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. 1d ago

    Early Signs of Burnout: Your Body May Be Telling You Recovery Has Stopped

    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 explaining each piece away. I know because I’ve done it. What are the early signs of burnout? The early signs of burnout can look like disrupted sleep, waking up at 3 a.m. thinking about work, grinding your jaw, reflux, skin flare-ups, irritability, exhaustion and snapping at the people you love. I have heard myself say things like: I’m not sleeping well. It’s my hormones. It’s my age. I need to drink more water. I need a facial. My jaw is a dentist problem. My mood is a personality problem. Each symptom gets its own explanation. And somehow, we keep moving. “I am just a woman who is burnt out.” Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout Why do we dismiss the early signs of burnout? Because it is easier to separate the symptoms than to look at what they might have in common. I can be completely composed at work. I can be gracious when I’m talked over, ignored, laughed at or when someone else takes credit for my work. Then I can come home and snap at my family. And that’s where the shame starts. I’m so tired. What is wrong with me? I’ve noticed how quickly we turn that last part into a judgment about who we are. “Sleep is a sleep thing. My jaw, that’s a dentist thing. Snapping, that’s a character thing.” Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout But what if all of those things are connected? For me, the more important question is what happens to recovery. I can work hard, use up my energy, recover and go again. That is part of being human. Burnout is different. It is what happens when recovery stops working. And sometimes the reason recovery stops working has very little to do with the actual workload. What can be underneath burnout symptoms? Think about what happens before you speak in a meeting. If I say this, how will it land? What will it cost me? What will they think about me? What if they say this? How am I going to respond? Or the way I walk into a room and say: Can I just speak to you for a minute? I don’t want to bother you... Or the way I swallow what I actually want to say because I tell myself: Now’s not the time. That constant management takes energy. It can create a background message that says I have to manage who I am in order to be accepted here. And that doesn’t necessarily disappear when I close my laptop. It follows me home. It follows me on vacation. It can follow me even after the file closes or the deal is done. I keep telling myself I’ll rest when this is over. But there is always another file. That’s when I have to look beyond the symptom and ask what I have been managing underneath it. Maybe I learned a long time ago that needing something made me a burden. Maybe I learned that if I stopped performing, I wouldn’t belong. Maybe I learned that I had to be the one who could handle everything. Those stories can keep running long after the circumstances that created them are gone. What should I do if I recognize these signs? First, if you have a physical symptom, get it checked. Make the appointment. Talk to your doctor. Get the appropriate medical assessment and diagnosis. “Self-awareness is not a treatment plan, and I’m not pretending it is.” Stacey Stevens, host of How We Recover From Burnout That matters to me. Then, once you have taken care of the medical side, choose one symptom. Not your entire life. Just one symptom. * When did it start? * When do you remember experiencing it for the first time? * What was happening around you? * What were you telling yourself at the time? For me, the date matters because it can lead me back to the story underneath the symptom. Self-awareness alone won’t change what is happening in my body. But it can help me understand what I have been carrying. And understanding the story gives me something I can actually work with. Because sometimes the first step toward recovery is recognizing that the thing I have been calling normal for years was never actually working for me. 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. 6d ago

    Self-Advocacy for Women Lawyers: Why I Spent 20 Years Not Doing It

    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 situation instead of a client’s: establishing the facts, identifying what is needed, stating the theory out loud, and making the argument in front of someone who has the power to grant it. For women lawyers, it is the only lever I have found that reliably moves, because the profession is not going to move. Think about what you do on a file. You establish the facts. You identify what your client needs. You craft the argument, you make it to someone who can grant it, and you do not apologize for asking. When the answer comes back no, you do not soften the ask until it disappears. You come back with a different argument. When was the last time you did any part of that for yourself? You are surgically precise about what your clients need. On your own file, many of us go completely mute. You will fight a motion for weeks over a point of principle and then not spend three minutes asking for what you are worth. “This isn’t a skills gap. You have the skill. I had it for 20 years. I just wasn’t willing to point it at myself first.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Why do the burnout numbers come back worse for women lawyers? Three things are running at the same time, and only one of them shows up on anyone’s scorecard. Biology, the daily performance, and the duality of our roles. Our biology. The female body operating under sustained chronic stress does not respond identically to a male body under the same conditions. That is physiology. Hormonal shifts every month, shifts again in pregnancy, then postpartum depression, perimenopause, menopause, post-menopause. All of that changes how we process cortisol, the hormone the body releases under stress, which is being released more or less constantly when you live in a state of sustained chronic stress. Inauthenticity steals energy. If you are minimizing traits that are actually who you are and performing traits that you are not, and doing it as a standing condition rather than a one-time adjustment, it draws from the same reserves you need for the actual work. So the work gets done on a fraction of your capacity, and the rest goes to a performance we have been conditioned to believe we have to carry out in order to fit into a male-dominated profession. Then we go home, back to our feminine traits, exhausted, and don’t even know where to turn. The duality of our roles. Professional obligations at work, personal ones outside it. Whether you are a spouse, a partner, or maybe you are someone who is a caregiver to elderly parents, chances are- and the stats confirm this- it is part of what we do as women. Studies show this isn't a resilience problem, which is why advice like “just find a better firm” doesn't work. Does moving to a better firm fix burnout for women lawyers? Usually not, and I would rather say that plainly than let anyone lose years to it. I have watched women leave an aggressive firm for a smaller family-friendly one and hit the same wall about 18 months later. “I’ve watched women lawyers, law clerks, women just in this profession who will leave an aggressive firm for a smaller family-friendly firm down the road, but then they’re still hitting the same wall 18 months later. It’s because the success metrics are still the metrics that run within this profession.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Some firms are meaningfully better than others. I know that because the firm I have been at for almost my entire career is better than others. No firm operates outside the ecosystem, though, so if you decide the firm is the problem, you can spend years looking for one that isn't, when what is actually doing the damage is how we accommodate the profession once we get there. Am I saying wellness programs and firm policies don’t help? No. Policies, procedures, programs, retreats, wellness weekends, all of that stuff helps, and I would not want a firm that offered none of it. What I am saying is that none of it is permanent if you keep accommodating the system the same way. A wellness week doesn't change the performance you return to on Monday. This is the part of this that could cost me something, so I will say it without softening: a profession that has been running for 2,000 years, and that women entered roughly 130 years ago, is not going to reorganize itself around us. Not in my career, and probably not in yours. “This is where I’ve landed and I’m not ashamed to say it took me 20 years to get here. And I really, really wish that I could be wrong when I say this, but we’re trying to be honest here.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout I say “it is what it is” about the ecosystem of law, and I mean it as acceptance, not defeat, because you cannot work with something you are going to keep arguing with. What does willful blindness mean when the file is your own career? Willful blindness is a legal doctrine: you have information available to you, you suspect what it would show, and you deliberately do not look. Courts treat that as knowledge. It is the most accurate description I have for what a lot of us are doing with our own careers. We are not ignorant. We know we are telling ourselves a story about who we have to be in this profession, and we know exactly what we have edited out of ourselves. We have judged what we can say, or cannot say, or how we can and cannot say it, out of fear of being labelled. We know which values we have set aside because they don't work with the performance metrics. We know that we have sabotaged our wellness and called it commitment. “We know. We just don’t really look at it. Because if we do, then that means we may have to do something about it.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout And none of us have the energy to add another thing onto the list of things we have to do something about. I understand that completely. It is also why the first step is smaller than people expect. What is the first step in self-advocacy? Paying attention. That is the whole of step one, and it is not confidence, and it is not drafting a script for a conversation with your managing partner. Start looking at the times in a day or a week where you said yes when you meant no. Where you compromised a value. Where you added something to your list knowing you did not have the energy for it. You are not fixing any of it yet. You are building the record. What that requires is the willingness to stop being willfully blind about your own case, the same way you would never let a client be willfully blind about theirs. You cannot advocate for something you refuse to examine. Does this apply outside law? Yes, if you are in engineering, finance, medicine, construction, the trades, or anything else built long before women entered the room. Different scoreboard, different metrics, possibly a different ecosystem, and the same thing running underneath it. Law runs on a scoreboard that measures volume and a specific set of traits, and has never been asked to account for the fact that half of us live in different bodies and carry two roles at once. That is a description, not an accusation, and it won't change on its own. How you accommodate it is up to you. So who will advocate for you? The profession is not going to, because it was never built to. That leaves you, which is better news than it sounds, because you have been trained on this work for your entire career. You have just never decided to take on your own case. 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. Season 1, Episode 64 Trailer

    Why Women Lawyers Burn Out Faster Than Men

    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 design of the thing we’re standing in. That’s what I want to answer today. One thing first, because it will change how you hear everything after it. If you’re at a good firm, why would you burn out anyway? Because what produces it sits underneath the firm rather than inside it. I spent the past 20 years at a great firm, and I still burnt out. “The associates that I started with, the ones who came before me and who came after, I’m proud to say that many of them are my partners. And I’ve always had largely the same people around me the whole way through. And I became the lawyer I am because of the opportunities that I had there. But I still burnt out.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and burnout expert So this isn’t a complaint about a firm, or about a specific lawyer, because I’m not here to make that point. This is about something underneath every firm, and I want to talk about it at a level where I’m not bashing anybody, because being critical of the practice is far less useful, and it lets us off the hook from looking clearly at what’s actually true about it. How long has the legal profession existed, and how long have women been in it? Roughly 2,000 years for the profession. About 130 years for women. Structured advocacy, courts, professional pleaders- that architecture is ancient, and for essentially all of it there were no women in it at all. The first women were called to the bar, which means formally admitted to practise law, in the late 1800s. Women did not become the majority of students entering law school until 2016, just over 50%, the first time on record. Sit with that math for a second. Two thousand years of a profession being built, refined and codified, with women present for the last 130 of them and present in meaningful numbers for a fraction of that. It explains something that otherwise makes no sense: a profession full of smart, driven, intelligent, accomplished women still operates on a design none of us had any hand in. Nobody is stopping us. That’s just how it was built. “The house, it was built long before we were given the keys.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and burnout expert What is the legal profession built on? Traits we broadly call masculine. Competitive, aggressive, argumentative, certain, combative when required and comfortable being so. Now, those aren’t flaws in the design, and I want to be fair about that. Law is an adversarial system, meaning two sides argue opposing cases in front of a neutral decision-maker, and a system built that way needs someone willing to fight, whether that’s for a client in trouble who needs an advocate who will go to war or for anyone else who can’t do it themselves. There’s real value in a profession that produces people who don’t back down, and I’m not arguing that the system should be soft. I built my career on being able to do exactly this whenever it was called for. It just leaves you with an ecosystem calibrated around one set of traits, which then measures everyone standing in it by how well they perform those traits. What does a law firm actually count? Four things. Billable hours, which are the units of time a lawyer records and charges to a client, plus fee generation, client retention and client acquisition. Those are the success metrics. That’s the scoreboard. Everything that determines your compensation, your standing, your partnership prospects and your future relates back to those four categories. Notice what all four have in common. Each one is a volume metric. How much did you produce, how much did you bring in, how much did you keep, how much did you add. The scoreboard measures extraction and accumulation and nothing else. What doesn’t show up on the scoreboard? Most of the work that keeps a firm functioning. The hour you spent talking an associate off the ledge because a client or an issue had them so stressed out they couldn’t work. The client relationship you held together through a genuinely difficult stretch by being the person they knew they could call and knew they could trust. The judgment call where the right answer turned out to be fewer hours rather than more. The mentoring. The institutional glue, by which I mean the unpaid, unrecorded work of holding a place together so other people can do their jobs in it. None of that is measured. Not because anybody sat down and decided it’s worthless, but because it doesn’t reduce to a number, and the legal profession runs on numbers. What is performance surveillance in a law firm? It’s the permanent running scoreboard that measures a very narrow slice of what you actually do, that everyone can see, and that never turns off. I don’t mean someone watching you. “You are always mid measurement. The year never stops being a year you’re being assessed on.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and burnout expert And a scoreboard that only counts volume will always reward the person willing to produce the most volume, regardless of what else that person is carrying. What do women change about themselves to stay on that scoreboard? We minimize our feminine traits and develop masculine ones. Nobody says that part plainly, and it happens without much conscious decision, in small increments, over years. We learn that softness can be read as weakness, so we harden, we man up, we grow a thicker skin. We learn that emotion in a professional setting can be a liability, so we suppress it. We learn that collaboration doesn’t show up on the scoreboard and assertion does, so we become more assertive. And you learn to be certain even when you aren’t, because doubt in the legal world is expensive. I want to be careful here, because I’m not being critical of any woman who did this. “That adaptation was our intelligence. It’s what we knew the environment rewards.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and burnout expert We’re all extremely good at reading what an environment rewards. That’s part of the reason we got into this in the first place. It comes at a cost, and that's what I want to talk about next. 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

    Why Women Lawyers Burn Out Faster Than Men

  4. Aug 27

    Why Women Lawyers Burn Out More Than Men, According to Two National Studies

    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 already saw in the Canadian data: women lawyers report meaningfully higher rates of burnout, anxiety and depression than men in the same field. I want to defend one claim in this post rather than hand you five observations. The most useful thing in this report is a small finding about resources that exist and almost nobody touches. Why do women lawyers burn out more than men? Because the conditions producing the exhaustion do not land evenly, even when the workload is identical. The ABA’s 2026 study found women reporting higher rates on every wellbeing measure it took, inside the same firms and under the same billable targets, and the report puts the cause in the profession rather than in the women working in it. Burnout here means the clinical pattern of exhaustion combined with a collapsing sense of your own effectiveness at the work, not ordinary tiredness at the end of a long file. The challenges women face in this profession are not rooted in individual resilience. They are rooted in the systems, the expectations, and the cultural norms of the profession itself. American Bar Association, national study on the wellbeing of women lawyers, released August 1, 2026 That sentence matters because of what women say to themselves instead. What I have heard, over and over, from women describing burnout or anxiety or depression is that it means we’re weak. That we’re not strong enough to be good lawyers. What did the ABA’s 2026 study of women lawyers actually find? It found a consistent gap between women and men on five measures, all of it self-reported by nearly 3,000 participants. Laid directly against each other, same profession, same firms, same pressures: * Financial strain: 40% of women, 29.5% of men * Sleep disturbance: 31% of women, 19% of men * Family relationship strain: 30% of women, 19% of men * Anxiety warranting real clinical attention: 37% of women, 23% of men * Depressive symptoms: 19% of women, 15% of men Notice something about that list. These aren’t different problems. Same buildings, same billable targets, and women are losing more sleep and carrying more financial fear and fraying more at home, which is a different result coming out of an identical set of inputs. The gap is not explained by saying women are more sensitive, or that women just don’t handle the pressure as well. If that were true, the gap wouldn’t be this consistent and this wide across every single category the study measured. What is the policy implementation gap? The policy implementation gap is the ABA report’s term for the distance between the mental health resources a firm formally offers and the number of people who will actually use them. Firms have mental health policies. They have wellness resources. Women overwhelmingly are not using them. Not because we don’t need them. The reasons women gave were stigma and confidentiality worries, plus the professional risk that attaches to being the person who raised a hand. You flag yourself the moment you ask for help. And even for the women who did use the resources, nothing structural moved underneath. The workload was where they left it. So was the billable target, and so was the fraying at home. The help was there and almost nobody trusted it enough to reach for it, and the ones who did found the same conditions waiting exactly where they’d left them. Is it rational for a woman lawyer to avoid her firm’s wellness resources? On the evidence in this report, yes. Professional risk was a named reason women gave for not using the resources available to them, which means the calculation you’ve been running, probably without fully admitting you were running it, about exactly how much you can say out loud and to whom before it becomes a mark against you, is documented behaviour in a national study rather than paranoia. I’ll be plain about where that leaves me, because it’s a position that costs something to hold. I’m telling a room full of professionals that the honest read on their firm’s wellness program is that reaching for it may mark them, and that their instinct to stay quiet has evidence behind it. That is not a comfortable thing to say to the profession, and it is not a comfortable thing for the profession to hear. Why don’t wellness programs fix lawyer burnout? Because the thing generating the exhaustion is the structure of the work, and a wellness program doesn’t touch the structure. A breathing exercise does not move a billable target. An app does not make it safe to tell a managing partner you’re struggling, and safety is the actual barrier this report identified. The billable hour model, meaning the arrangement where a lawyer’s value to the firm is counted in hours recorded against files, is the specific thing individual coping is being asked to solve. It cannot. You cannot self-care your way out of a billable target, and you cannot meditate your way out of a policy that evaporates the moment you need it. Meaningful progress means moving past individual resilience and looking deeper into what the profession is choosing to prioritize, measure, reward, and model every single day. Chair of the ABA commission that produced the report If the profession isn’t going to change, what’s the point of knowing this? Fair question, and I’ll give you my honest answer rather than a hopeful one. I don’t think we are going to restructure the legal profession. It is what it is, we knew that getting into it, and we understood the responsibilities and the expectations that were coming. That’s a hedge and I’m naming it as one, because it sits uncomfortably beside everything above. If the conditions are producing the harm, “the profession is what it is” reads like letting the conditions off the hook. I’m not resolving that tension for you. What I’ll say is that the two things I think are within reach are smaller than reform and bigger than a wellness app. The first is what you do with the explanation. The next time you feel that familiar pull to explain your exhaustion as a personal shortfall, the I should be handling this better, everyone else seems fine, maybe I just need to toughen up, run it against the data instead. Two national studies, two countries, and the conclusion holds in both. The second is that we stop carrying the structure as a verdict on our character. This is why I keep coming back to self-awareness, which here just means seeing the data clearly instead of turning it inwards. Self-respect is the harder one, and it means refusing to let a structural cost land on you as a personal failure, harder because this profession has trained us to read our own exhaustion as evidence about who we are. Self-advocacy is the one this whole show keeps circling. It starts the moment you stop asking what’s wrong with you. So run the numbers against the story first. Then ask the question this report makes it reasonable to ask out loud: why have the resources available to us never once felt safe enough to use? You will recover from burnout, Stacey Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! This post is public so feel free to share it. Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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. Aug 25

    63% Of Women Lawyers Are Burned Out. You Are Not The Problem.

    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 comprehensive national study on wellness in the legal profession. The breakdown for women: * 63.9% reported psychological distress * 42.6% reported worrisome anxiety symptoms * 31.5% reported moderate to severe depressive symptoms Read that last one again. Nearly one in three women in this profession is carrying clinically meaningful depression symptoms and still showing up, still billing, still sitting across from clients like everything is fine. The breaking starts in year one Here is the number that stopped me the longest. 71.2% of women with under 15 years of experience reported significant mental and emotional distress. Three quarters of the women who are supposed to be the future of this profession, the ones we tell to keep climbing and keep proving themselves, are in distress before they hit the halfway mark of a career. It starts earlier than that. 73.8% of lawyers with less than three years of experience report psychological distress. Law students. First year associates. Already at the same levels as women who have been at this for two decades. This profession does not wear people down slowly. It starts breaking them almost immediately. This is structural, and you already know what you did with that number I know exactly what a woman does when she reads 63%, because it is what I did. A flicker of relief. At least I am not the only one. Then, within about ten seconds, the conditioning takes over. Maybe I just have not figured it out yet. Maybe I need to manage my time better. Everyone else in that 63% is probably handling it better than I am. Stop. That is conditioning talking, and conditioning is not evidence. The evidence points at the structure. The billable hour model, the emotional demands of the work, and the lack of organizational support account for close to half of the burnout measured in this study. Not personality. Not grit. You are the data point. And the data point does not need to fix herself. She needs the truth named plainly, which is what almost nobody in this profession is willing to do out loud. The one thing to do this week You don't get to solve a structural problem on your own. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the numbers give you one genuinely useful thing: permission. Permission to stop treating exhaustion as evidence of inadequacy. Permission to stop guarding the anxiety spike and the depression symptom like a professional secret. Because 63% of the women around you are keeping that same secret, in the same silence, each one convinced she is the exception. So do this. Say the real word to one person. Not “I’m just really tired lately.” Not “well, it’s part of the job.” The actual word. Burnout. Anxiety. Depression. Whatever is true for you, said to one person you trust. If you don't have anyone you trust, say it to yourself in the mirror. Not HR. Not a public post. One person. The profession stays silent by design, one woman at a time convincing herself she is the outlier. One honest sentence to one person is where that pattern breaks. What doing something about it actually means I am not asking you to reform the billable hour this week. I am asking for three things: * Self-awareness to see the numbers for what they are instead of proof that you cannot cut it. * Self-respect to refuse to let the system’s cost land on you as shame, and then land in your body as cognitive, mental, and physical damage. * Self-advocacy for yourself and for every woman coming in behind you, which starts with saying the true thing out loud. You did not choose a broken structure. You can choose to stop absorbing it as a verdict on your worth. 63.9% is not a footnote. It is a call to stop pretending this is normal, in law and in every other male-dominated profession. 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. Sources: Federation of Law Societies of Canada, National Study on the Wellness of Legal Professionals · CBA National, Higher prevalence of distress and depression in law 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. Aug 22

    You Can Win a Seven-Figure Settlement and Still Not Ask Your Partner to Make Dinner

    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 email defending a client’s position, and then freeze. Really freeze. When a senior partner criticizes her work in front of the room. Same brain. Same skills. Same woman. So what is actually going on? Why smart, capable women go silent in their own performance review A couple of articles ago on How We Recover From Burnout, I asked how old the version of you at work really is. In the last episode, I asked you to pause and notice whether your body is bracing for something that is not actually there anymore. Today’s question is the one that changes something. Why can you argue anyone into the ground in a courtroom or a boardroom, and still go completely silent the second the subject is your own performance review? Here is the answer, and it is the whole point of this piece. You have spent your entire career becoming exceptional at advocacy for other people. No one ever taught you advocacy for yourself. Those are not the same skill, even though they look identical from the outside. Advocating for others feels safe because the stakes are not you When you fight for a client, you are operating from a role. The stakes are real. They are just not personal. If you lose, it may cost you professionally, and it may cost your client, but it does not cost you your sense of who you are. There is a certain kind of armour built into that distance. You get to be relentless, because relentless is safe when it is not about you. The second the fight is about you, that changes. Your raise. Your boundary. Your worth in that room. Suddenly the armour feels wrong, because now the thing on trial is you. And this is where the older story comes back in. The woman running that meeting learned a long time ago, as a girl, that staying quiet kept the peace. That needing things was not a priority. That being the responsible one meant you did not ask; you just handled it. So you are not lacking the skill. You have been demonstrating world-class advocacy for years. The oldest, most protected part of you has never once believed she was allowed to use those skills on her own behalf. You will go to war for someone else every single day. Going to war for yourself feels like something you need permission for first. And by the time you have talked yourself out of asking, the decision has already been made without anyone else in the room. There are two versions of standing up for yourself, and only one of them works This distinction matters, so I want to draw a hard line. Version one is assertiveness worn as armour. It is born out of fear. You go hard, get sharp, get loud, because some old part of you learned that if you do not strike first, you will get flattened. It looks like strength. It is a strength costume. Underneath it, your nervous system is still registering a threat, still running in survival mode, still flooding your body with the exact chemistry that leaves you more exhausted every year. And if we are being honest, this version has probably cost you relationships you actually wanted to keep. Version two is assertiveness sourced from self-respect. It is not louder. It is not sharper. It is steadier. It comes from a place where you already know you do not need the room’s approval in order to exist. You are not asking permission. You are stating a fact. “This is what I need.” Not, “Sorry, if it is not too much trouble, I was just wondering.” Just, “This is what I need.” That is the difference between forced and chosen. Forced advocacy is reactive, armoured, and it only ever shows up for other people, because that is the only version your body has been given permission to run. Chosen advocacy is the same skill, redirected for the first time at something you actually own. You do not need a new skill to close this gap. You need to stop asking a frightened, outdated part of yourself for permission to use the skills you already have. The one question that starts closing the self-advocacy gap Here is what I want you to notice this week. Notice, not fix. Find a moment where you are about to advocate for someone else, and check in. If a client came to you underpaid at your level, you would have a number ready in ten seconds. If a colleague got interrupted the way you get interrupted, you would flag it without a second thought. Catch yourself in that exact gap. The moment where you would fight instantly for someone else and still hesitate to do the same for you. Then name it. It does not have to be out loud. In your own head is enough. “I would say this for someone else. Why am I not saying it for me?” That question alone starts closing the gap. You do not need to overhaul your personality. You need to catch the pattern once, in real time, and let it feel uncomfortable instead of automatic. You are not that little girl anymore You didn't get here by accident, and you won't leave by accident either. You built a self who could survive almost anything. That self did her job. She kept you safe, kept you moving, and deserves your respect for it. But you are not that little girl anymore. You are the woman who actually made it. And the woman who made it gets to say out loud what she needs, without waiting for the room to grant her permission first. That is the whole arc. Awareness of the self you built. Respect for what you survived. And now, advocacy. Point it where it always should have gone. At you. You will recover from burnout, Stacey I am Stacey Stevens, a lawyer turned speaker who helps high-achieving women recover from burnout and rebuild the story they tell themselves. If this landed, subscribe and share it with the woman in your life who negotiates brilliantly for everyone but herself. 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. Aug 20

    Stop Telling Burnt Out Women to Take a Bath: Why "Just Relax" Has Never Once Worked

    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 calendar ever actually change anything? Because if you are anything like me, you have said the words “I am so burnt out” out loud, and someone has looked at you kindly and said, maybe you just need to relax. Maybe you need to stop working so much. Take a bath. Breathe. Unclench. And some part of you knows that has never once worked when it mattered. Why “just relax” does not work for burnout “Just relax” doesn't work because burnout isn't a thinking problem. It is a physiological state. You cannot willpower your way out of a body that is still bracing. Think about the woman who has read every resilience book on the shelf. She has highlighted the good parts. She does the breathing exercises. She meditates every morning before the house wakes up. And still, by three o’clock in the afternoon, she is ready to snap at somebody over nothing. That is not because the meditation is not working. It is because meditation may never have been the right tool for the actual problem. Your nervous system does not run on logic. It runs on pattern recognition. Here's what nobody explains to high-achieving women. Your nervous system does not evaluate evidence. It matches patterns. That means it doesn't know the difference between asking a hard question at an examination for discovery, taking a contrary position in a meeting, and running into a sabre-toothed tiger. All it knows is: threat. And its entire job, in fact its only job, is to keep you alive through it. So when you have spent years in an environment that requires constant vigilance, and I mean reading the room, managing other people’s reactions, staying three steps ahead so that nothing blindsides you, your body does not clock off when you leave the office. It does not know the meeting has ended or that the deal has closed. It stays in the position it learned to hold to keep you safe. Because as far as it is concerned, that position is the reason you are still standing. Why you can win the case and still not sleep that night This is why you can win in court, close the biggest deal of your career, and lie awake anyway. It is why you can finally take a real vacation and get sick on day two. Because the second your body senses it is actually allowed to stand down, it does so all at once. And that looks like a collapse instead of a rest. This is not weakness. This is a body that has done an extremely good job of keeping you safe and holding it all together, even when there was no longer any reason to. Willpower is the wrong tool for a physiological problem This is the part that gets missed constantly, so I want you to hear me. You cannot think your way out of this. You cannot willpower your nervous system into standing down the way you can will yourself through an argument, a difficult meeting, or a hard conversation with your spouse. Willpower is a cognitive tool. Bracing is a physiological state. You are trying to use a hammer to loosen a knot. It is the wrong tool, so you keep hitting the same spot harder and wondering why absolutely nothing is changing. And come on. You have read the books. You have taken the workshops. You see the post on Instagram or TikTok and think, yes, she is right, that is exactly it. And then you never follow through, and nothing moves. Your body keeps the books Every year you spend performing calm while your body runs on alert gets itemized. Sometimes it shows up as insomnia. Sometimes it is jaw pain that started the year you stopped speaking up in meetings. Sometimes it is a blood pressure reading that makes no sense for someone with no other risk factors, until you remember you have been white knuckling your way through 40-, 60-, or 80-hour weeks for over a decade. Your body keeps the books whether you are checking the balance or not. And that is the real reason “just relax” fails. Relaxing is not a decision. It is not a message you deliver once, on command, in a yoga class you attended sometime in 2019. Your body needs actual evidence, delivered over and over, that it is safe now. What actually works instead of willpower: small, repeated signals of safety Not a dramatic overhaul. Not a retreat. Not a new planner. A body that has been on alert for years does not trust one deep breath. It learns to trust a pattern, in exactly the same way it learned to trust the pattern that kept you safe in the first place. That one took years to build. This one is built the same way. It can start as simply as noticing where you are holding tension right now, this second, while you are reading this. Is it your jaw? Your shoulders? Your stomach? Just notice. You are not forcing anything to change. The one question to ask yourself today I want you to try one thing today. Somewhere between the meetings. In the elevator. At a red light. Standing at the coffee machine. Stop, and ask your body one question: What am I bracing for right now that isn’t actually here? You do not need an answer. You need the pause. That pause makes a different response possible. That is it. That is the whole practice for today. One pause. One recognition. You are not broken, and you are not weak You are not broken for needing more than a deep breath and an organized calendar. You built a body that learned it could survive anything and everything you were handed while you were growing up. And it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It saw the outcome. It was rewarded. It was told, you did this right, because you are still standing here today. Your body did its job. The work now is not to override it. The work is to finally give it the evidence it has been waiting years for: that the old danger is gone. That the old need to survive is over. That it is safe to put down the armour you built around yourself. 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

  8. Aug 17

    She’s 41, Billing 2,200 Hours a Year, and Still Taking Orders From a 10-Year-Old

    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 the room, and doesn't open her mouth. And at least once that day, she apologizes for something that was genuinely not her fault. Imagine you didn’t see the title of this post. Could you guess how old she is? I am not asking you to guess her age. I am asking based on her behaviour. Because after more than twenty years of watching brilliant women fall apart quietly in conference rooms, here is what I know. That version of her was not built at the office. That version of her has been running a shift far longer than her job title has existed. The exhaustion nobody talks about is not the workload It is not just that she is running a pattern she no longer needs. It is that, on most days, underneath it all, she knows what she is doing. Instead of addressing it, she justifies it. She feels herself not asking twice. She feels the apology forming before she finishes her sentence. She feels herself shrinking a need down into something smaller and more polite before the words even leave her mouth. And in that same second, the excuse is already built. I am just being efficient. I do not want to make this weird. Now is not the time. I do not want to be that person. I already know what they will say about me. She builds the justification so fast she almost does not notice she needed one. That is a level of exhaustion nobody talks about, because we are not talking about hours and caseloads. We are talking about the exhaustion of running a program you can half-see yourself running and still cannot stop, because stopping would mean admitting how long you've been in charge. Three women, three programs, one pattern I want to show you three shapes this takes. I have seen all three of them up close, and many more besides. Listen for your own justifications in them. The one who was the responsible one She was the oldest of four. By ten, she was making the lunches, signing the permission slips her mother was too tired to read, telling her little brother that everything was fine, just go back to sleep. Nobody handed her a job title. The message was clear anyway. You are the responsible one. Thirty years later, she is still the one absorbing the extra file nobody wants. And when some part of her starts to think something is wrong with this, she tells herself someone has to take it on, someone has to hold it together. It is the exact same sentence she said to a frightened sibling at two in the morning, when no parent was coming. Except now she says it in a blazer and calls it work ethic. The one who stopped needing things She left home at fifteen. She learned fast that needing things got her nothing but more weight to carry, so she stopped needing things, at least out loud. Now she is sitting across from a manager who is underpaying her. She can feel the number she wants sitting in her throat. She knows she is worth it. She swallows it and tells herself, I do not want to seem ungrateful. I do not want to rock the boat right now. Some part of her knows that is not the real reason. She just cannot afford to sit with the real reason. The one who learned that quiet keeps the peace She is the first in her family to graduate from university, the first to sit in a corporate boardroom, the first to wear that kind of suit. Growing up, she was taught, not with words but by watching, that quiet keeps the peace. In family arguments. In being scolded. Quiet always kept the peace. So now she disagrees in her head while her mouth agrees. And she tells herself, I will raise it privately; that is the smarter move. Most weeks she does not. She knows she will not, even as she tells herself she will. None of these women are working a job. They are running a program, half consciously, catching themselves mid-loop and stepping back into it anyway. A program written long before any of them owned a blazer, put on the heels, and picked up the briefcase. The program was not wrong. Nobody told her the assignment ended. This is the part people miss. The program worked. It kept her safe. It carried the oldest sibling through a hard childhood. It kept the girl who left home at fifteen from getting hurt worse. It kept the first daughter in a room that was never built for her. I am not standing here saying the coping mechanisms women developed were stupid or wrong. The opposite. They were smart. They were exactly the right tools for the ten-year-old, for the fifteen-year-old, for the woman who had never seen anyone who looked like her make partner. The problem is not that the program was wrong then. The problem is that nobody ever told her the assignment was over. So she keeps catching herself mid-pattern and keeps choosing the excuse over the truth, because the excuse is faster and more comfortable and doesn't require her to grieve, or to feel guilt or shame about the person she had to be to become the woman she is now. She is forty-one. She is billing 2,200 hours a year. And she is still running on code written by a child. The burnout loop: catch it, know it, excuse it, keep going Here is what has actually changed for her. She sees the pattern now. That is the shift. She is no longer blind to it. But instead of changing it, she maintains it. She justifies to herself why she is doing what she is doing. And that keeps her in the same survival loop she was running all those years ago. That loop is not just emotional. It changes your biochemistry. It changes your physiology. It puts your body back into a state of exhaustion over and over and over again. The loop looks like this: * Catch it. You feel the pattern activate in real time. * Know it. You recognize what it is. * Excuse it. You call it efficiency, professionalism, timing, or “it is just who I am.” * Keep going. Nothing changes, and the body pays. Calling it “just who I am” is the most expensive line in the whole sequence. It is not who you are. It is a very old survival strategy still running long after the danger left the building. We let it run because stopping takes us outside our comfort zone. Change is frightening. And some weeks the only energy we have left is the energy it takes to maintain the thing that is draining us. The one question that starts everything This is where it starts. Not with a wellness app telling you to breathe. With one honest question. The woman who shows up at work every day and goes home to her family every night: how old is she really? Not her age on her birth certificate. Who is she still behaving as? How old was she when those behaviours were built? And what was she actually trying to survive? You do not need an answer right now. You do not need an audience. You do not need to post it anywhere. This is something you sit with in the car, on the walk from the train station or the parking garage, wherever you get sixty seconds of silence. Sit with it in the moment you catch yourself running the pattern and brushing it off as nothing. Because until you take that step, you cannot begin rewriting the story running underneath your behaviour, the one that is driving you into burnout. Most of us have been performing this script so long that we forgot we are allowed to read it, let alone rewrite it. Or we were never told it is safe to try. This is not about blowing up your life. I am asking you to notice. That is it. Notice the age. Notice what you are protecting. Then notice whether you are still her. Your past is your path. It is not your excuse, and it is not your identity. You do not need the same strategy at thirty, forty, or fifty that you needed at ten. You are not the eldest of four who has to hold everyone together. You are not the girl who left home at fifteen. You are not only the woman who survived and built something anyway. That is a story. It is not a wound either. What you became in spite of it, and eventually on purpose, is the real thing. In the next piece, I am going to talk about what that old program is actually costing your body when it does not get the memo that the job it was hired to do is over. Because being told to relax, take some time off, set some boundaries, and get control of your calendar does not work. Next time I will tell you exactly why. Until then, just notice her. That is the whole assignment. You will recover from burnout, Stacey If this landed, subscribe so the next piece comes straight to your inbox. And send it to the woman you thought about while you were reading it. 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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