Liz’s Story: The Price of Achievement
Liz had always been an achiever. From the moment she set her sights on becoming a physician, she knew the path would be grueling. The long nights of studying, the relentless demands of medical school, the brutal schedule of residency, and the all-consuming nature of fellowship—it all required an unwavering focus on one thing: medicine.
While her peers in their 20s and early 30s were exploring hobbies, traveling, and deepening relationships, Liz was buried in patient charts and call shifts. There was no time for book clubs, pickup soccer games, or weekend brunches. “I’ll make time for those things later,” she told herself. “Right now, I just need to get through this.”
And she did. She became a great doctor. But somewhere along the way, her world had shrunk. Work was everything, and everything else had withered on the vine.
She describes it best: “I”m like a bodybuilder with massive biceps but the skinniest little calves you’ve ever seen.” Her professional identity was muscular—sharp, refined, and highly developed. But her personal life? Weak and neglected.
It hadn’t been a conscious choice to cut herself off from life outside medicine. It had been a necessity—until it wasn’t. Until she realized the cost.
The Silent Toll: When Work Becomes the Whole Self
Liz wasn’t alone in this. Physicians are among the highest-risk professions for burnout, depression, and even suicide (Sexton et al., 2022). The culture of medicine rewards self-sacrifice, conditioning doctors to put patients before themselves. Over time, this doesn’t just affect their personal lives—it affects their ability to practice medicine well.
Research shows that emotional exhaustion among healthcare workers is alarmingly high, with over 40% of physicians experiencing burnout (Sexton et al., 2022). It’s not just the long hours—it’s the chronic exposure to suffering, the immense responsibility, and the unrelenting pressure to perform. This level of sustained stress leads to cynicism, emotional detachment, and an increasing sense of isolation (Sexton et al., 2022; see Smith et al., 2018 to understand ‘functional cynicism approximated from military cultures).
Liz had always been deeply compassionate. But after years of constant exposure to trauma—patients suffering, lives lost, the moral weight of making life-or-death decisions—something changed. She started seeing people differently. Instead of seeing potential, she saw risk. Instead of seeing joy, she anticipated tragedy.
This shift isn’t just anecdotal. Chronic exposure to suffering rewires the way physicians see the world, fostering a sense of detachment as a coping mechanism. While this adaptation helps physicians function under extreme stress, it also isolates them from the very relationships that could sustain them. Relationships outside of medicine, that see the world through other eyes and another lens that starts to feel further away from struggling physicians.
Liz didn’t just struggle with time for relationships—she struggled to relate at all.
When Success Feels Empty
Despite all her achievements, Liz found herself deeply unhappy. Work, which had once given her purpose, now felt like a trap. She realized that her entire identity had been built around being a doctor. And when work became overwhelming, when cases weighed too heavily, or when things went wrong, she had nowhere else to turn. With all her eggs in the work basket, events that happened at work started to take an outsized importance in her sense of self-worth.
The truth is, no matter how driven we are, our lives will eventually level off. Our careers will plateau. Almost all of us. We will all experience pain, loss, and setbacks. And if we’ve built our entire identity around a single thing—whether it’s work, status, or achievement—then when that thing falters, we fall with it. Myopic, one-dimensional identity is does not produce resilience and joy, no matter what that identity source is.
How does someone get to the place where they feel like a bodybuilder gigantic professional biceps and skinny, whispy little calves for a personal life? It’s insidious: Because you’ve built so much muscle in your professional life and poured so many resources into that, it comes to feel like the place where life is most rewarding. The lack of investment in life outside of career feels less rewarding, more alien, and more anxiety producing. So…keep doing curls, and skip leg day over and over again and…voilà…you’ve got a career that defines you and a personal life that signals pain to avoid.
Liz needed more than a career. She needed a life.
The REWIRE Approach: Rebuilding What Matters
Liz found her way forward through REWIRE—a values-based approach designed to help high-achieving professionals reconnect with what makes life meaningful. Here’s how she did it:
1. Clarifying Her Values
Liz had spent years focusing on excellence in medicine, but she had lost sight of other core values—connection, leadership, and showing up for people.
When she stepped back and assessed her life, she realized she wasn’t living in alignment with these values. Maybe at work, but not in any other part of her life. And this was driving a sense of incongruence that was where her distress was emanating from. She was showing up at work, but she wasn’t showing up in her personal life. She was showing up for patients, but not for the people who cared about her and who she really cared about.
By accepting this painful reality with non-judgement (becoming a doctor, afterall, takes EVERYTHING for most to achieve), the groundwork for change was laid. We started to conceptualize and draw out a roadmap for the areas of life that she wanted to change. She wasn’t just trying to “fix” burnout. She was trying to build a life that actually felt worth living, so that burnout was no longer an option.
2. Committed Actions Toward Connection
Clarifying values was one thing—acting on them was another. Liz committed to small, meaningful changes that aligned her daily life with what she actually cared about:
- Investing in Friendships: She reached out to old friends, set up regular coffee dates, and made time for social events—even when it felt easier to stay isolated.
- Setting Boundaries at Work: Liz started leaving work on time when possible. She stopped checking patient charts at midnight. She learned to say “no” to additional responsibilities that weren’t essential.
- Rebuilding Family Relationships: She had been absent from family life for years. Now, she made a point to call her parents, visit her siblings, and be present for birthdays and holidays.
- Finding Joy Again: Liz rediscovered hobbies she had abandoned—reading novels, running, and playing the piano. At first, it felt unnatural, even indulgent. But over time, it became a crucial part of her well-being.
3. Changing the Way She Engaged with People
One of the hardest habits Liz had to break was her insatiable focus on work problems. She realized that when she did engage with friends and family, she was only talking about medicine—the struggles, the frustrations, the stress.
And while this came from an earnest need for support, it was also creating a barrier between her and the non-physicians in her life.
To counter this, Liz made a deliberate shift:
✅ She set limits on how much she would talk about work. She allowed herself space to share, but she didn’t let it dominate every conversation.
✅ She replaced self-focus with curiosity. Instead of framing interactions around what was different between her and others, she started focusing on what they shared.
✅ She practiced listening more than talking. She asked about people’s lives, their interests, their experiences—because relationships aren’t just about being understood, but about understanding others.
✅ She practiced getting her head up instead of down, and seeing the world around her. Practices like awe and gratitude are like muscles, and she started building them slowly but surely (Adair et al., 2020).
This change was subtle but powerful. It re-opened doors she had unintentionally closed and made social interactions feel nourishing rather than draining.
4. Repairing and Showing Vulnerability
Physicians are trained to project confidence, to be the ones with the answers. But healing required vulnerability.
Liz learned to lean into repair—to acknowledge when she had let friendships lapse, to apologize when she had been distant, and to express when she needed support. This is an uphill battle for physicians worthy of fighting, pushing back against nurtured perfectionism in the culture of medicine. This nurtured perfectionism occurs in both patient care (see LEGAL RAMIFICATIONS OF ERROR MAKING) and public interactions (the physician as the stoic, self-controlled leader in the community who doesn’t show emotion). Its functions are precision and calm-under-pressure; its consequences for many play out in relationships through a kind of difficulty being wrong, being willing to be vulnerable, and pursuing repair proactively in relationships. These ways of being (vulnerable, humble, acknowledging wrongness) rub against the grain of the medical system, and although the conversations to start to change this are uncomfortable at first, they are the foundation of rebuilding connection.
Research supports this approach. Studies on resilience in healthcare workers show that social support plays a critical role in preventing burnout and mitigating trauma’s effects (Smith et al., 2022). When physicians engage with strong support networks, they are not only happier—they provide better patient care, and they are protected from the negative impacts of stress long-term.
A Life Beyond Medicine
Today, Liz is still a physician. But she is also a friend, a sister, an athlete, a person who has interests outside of the hospital walls. She is no longer just surviving—she is living. When work is hard or miserable, it doesn’t take Liz down to a zero…it signals a need to pivot to another part of her life and hold work less tightly.
If you resonate with Liz’s story—if you’ve been pouring everything into work at the expense of yourself—it’s not too late to change course.
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