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. 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

  2. 5d ago

    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

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. Aug 14

    I Teach Women How to Use Their Voice. Last Week, I Lost Mine in the Middle of a Conversation

    Someone in a community I belong to left a comment about my podcast. They said they wanted to know more about me. Not the framework. Not the tools. Me. How am I actually living this, and not just teaching it? I was taken aback at first. I thought I was living it. Then I sat with it and realized something more uncomfortable: maybe I am living it, and I am just not showing you that part. So here is the part I do not usually share. What happened when I got interrupted I was in a serious conversation with a few people. I had a point to make. A valid one. The moment I started talking, someone cut across me and kept going. I stopped. I waited. I said, “Excuse me, can I finish?” Then I started my point again. I got a little further in this time. And it happened again. Except this time the interruption was followed by laughter. Chuckles from everyone else in the room. I went silent. Instantly. And I went straight back to every time I have been told, or treated as though, my voice does not matter. Back then, those moments almost always happened in environments where I was not safe. So I built a survival behaviour that worked: swallow the words, suppress the feeling. Usually the feeling was anger. In other words, I became her again. That earlier version of me who stands there saying nothing out loud while feeling everything in every inch of her body. Nobody in that room knew. Only me. Why high achieving women go silent when they are interrupted Going silent after being talked over isn't a personality flaw, and it isn't weakness. It is a learned survival response. When your nervous system logged early on that speaking up was unsafe, it built a shortcut: stay quiet, stay small, stay safe. Years later, the shortcut still fires, even in rooms that are not actually dangerous. That is what makes it so disorienting for accomplished women. You can be a lawyer, an executive, a founder, a person who speaks for a living, and still find yourself frozen mid-sentence because your body pattern matched a boardroom to something that happened decades ago. The pattern is not proof that you have not grown. It is proof that you learned something young and learned it well. Insight is not the same as freedom I knew what was happening while it was happening. I recognized the signs. I know the signs. I teach the signs. I could have narrated my own nervous system in real time. And I became her anyway. This is the part people who teach this work do not say out loud often enough. Recognizing a survival response and interrupting a survival response are two completely different muscles. I recognized mine with 100% clarity, and I was still stuck inside it. I will be practising the interrupting part for the rest of my life. I am too far into this work to pretend I have outgrown it. I am trying, and it is hard, and some days trying looks like nothing more than breathing, focusing, reframing. The reframe that got me out of it Here is where it turned, and this is the useful part. I kept trying to make the moment about whether someone heard me. Whether they validated the point. Whether they responded the way I needed them to. Every single version of that framing kept me stuck in her. Because every version made the moment about someone else’s reaction, which is the one thing I do not control. The actual reframe was smaller than that. And truer. It was never about their validation. It was about whether I had the courage to try. I said the words. That was the whole task. What someone else does with my words next is a separate question, and it does not get to reach back and decide whether my courage counted. What interrupting the pattern actually looks like If you recognize yourself in this, the work is not to stop freezing. The work is to shorten the distance between freezing and finding the door. In practice that looks like: * Name it silently while it is happening. “This is the old response. This is not now.” * Separate the task from the outcome. Your task is to speak. Their reaction is their business. * Count the attempt, not the applause. You said it. That is the win, even if the room laughed. * Breathe, focus, reframe. On hard days, this is the entire practice, and it is enough. * Say it out loud afterward. Telling someone what happened stops the moment from becoming another swallowed word. None of this makes the pattern disappear. It makes the exit faster. Why I am telling you this I am not free of her. I am not free of every version of myself I had to be in order to get through what I got through. What I am telling you is that I found the door in the middle of being that person. That is the only version of this work that is actually true. It is not “I do not do this anymore.” It is “I am interrupting the pattern every time it shows up, and the more I do it, the faster I find the way out.” And here is the real reason I am saying it out loud. I am reinforcing something I spent most of my life not believing. That I have a voice, and that it matters. Not because somebody else heard it. Because I used it. If you went quiet somewhere this week when you meant to speak, you did not fail. You met an old pattern. The next time it shows up, your only job is to say the words. The rest is not yours to carry. You will recover from burnout, Stacey If this resonated, subscribe so the next one lands in your inbox, and share it with the woman you know who keeps swallowing her words. 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 11

    Remote Work Is Making You Invisible: How to Recover from Burnout Before It Breaks You

    Last month I read an article on Women of Influence about remote work, and one line has not left me since. The flexibility that keeps us in the workforce quietly turns into the reason we are not moving up in it. The research in that article found something worth sitting with. Remote workers are not getting passed over for promotion because they are producing less than their peers. Output was never the problem. The problem is that promotion was never really built on output in the first place. It is built on visibility. It is built on being in the room, being seen by the people who hand out opportunity and sponsorship. Why remote work stalls promotions when the output is identical That visibility almost always runs informally, in the background. It happens in a conversation after a meeting. It happens in a hallway moment with someone senior. It happens when an invitation gets extended simply because you were standing there when it came up. Miss enough of those moments, and you can do the exact same work as everybody else and still not be in the room to get credit for it. I kept reading, and I kept thinking about the person that research actually describes. You work from home three days a week because that is the only way school pickup, or life, or a family responsibility, or all of it actually works. You get your client calls done. You get your assignments done. Same work. Same numbers. And yet somewhere over the last few months, a room started filling up with people who are being asked to participate in things you are no longer being asked to do. This is not only a woman’s story Before I go any further, I want to be clear. This is not only a woman’s story. Men use flexible arrangements too, and they have their own version of this. Sometimes it is a quieter version, because from a societal standpoint nobody really expects men to need it in the first place. The research in the article I am talking about is specific to women, and I am not going to dress that up as something it is not. But what the article got me thinking about was the mechanism underneath it. What a mind does when it has been overlooked does not check gender at the door. Our minds all work the same way. What your mind does the moment it notices it is being left out So I started thinking about what actually happens inside us. You find out there was a meeting you were not looped into. You tell yourself it is nothing. You were just busy. It really did not have anything to do with the part of the file you were working on. Then it happens again the next week, with someone else. And maybe it is taking a little longer this time to talk yourself out of noticing. This does not only happen at work either. Think about your friends. The same group gets together over and over, and one day you are the one who is no longer being asked. So what do we do? We start running an inventory. We start paying close attention. Who got invited? Who did not? What might that mean? And underneath all of it there is a question you may never have said out loud to anyone. Is this happening because of what I work on, or because I am not as good as I thought I was? That question- what does this make us mean about us- is the real story here. It is the part the article stopped short of. The research paused at the structural observation, and in my opinion, the more important question is what happens next inside you, once you are standing in that gap. No one sends a memo that says you were overlooked Let us be honest. Nobody is going to send you a note that says you were passed over because you were not physically present. What actually happens is much quieter than that. The promotion just goes to someone else. The project just gets assigned to someone else. And in the absence of an explanation, your nervous system writes one for you. It does not reach for logic. It does not say, there is a structural visibility problem in how this organization allocates opportunity. The meaning it hands you is a gut punch every single time. This must mean there is something wrong with me. Do not take that as a character flaw, because it is not. That is an internal narrative doing exactly the job it was built to do under uncertainty. It fills the gap with the most self-referential explanation available, which also happens to be the most punishing one. This is why the SIGNS framework my mentor Jan Doughty taught me names that internal narrative directly. The story you construct is not neutral information. It is a survival mode interpretation. Left unchecked, it becomes the story you start acting from. The second layer is structural, and it is a trap There is a second layer here, and it is harder to sit with because it is not a story problem at all. It is part of the structural trap itself. The research on how this affects women is direct, and there is a lot of it. She is more likely to be carrying the caregiving load that made flexibility necessary in the first place. And she is more likely to run into what researchers call the flexibility stigma, the assumption that using the arrangement means she has lower ambition. Men face a version of this too, and in some places it lands even harder, because it breaks a different expectation, the assumption that a man would not need that accommodation at all. Different mechanism, same mind. Here is the bind. The arrangement that lets you keep your life together and the arrangement that lets you keep being seen as ambitious are not always the same arrangement. Sometimes you have to pick one. And there is a price to be paid for it. I am not talking about money. I am talking about the price your nervous system pays trying to stay regulated when both options in front of you carry a real cost and there is no third door. No safe exit. One or the other. Why a bind with no exit pushes you into freeze In many cases, a bind like that triggers freeze. Freeze is the body’s response when there is no safe way out. It stays still. So we stay quiet. Sometimes, depending on the circumstances, we quietly hope the choice will make itself. Usually it does. And often it does not go in our favour. A nervous system that has quietly decided that being overlooked means being unworthy is a nervous system that gets triggered fast. That single thought, I am not worthy, I am not good enough, sets off an emotion. The emotion drives an action. The action produces an outcome. Those are the behavioural patterns you start running once you believe you are not good enough. And I can tell you from experience, behaving in a way that compensates for not feeling good enough drains your energy and walks you straight into burnout. You end up spending all of your time and attention worrying about what you can do to meet what you believe other people expect of you. The SIGNS of survival mode, and how to catch yourself in it This is why self-awareness matters so much. You want to be able to read the signs in your body the moment you start acting from the belief that you are not good enough. S is for Somatic. How are you showing up in your body? Is your jaw clenched? Is your breathing shallow? Are your shoulders tight? I is for Internal narrative. What are you telling yourself right now? G is for Guarded relating. How are you interacting with the people around you? Silent treatment? Short, clipped, to-the-point sentences? N is for Noise. Are other people’s expectations and agendas crowding out and blocking your own? S is for Survival. Ask yourself plainly: am I in survival mode right now? If you said yes to even one of the SIGNS, you are in it. And if you stay in it long enough, eventually you arrive at burnout. You will recover from burnout, Stacey Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Thanks for reading Stacey Stevens | How We Recover From Burnout! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit staceylstevens.substack.com

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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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