There was a stretch of residency when I couldn't tell you what month it was without checking my phone.

The days just bled into each other. Getting the kids up, breakfast, nap time, pickup, dinner, bedtime, and then the same thing again. I was physically present in my life, doing everything that needed to be done, and I was completely, quietly gone.

For years I told myself I was a homebody. An introvert. Someone who just didn't need a lot of social connection. I believed it because it was easier than sitting with what was actually happening, which was depersonalization. Physically present. Mentally checked out. Not breaking down. Just disappearing.

Then I joined a book club, a small group of women reading the classics, the kind of conversations I hadn't had since college. I remember looking forward to those meetings in a way that genuinely surprised me. That book club wasn't entertainment. It was the first time in months I actually got to exhale.

Around the same time, I heard an NPR segment on caregiver burnout, and something in me just stopped. That's me. I went home and looked it up and checked almost every box. The fatigue that sleep didn't fix. The blurred days. The going through the motions. I didn't have a clinical term that fit, so I made one up: protracted medical training spouse burnout. PMTSB. Not exactly catchy. But it was real, and naming it mattered.

What I've come to understand since then is this: burnout isn't a character flaw. It's not weakness or ingratitude. It's what happens when the demands on your life exceed your personal resources for an extended period of time. Think of a scale. On one side, everything being asked of you: the household, the kids, the emotional atmosphere of your home, the unpredictability of his schedule. On the other, everything you have to give. Burnout isn't one terrible week. It's the slow, quiet tipping of that scale, weight accumulating on one side while the other side empties, until one day you can barely remember when it was balanced.

This whole episode circles back to one question: are you adequately resourced? Not "are you okay," that one's too easy to deflect. I walk through two frameworks that completely reframed this for me. Emily and Amelia Nagoski's concept of human giver syndrome, the cultural expectation that women be pretty, calm, happy, and available at all times at the cost of their own needs. And Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith's seven types of rest from her book Sacred Rest: physical, mental, emotional, social, creative, spiritual, and sensory. Not as a rest strategy, but as a resource inventory. Because if burnout is demand exceeding resources, the real work is knowing exactly where you're running low.

That's where we start.

What You'll Learn

[00:00 - 01:30] What depersonalization looks like from the inside, and why it presents as "fine" to everyone around you
[02:00 - 05:30] The book club that turned out to be social rest, and why proximity is not the same as connection
[05:30 - 07:00] How I named physician spouse burnout in 2013 before anyone else was talking about it
[07:00 - 10:00] The scale analogy, the three clinical components of burnout, and why this life qualifies
[10:00 - 11:30] Human giver syndrome and why the physician spouse world is one of its most concentrated environments
[11:30 - 17:00] All seven types of rest used as a resource inventory, and how to find where your depletion actually lives

Resources Mentioned

Your Next Steps

Take the Assessment: The Hidden Cost of Being the Strong One
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
Find me on Instagram: @Kendra_ItGetsBetterNow | @SupportingPhysicianSpouses