now. What two questions should you ask before you say yes when you mean no? Pause, and ask two questions before you respond. First: have I felt this feeling before, and what does it remind me of? Second: is what I’m afraid of actually going to happen here, or is it something that already happened a long time ago to someone much younger than I am now? The second question does most of the work. The person answering it today knows more and has accomplished more than the person who first learned the fear, and that’s worth remembering in the moment, because the flinch tends to make you feel like her again. Most of the time, as I put it in the episode, “the fear is real, but it’s just not a real fear about today.” Asking the questions lets it shrink down to its actual size, which is usually much smaller than it felt a second ago. Do you have to stop being afraid before you set a boundary? No. You set the boundary anyway, even if your voice shakes a little, and you let the questions shrink the fear rather than waiting for it to disappear. “You don’t need the fear to be gone. You just need it to be small enough that it isn’t the thing that is making the decision for you.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout So the next time you feel yourself about to say yes when you mean no, just pause, ask the two questions, and then say the no. Waiting until it feels safe is how most of us end up never saying it at all. What’s the difference between managing your energy and protecting it? Managing your energy is what the energy vampire practice does: it gets you into the room resourced. You measure protecting it by whether you leave that room having said what you actually meant, with your tank still full. You already did the hard work last time. You know who your energy vampires are, and you know how to walk in with something in your tank. The next piece isn’t about finding more energy or more time. It’s about understanding where the fear that stops you from setting the boundary comes from, so that the next time it shows up, you can treat the flinch as something old rather than as proof about the person in front of you. You will recover from burnout, Stacey Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit staceylstevens.substack.com

  7. Oct 2

    Why Isn't Self-Care Helping My Burnout? Three Days With a Group of Women Showed Me Where My Energy Was Going

    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. Why isn’t self-care helping my burnout? Because most self-care works on how you feel for a while and leaves the reason you were depleted exactly where it was. Self-care, the way I’m using the term, means the version that gets marketed to us: the facial, the massage, the spa day, the treat you’ve told yourself you earned. “Self-care, the way it’s usually sold, the way it’s marketed to us, only touches the surface. It only heals superficially.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout A facial changes how our skin feels for a while. A massage relieves some stress and some tension in your shoulders and on your back. Neither one touches the real reason you were depleted in the first place. What actually restored me during three days away with other women? Connection did, specifically three days of very real connection with women sharing where they are in their own healing journeys. We’d all come into it from different places, and yet somehow understood that we’re all living some version of the same journey. Two things happened that weekend. We were honest about what we needed from each other and from the weekend, instead of just showing up and hoping that things would roll out the way they always do. And we released things that no longer served us, out loud and on purpose, instead of quietly carrying them home again. What is the difference between self-care and recovery? Recovery is what happens when you stop giving your energy away for free. Self-care can be part of it, but on its own it’s much closer to resting, and you can technically be resting for two hours without having recovered anything. I wrote about that gap in an earlier post on why we can’t stop scrolling at night (link: why-cant-i-stop-scrolling-at-night), how you can sit on the couch and pick up your phone and before you know it, two hours is gone. Self-care has the same problem. So I want to change the question you’ve been asking yourself. “Recovery, that’s not a facial. Recovery, that’s what happens when you stop giving your energy away for free. And that’s the sentence that I want you to really sit with. Not, when are you finally going to stop and get some rest? When are you going to stop giving your energy away for free?” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout What is burnout, if it isn’t a lack of rest? Burnout is what happens when your energy has been leaving you faster than you’ve been replenishing it, for long enough that the shortfall feels normal. An energy deficit, meaning more going out than coming back in, stops registering as a deficit once it’s been your starting point for months or years. “Burnout isn’t what happens when you haven’t had enough spa days. It’s what happens when your energy has been leaving you faster than you’ve been replenishing it. When you’ve been doing this for so long that the energy deficit becomes your baseline, it becomes your starting point.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout That’s why the real work isn’t finding more hours to rest. It’s identifying where your energy is actually going, and specifically who or what is taking it from you without ever giving you anything back. Why do I feel more tired after a weekend off than after a busy one? Because the hours were never what you were spending. What drains you is who you spent the time with and what it cost you to be in that room, which is why I’d put your energy ahead of your time as the most precious resource you have. Have you ever had a completely open weekend, nothing going on, and still Monday morning rolls around and you feel more tired than you did on Saturday? Or the reverse, three demanding days in a row, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, and you come out of it feeling restored and wonderful, so busy you have no idea where the time went? The difference is who you spent your time with, and what it cost you to be in that room for that period of time. Maybe the busy days happened somewhere where nothing required you to abandon who you truly are just to keep the peace. What is an energy vampire? An energy vampire is anyone who benefits from the energy you give away for free without ever noticing what it’s costing you. They’re usually not strangers. They come from the relationships that actually matter to you: your family, your friends, your colleagues and your clients. The definition rests on that word noticing. Your energy is being taken away from you without anyone ever having to account for what it’s costing you. What is a resentment inventory, and how does it help with burnout? A resentment inventory is a tool from Terry Cole, a psychotherapist and the author of Boundary Boss. You ask yourself where you’re feeling resentment right now, and you treat what comes up as data rather than as a character flaw. It’s disarmingly simple. I’ll be honest, I don’t know if resentment is the word I would use. The version I ask myself is: where am I feeling that there’s someone out there that I just know, when I see them, it’s just going to suck the life out of me? Wherever you feel it, it’s pointing at something. It can point to a boundary, meaning the line between what you’ll give and what you won’t, either one that’s missing or one that’s been crossed. Or it can point to needs of your own that just aren’t being met. You don’t have to go hunting for everything that’s draining you, because that feeling of “oh my God, I have to deal with this again” is your sign. We’ve just gotten in the habit of labeling it as something shameful, as if not having enough energy to deal with what someone is putting on our table means there’s something wrong with us. When really, it’s a signal that we’re just not picking up. Why do so many women give their energy away for free? Because some part of us learned a long time ago that being needed was safer than being wanted, and that keeping everybody else’s peace was our job. Overgiving, meaning giving more of your energy than you get back, usually gets explained as generosity, and I don’t think that explanation holds. “A lot of us, we’re not over giving because we’re generous by nature. We’re over giving because some part of us learned a long time ago that being needed was safer than being wanted, that keeping everybody else’s peace was our job. And that our own resentment, our own, not again, was something that we had to swallow, push aside instead of listening to it.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout So the “meh, I like making people happy, I like doing things for people” explanation doesn’t hold up for me anymore. It’s an old story that is still running, the same kind of story I wrote about in the post on whether to quit or push through burnout. And every single person who is benefiting from it without ever noticing what it’s costing you, those are your energy vampires. How do you find out who your energy vampires are? Make a list. Take the relationships that actually matter to you, your family, your friends, your colleagues and your clients, and ask which one on that list makes you feel deflated before you’ve even interacted with them. “Which one on this list makes me just feel deflated? Before I even interact with them. Don’t try to fix it yet. Just make the list because the list is your map.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Wherever you feel the pull, the draining, the sucking the life out of you at just the thought of having the interaction or taking on the task, write it down. That’s the first step in being aware of all the places where your energy is being taken away from you without an… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit staceylstevens.substack.com

  8. Sep 29

    Why Can't I Stop Scrolling at Night? A Lawyer on the Hour That Disappears After the Kitchen Closes

    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 can’t I stop scrolling at night? Because you’re depleted, and a depleted brain will reach for the fastest source of relief available. The feed is also the one thing in your evening that doesn’t ask you to know what you want, and for a lot of women who’ve spent their careers being the capable one, that second part is the harder problem. Doomscrolling, meaning an hour or more spent moving through an endless feed you didn’t really choose, usually gets treated as a discipline problem. The line most of us say to ourselves afterwards is some version of: What is wrong with me? Why can’t I just put the phone down? That’s the wrong question. It takes a symptom and turns it into a verdict about your character, which is a move I’ve talked about before, and it sends you off looking for more willpower to fix something that was never running on willpower in the first place. Why does an exhausted brain reach for the phone instead of something restful? Because by the end of the day you don’t want one more decision, and the feed is the only option in front of you that doesn’t require one. Depleted, the way I’m using it, means what’s left of you after a full day of spending your attention on other people. Think about what the day looked like before you picked up the phone. You’ve made decisions all day. You’ve handled other people’s emotions. You’ve managed deadlines, clients, kids, meals, logistics, and the invisible labour that nobody clocks until you actually stop doing it. By the end of that, you don’t want to choose between going for a walk or journaling your feelings. You just want no one to need anything from you, just for a little while. So we start scrolling. Is scrolling on your phone actually rest? Mostly no. Sabine Sonnentag, a researcher who has spent years studying what actually makes people recover from work stress, identifies four things real recovery needs, and scrolling gives you one of them at best. In her work, recovery is more than the absence of work. You can sit on the couch for two hours and still not have recovered anything. What recovery needs is: * Detachment: a genuine mental break from work. * Relaxation: letting your body come down. * Control: a sense of control over your own time and choices. * Mastery, sometimes: doing something that reminds you you’re more than the person managing everybody else’s life. Scrolling can give you some detachment. It rarely gives you the other three. You didn’t choose what you watched, because an algorithm chose it for you. It isn’t relaxing your body; if anything, it keeps it activated. And it’s definitely not developing any mastery. How can you tell if scrolling is numbing you or helping you recover? Put the phone down and ask yourself two things: do I feel calmer or more behind, and do I feel more grounded or more activated? That’s really the entire test, and it has nothing to do with your willpower. Numbing, in this sense, means anything that changes how you feel in the moment without changing the state you’re actually in. It’s the difference I’d want anyone to feel in their own body after an hour on the couch. “Numbing changes what you feel for a minute. Recovery changes the state you’re in when you go back to your life.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout If the answer is more behind and more activated, that hour was numbing. There’s no shame in it. It’s just information, and it’s more useful than another round of asking what’s wrong with you. Why is it so hard to put the phone down when you know it isn’t helping? Because it’s the only kind of stopping a lot of us give ourselves permission to do. If you’ve spent your career anticipating everybody else’s needs, an hour where nobody needs anything from you can leave you unsure what you’re allowed to want, and the feed answers that question for you one video at a time. Depletion is true, and it still isn’t the whole answer. Depleted people have a lot of options for what to do with an hour. Most of them reach for the same one, and I don’t think it’s a random choice. I think something is running underneath it, something like: if I’m not doing something for everybody else right now, what am I actually allowed to want? “You have spent your whole career and probably most of your life before that being the capable one. The one who handles it, who anticipates everybody else’s needs before they even ask.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout When the day finally ends, and nobody needs anything, there might be a small part of you that doesn’t really know what to do with that, maybe because you’ve never actually practiced wanting something purely for yourself without earning it first or attaching it to somebody else’s need. “And scrolling on our phones, it kind of solves that problem in a strange way. But it’s really not rest. It’s the one thing that doesn’t ask you to know what you want. You don’t make decisions. You don’t have to choose anything. There’s no risk of getting it wrong.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout And you don’t have to sit with the harder question: what would actually restore me right now. “And that’s the real reason why it’s so hard to put down your phone. ... It’s the only kind of stopping that maybe you’re giving yourself permission to do.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout What should you ask yourself before you pick up your phone at night? One question, after a 10-second pause: what do I actually need right now? Name it in one word before you decide anything, whether that’s comfort, quiet, connection, fun or escape. There is no wrong answer on that list, escape included. The point is that you’ve named it before the algorithm gets a vote. Then the next morning ask yourself a second question. Did last night leave me more restored, or worse? There’s no shame in either answer. It’s just information for you, and after a week of it you’ll know more about what your evenings are actually doing than any screen-time report can tell you. Should you stop scrolling at night altogether? No, and I’m not going to give you a new rule about your phone. If you still choose to scroll, make it a decision, not a default. “And if you still choose to pick up your phone and scroll, that’s fine. But make it a decision instead of a default. Set a timer. Know what you’re actually using it for. Because that alone changes who’s making the choice.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Most writing on this treats the phone as the thing to fix. My position is that you could delete every app tonight and still not know what to do with an hour that belongs only to you. Scrolling isn’t evidence that you’re lazy or undisciplined. It might be evidence that you have spent so long being the one who handles everything that you just never learned how to want something just for you, and that comes down to a permission you never gave yourself, showing up in one more place you didn’t expect to find it. You will recover from burnout, Stacey Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit staceylstevens.substack.com

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Writer. Award-winning speaker. Lawyer. Writing about my life as high-achieving women who has broken free from performance conditioning and reclaimed my autonomy, self-worth, and personal power—without guilt, apology, or permission. staceylstevens.substack.com

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