How We Recover From Burnout

Stacey Stevens
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Careers
  • Updated Semiweekly

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. 3d ago

    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

  2. Sep 23

    What to Do When Your Boss Criticizes Your Personality and Can't Give You One Example

    I met with a friend of mine whose boss told her she was acting far too overconfident, and then on other days told her she was acting too mopey. She doesn’t work at my firm. She doesn’t even work in law. When she went looking for what she had actually done wrong, nobody could give her a single example, and that gap is what this post is about: what to do when your boss criticizes your personality and there’s nothing specific underneath it to fix. What should you do when your boss criticizes your personality? Sort it first. Either you did something wrong, or someone is uncomfortable with who you are, and only the first one is yours to fix. “There’s a difference between I did something wrong and I made someone feel uncomfortable by existing as I am. The first is absolutely yours to fix. The second, not a chance. That was never yours to fix.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout My friend’s feedback belonged in the second pile. Nobody was talking about a mistake she’d made or something she missed at work. She was being told that the way she is made other people uncomfortable, and the two notes she got pulled her in opposite directions depending on the day. I think almost every woman reading this has had some version of that. Maybe it wasn’t spoken that plainly. Sometimes it’s a look or a tone, or a comment that lands a little off, and underneath it is the same message: who you actually are isn’t quite acceptable here. How can you tell feedback about your work from feedback about who you are? Look for the example. When my friend went looking for what she may have actually done wrong, there wasn’t anything, and no examples could be given back to her to explain why her overconfidence or her mopeyness was somehow offensive. A note that can’t be tied to a single moment, email or conversation is usually about someone else’s comfort. That doesn’t put you beyond feedback. You can still hear it, take it to heart and find ways to grow because of it. But “you make me uncomfortable” isn't the same as “you did something wrong,” and only one of those is what you’re responsible for fixing. Why doesn’t working harder fix feedback about your personality? Because working harder is a form of proving, and you can’t prove your way out of a reaction to who you are. There’s no behaviour to correct, so there’s no finish line. Megan Dalla-Camina, a researcher who studies confidence in women, separates proving from trusting. Proving is what most of us are good at: we work hard, we deliver, we collect the wins, and we adjust when someone’s unhappy. It’s what my friend did. She went looking for the fix, the specific thing to correct, because that’s the instinct. Find the flaw and prove it’s handled. “You can’t prove your way out of, you make me uncomfortable by being who you are. There’s no version of that feedback with a flexible, fixable answer. Because the thing that they’re objecting to, it’s not a behavior, it’s you. And chasing an unfixable note forever is exactly how you end up rewriting yourself into someone that you don’t recognize for people who are never going to be satisfied anyways.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Trusting yourself is the other move, and it’s quieter than proving. It has nothing to do with defiance. It means deciding on your own authority that who you are doesn’t require someone else’s comfort to be valid, and then no longer treating every reaction to you as evidence that you need to be different. What is shape-shifting at work, and why is it a threat response? Shape-shifting is reading the room, guessing what version of you would be acceptable this time, and producing her. Do it long enough, and it stops being a strategy and becomes a threat response: a body that has decided disapproval is dangerous and treats every interaction as a small test you might fail. Most of us take the proving path automatically because it’s faster and it makes the discomfort stop right away. The cost shows up in how often you have to do it. “Not once, not twice, every single time. Every meeting, relationship, every room that might call for a slightly different version of you. And you’re recalculating who you need to be in real time, all day, based on what you think other people need from you for them to approve you. It’s not a personality trait, that’s a threat response.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout The question running underneath all that recalculating is rarely what you think you need to do, or what’s true for you. On a loop, it’s closer to: Is this okay? Will they like this? Am I being too much right now? Or am I being not enough? Your body can’t stand down while that loop is running, so you stay in a low-grade state of threat, and we know what that does to your nervous system. How does self-monitoring at work lead to burnout? It gives you two jobs. On top of the work you’re paid for, you’re running a second full-time job underneath it, watching yourself all day and adjusting. “You’re actually running a second full-time job underneath the work that you’re doing because you are constantly monitoring who you’re being, whether it’s landing and what you need to adjust next. That’s the mechanism. It’s not the hours. It’s not the workload. It’s spending all day, every day in a low grade threat state about your very own existence.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout I’d push on this with anyone who treats burnout as a scheduling problem. You can cut your hours in half and still spend every remaining hour checking whether you’re too much or not enough, and your nervous system won’t register the difference. What can you say to yourself when self-doubt shows up at work? Swap one sentence. Instead of “something’s wrong with me,” try “this is uncomfortable, and I can be uncomfortable without meaning I’m wrong.” That swap comes from Evy Poumpouras, a former Secret Service agent, who treats confidence as a habit you build the same way you build any competence, by doing the thing before you’re good at it. It’s a small swap. One version sends you looking for a fix that doesn’t exist, and the other lets you sit in the discomfort without needing to rush off and solve it. Poumpouras splits the problem roughly half-and-half. Half of what you’re up against is the room, and you don’t control that. The other half is what you decide about yourself inside the room. That half is smaller than people want it to be, but it’s also the only half that you can really control. 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. Sep 18

    How Do You Stop Bringing Work Stress Home? Start With the Voice That Asks If You're Going to Let That Go

    I talk a lot about work. Statistics about work, what work costs, what the profession asks of you. I know. But we all have to go home at some point, and today I want to talk about how to stop bringing work stress home when you walk in still wearing your full workplace armour. Here’s how I discovered it. How do you stop bringing work stress home? You catch the transfer while it’s happening, in the half second between the thought and the emotion that follows it. You do not do it by arriving home regulated, because nobody is perfectly regulated on command, and I have never once managed it after a long day. What I do now has two pieces, and both are small, on purpose. One happens outside the door and takes a minute, maybe a minute and a half. The other happens inside, in the moment a word like “should” turns up in your head, and it is a single question you ask before you open your mouth. Neither one requires you to override anything. Both are described further down. Small is the point. None of us can manage anything large right now, so we need what fits into the margins of the lives we are currently living. Why do I snap at my partner as soon as I walk in the door? Because your nervous system hasn’t gotten the memo that you’re not at work anymore. You come through the door still scanning, and then an ordinary question lands on a system that is still reading the room for what’s coming. It was an ordinary night. My partner said something I took as offhand, and to be honest it didn’t really mean much, but before I had even decided how I was going to feel about it, the first thought, the voice running underneath it, was: are you going to let him get away with that? “Now, notice the word that’s doing all the work in that sentence, which is let. Like feeling anything other than defending is some sort of failure of vigilance.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout The correct posture, apparently, even in my own home with someone who loves me, was still monitoring for a threat and deciding whether to respond. And what it sounds like from the inside, when you snap, is this: I’ve just gotten through the door. I have worked all day. And the first question you have for me is, "What’s for dinner?" What is the “should” voice, and why is it still running at home? The should voice is the internal commentary that turns an ordinary remark into something that requires a response. It sounds like should, or have to, or are you going to let that go, and it is the same voice that reads a room for what’s coming, catalogues a comment for what it might mean, and decides in real time whether something needs answering. “That’s not a home voice. That’s a workplace voice. That’s a courtroom voice.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout It never got the memo that it was off duty. It doesn’t distinguish between a hostile encounter at work and your own partner asking what’s for dinner, so you hear the tone, or you interpret something as a tone, and your back comes up a little. Your head turns quickly. You can feel it in the way you’re looking at them. This is related to something I talked about a few episodes back: being steady in a boardroom and steady in a courtroom, making your arguments all day, and then standing at your own sink doing dishes while everything feels like too much. Related, but not the same problem. That one is about not knowing who you should be. This one is about one specific voice that came home with you. Why doesn’t your nervous system switch off when you leave the office? Because it was never off during the day, and walking to your car doesn't turn it off. When you’ve been in an environment where you’re under stress all day long, a low-grade survival mode kicks in, meaning your threat response runs at a level quiet enough that you can still bill the hours and take the calls. So you’re in fight, flight, fear or fawn for eight hours, or ten, and then you leave the building. The feelings come with you. The guarded way you relate to people at work, you bring home too, and your system keeps scanning for threats that may not really be there. Why do the people closest to you get the worst of it? Because they’re the ones you’re safest with and the ones you have the most power to hurt. The math of it is ugly when you say it out loud. “The people that we come home to are the ones with the least power to hurt our career, but the most power to hurt us personally. And they are also the people that we have the most power to hurt, because they’re the ones who are getting a version of us that is still braced for combat when we don’t have to be.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout “Our professional world gets the most managed, most careful version of who we are. And the people that we love, they get what’s ever left over. Which most nights, if you’re burnt out, isn’t much. And what you have left is running hot.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout That’s backwards. I don’t think we chose it deliberately, though. It’s what happens when the professional world you’re in requires so much of you that you never learn how to power down. What question do you ask before you respond? One question, in the half second before you answer: is this actually a threat, or is this just the only mode I know how to be in right now? You ask it the moment you notice the word should, or are you going to let that go, or whatever version of those words turns up for you. “You don’t have to override it. You don’t have to be perfectly regulated on command. That’s not realistic. I’m asking you to catch the transfer happening. That moment from when you have your thought to the emotion that follows.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout Here is why that moment matters mechanically. When someone says something to you and the thought is “I should do this,” or “I have to do this,” or “am I going to let them get away with it,” that thought triggers an emotion, and the emotion that comes with it is either confrontational or it’s obligation. Naming it in that half second changes what happens next way more than you’d expect. A gut check. You catch yourself and get a moment to change how you react, or change the environment you’re about to create with the way you answer. What’s the ritual before you walk in the door? Take a few seconds, or a minute, or a minute and a half before you walk in, and ask what your body is still carrying. Do a quick scan: is your jaw clenched, where are your shoulders, how are you breathing, is your posture straight or are you hunched? That is the shutdown sequence your system never gets time to have. A shutdown sequence, in this case, just means the deliberate gap between one mode and the next, the thing an office with a commute used to do by accident and now nobody gives you. We have to build it, and we have to do it on purpose, because nobody’s going to hand it to us. 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. Sep 15

    Should I Quit My Job or Push Through Burnout? After 40 Years in Law, Neither One Worked

    If you are burnt out right now, you have already been handed two options. Leave, or push through. I’ve done both across more than 40 years in the legal profession, and I want to say this plainly to anyone lying awake at 9 pm on a Monday asking, “Should I quit my job or push through burnout?” Neither one was the actual solution for me, and I don’t think it will be for you either. Should I quit my job or push through burnout? Neither, not as the first move. Both options target your circumstances, and if what's making you feel stuck didn’t originate in your circumstances, changing them won’t reach it. Leaving changes your circumstances. Pushing through doesn’t change anything; it just asks you to endure your circumstances longer. On the surface, those two look like opposites, and the profession treats them like opposites, but the target is identical: “the job, the file, the room you’re standing in.” Neither move requires you to look at yourself. I’m not writing this from outside the system with a clipboard. I’m still deep in it. I know exactly what Monday night at 9pm feels like: the inbox still moving, the thing I was going to get to on the weekend still sitting there, bumped a little further down the road. Why do people feel the same 18 months after leaving a job? Because the story came with them. Over 40 years in the legal profession I have watched this exact sequence enough times that I now expect it. “I’ve watched women come to firms, leave firms. I’ve watched people who work in bad dynamics leave the entire situation, but yet ... end up feeling the exact same way 18 months later, but just at a different place.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout New building, new people who don’t know your history, and then somewhere around the year-and-a-half mark the same feeling shows up and makes itself at home. The story is never attached to the room where it started. Pushing through is the same problem without the moving expenses. “Pushing through is worse, honestly, because that doesn’t even change the circumstances. It just asks you to keep running the same story in the same room for as long as you can. Oh, and we call that being resilient.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout That last line is aimed at my own profession, and I meant it. Resilience, the way the word actually gets used in firms, often just measures how long you can keep running a story that’s costing you before anything around you has to change. What does it mean to say burnout is about “the story”? “The story” is what you decided about yourself long before you had any say in it, and it lives in your subconscious rather than your conscious thinking, which is why it can run all day without ever introducing itself. It’s usually some version of not being enough, not being wanted, or not belonging. It does not stay a private belief. It becomes the foundation for “how you think, how you feel, and how you act all day, every single day.” And then you spend your career trying to prove it wrong. You overperform. You overexplain. You overgive. You say yes when you mean no, all of it aimed at disproving something you have probably never said out loud to another person. So the career you’ve built may be a long argument against a belief rather than anything you chose on purpose. Creating from your own values looks completely different, and it isn’t driven by what you’re afraid a room might think. It’s driven by what you’ve already decided about yourself. How do you find out what story you’re telling yourself? Three questions, in order. I use them whenever I start thinking about whether I want to change my circumstances, and whether I really want to put the time and effort into it. 1. How do I want to feel about myself once I’m through this? “Not what do I want happen? Not what is the outcome that I’m chasing? Because to be honest, those are all external results that we have no control over. How do I want to feel about myself specifically when I look back on how I handled it?” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout 2. What would I need to believe about myself to get there? Not what would change about the situation. What do I need to believe about me? 3. Where is the evidence? Look back and find something you have actually done, not something you hoped for or imagined, that proves the belief about yourself is already true. Why does the evidence question stall people? Because it requires you to stop treating your own history as irrelevant. Most of us can answer the first two questions fine, and then we hit the third and go quiet. There’s one rule at step three, and it’s the only rule in the whole thing. “Don’t have that conversation in your head that says, no, but you know what? No, that was really different. Or no, Stacey, come on. Anybody would have done that. You want to disqualify it the second you find it. Don’t do it.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout It’s your opinion of yourself. It’s your belief, nobody else’s. Producing real evidence also means you stop judging your own history through the lens of what you assumed other people thought, which is harder work than it sounds when you read it in a sentence. Does this mean you should stay in a job that’s harming you? No. If the room is harmful, leave the room, and I’m not going to tell you which one to do from here because I don’t know your file, your finances or your family. What I am telling you is to do the reset first. The reset is running those three questions before you decide, not after. Skip it, and I’m almost certain you get the same feeling wherever you land. New building, same story, same Monday night at 9 pm. Have you actually solved this yourself? No, and I’d rather say that than pretend otherwise. I still get there. “I still have my Tuesday at 9 o’clock, my Monday at 9 o’clock, wondering, should I stay, should I go? ... I’m still in the thick of things, and I’m still asking myself these same three questions, and still catching myself trying to argue with the evidence.” Stacey Stevens, lawyer and host of How We Recover From Burnout The difference is that I know what to look for now. The story is the real thing. The circumstances are just where I’m living right now. 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. 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. Sep 9

    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

  6. Sep 4

    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

  7. 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

  8. 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

See All (70)

Trailer

About

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

Information